Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK, Malden MA USA: Polity Press, 2010. Print.
I’ve finished the book, but now I’m chasing down Rothenberg’s intriguing use of the core theoretical concept of her treatise: extimate causality. She introduces it by way of a critique of Foucaultian immanent causality, and also a rather somewhat hasty assertion of a Marxist external causality. Where the former’s immanence ruins its ability to clearly define any causal relations or ability to resist, the Marxists, according to R. rely on a version of causality that remains external to the field of effects, without the source or cause itself being vulnerable to change or the being effected in return.
So extimate causality is premised on an excess, that is the extra that is produced This excess is developed by R. firstly in her notion of retroversion. This is the way in which events, sentences, meaning in general is only created retroactively. That we create meaning only by looking back, or that in our very actions we are incapable of controlling what meaning these actions will have on outcomes or control those very outcomes. This is excessive.