What is at stake in this (Lacan’s) first shift from hermeneutics to structuralism, therefore, is precisely the question of cause. As we move from signification to its cause, signification is conceived of as the effect-of-sense: it is the imaginary experience-of-meaning whose inherent constituent is the misrecognition of its determining cause, the formal mechanism of the signifying structure itself. (Zizek 1994, 29)
Zizek is right to say that Lacan’s move from Freudian hermeneutics to structuralism is a major theoretical shift in psychoanalysis, but he may not be right to elaborate this shift as a problem of cauality. Zizek’s ideas about causality is basically from Hegel — the causality of telos (purpose), a highly difficulty concept. To Hegel, he has completely discarded the principle of the linear, mechanical causality (causa efficiens) in reality. What is at stake is the causality with meaning and purpose. This may be a transcendental intentionality in disguise. One may question about the purpose: who is behind the purpose of its causality. Buddhist causality (causation) explains the self-encirclement of enquiry, an inwardly circumcised meditation. Hegel’s causality is exactly a religious temptation if it has been disguised by the coverup of absolute negation. His principal of the Spirit as a continous, gradual, historical process with series of steps through which Spirit logically returns to itself as self-actualizing. This is religion. Causality is in some sense of religious sensation while structuralism is not.
Zizek is possibily right to stress the causality as the logic that constitutes the substantiality of sign, but he is not quite right to put the signified as an object. It may be related to Zizek’s Marxian Hegelian dilemma which makes him impossible to differentiate the Real object as a perfect objectification of substantial self – which is impossible without signification – from the Marxist socio-political agent as base structure. The Real object is the product of linguistic operation, the interactive performance of the self. Signification is the transformation that goes through the substantial body of the being and achieves what could be the mutation of spirit and self. The signification process is the work of WORD, the big word that will change the quality of the body, the immaculated self of pure existence. This inwardly diverted process precisely is what make an object as physical existence, pure objectification.
Filed under: Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, object a, psychoanalysis, the Real , Hegel, Lacan, object, objet a, substantiality, Zizek
