Excerpt from Mladen Dolar interviewed by Aaron Schuster in 2009 in Metropolis Magazine
Zupančič deals with this Lacanianism: Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche. Right here
Schuster: What is the new conception of freedom you see in the wake of Kafka and Freud?
Dolar: ‘Lacan was notoriously a man of extremely difficult style, but this arduous side was as if counterbalanced by his great talent to produce a number of short and striking slogans (like “The Woman doesn’t exist” or “There is no sexual relationship”).
And one of these slogans is Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche: “There is a cause only in something that doesn’t work”, or “There is a cause only in what limps”.
The line is paradoxical and I suppose counterintuitive. For it would seem that causality is what works in a network of causes and effects which constitute the basis of regularity and law, and so that which doesn’t work or doesn’t add up would appear to be a breach of causality, a crack in the causal chain.
Yet it is in the place of this break, this glitch, that Lacan places the question of the cause. This is indeed something that has to do with the very origins of psychoanalysis, since the first phenomena that it dealt with were tiny things like slips of the tongue, or dreams as slight slips of conscious life, something appearing in a crack of normal causality, a momentary hitch, which hinted at another kind of cause, irreducible to both the causality of nature or the intentional causality of consciousness.
Yet, Freud insisted on the strict determination of psychic life, so that even such slight phenomena must have a determinist explanation, and therefore it would seem that there is no space for freedom.
Still, what is a slip determined by? Is the unconscious the name of another causality determining us behind our backs? If we look at it more closely, we can see that the basic problem is that no such substantive, objective, independent causality exists, that it cannot be spelled out as a latent content or a latent cause simply to be unearthed behind the manifest one.
Rather, the spelling out of the latent content makes the paradox of the cause even greater: it shows that the distorted form of the unconscious formations cannot be explained away with the latent content, so that the form itself is endowed with a surplus of distortion which testifies to a glitch, a crack of contingency within the regularity of laws and rules.
This is where the object appears, precisely the object as cause, “object cause of desire”, as Lacan would insist, and the object voice is one of the ways of getting to it.
So the object appears as cause at the point of the missing cause, and there is subjectivity only insofar as there is a missing link, a glitch in the seamless chain.
And this is the trouble with the talk about freedom in psychoanalysis: it is not to be posed in terms of the freedom of the will or as an abandonment of determinism – relying on sheer will-power or glorifying the decision can easily lead to condoning repression and the self-delusion of the ego.
It is only by working through, by repeating, by engaging with the object that one can work towards the point where necessity and contingency overlap, and where one is far more free than one can imagine, or more than it is supposed by the usual theories of subjective freedom.
This is where Kafka takes on a special value, for it seems that his universe is the epitome of non-freedom, of total closure and entrapment, yet he works all the time towards an opening in midst of the very closure.
One could say that what both Kafka and Freud have in common is the following: to look very closely at the ways of entrapment, and through this to work towards the way where the seemingly objective causality crushing us itself involves contingency and subjectivity, and the way we are inscribed in it gives us more power than we could ever hope for.