The { } empty set persists after it is added to the thing to become the object, but there is a minimal difference that adheres to the object, otherwise without this “minimal self-difference” it would just be a being-object.
The minimal difference — the empty set — persists after the object is precipitated from the thing. It persists as the object’s minimal difference from itself … In effect, the object is generated from the conjunction of being and minimal difference or being and the addition of a negation. (35)
Ok, once the object “is precipitated from the thing” it contains this minimal difference, and this minimal difference can also be called the “addition of a negation” or as we’ve seen the empty set {}
Now in order to get our heads around extimate causality, we have to keep in mind these two important functions of the { } empty set: as a cut necessary “to bring an object into our world from sheer being” acts as the external cause and as the minimal difference “that makes an object non-self-coincident (and therefore not a sheer “being-thing”) adheres to the object as an internal cause. Taken together, (as they must be, because they are the same function), they form the extimate cause” (36)
I have to quote at length again here, because there’s just no way around this explanation that R provides: “The extimate cause functioning by way of the specific mechanism of the formal negation, engenders a structured field or system (with its concomitant objects, properties, and relationships) out of what would otherwise be a state of undifferentiation or monadic unrelatedness.” This is back to her dimly lit garage example. So the formal negation is responsible for engendering a system of objects out of sheer being.
“At the same time, it inevitably gives rise to an element of nondeterminacy, surplus, or excess. Speaking in terms of the social arena, we could put it this way: the operation that bestows identities, properties, and relationships also leaves a residue, so that every subject bears some excess. At every point in the social field, then, an irreducible excess attends social relations. In fact, although it seems paradoxical, this excess is what makes the social field itself possible and makes its structure potentially analyzable (36).
Is this what other poststructuralist thinkers allude to as the slippage of signified under signifier, that signifiers refer to other signifiers and not to some constant empirical object etc? Does R. mean by this “excess” simply the poststructuralist “surplus” of meaning, or of Laclau’s surplus that allows for the hegemonic struggles, of the surplus that Butler alludes to in her work? Interestingly in her most difficult chapters, R. addresses this issue head on, by locating in Butler and Laclau specifically, their notion of surplus and the ways in which they seek to tame it.