The Paradox of Causality

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, p. 39)

The relationship between cause and effect is dialectically reflected here.  On the one hand, the Cause is unambiguously the product of the subject's activity; it is 'alive' only in so far as it is continually resuscitated by the believers' passion.  On the other hand, these same believers experience the Cause as Absolute, as what sets their lives in motion--in short:  as the Cause of their activity; by the same token, they experience themselves as mere transient accidents of their Cause.  Subjects therefore posit the Cause, yet they posit it not as something subordinated to them but as their absolute Cause.  What we encounter here is again the paradoxical temporal loop of the subject:  the Cause is posited, but it is posited as what it 'always-already was'.