Causal Relation

Copjec's "causal relation" names the specific structural bond between the psychic and the social that she argues contemporary (historicist/Foucauldian) theory systematically misrepresents. That theory, she contends, models the psychic-social relation on the pleasure principle: the social order produces desiring subjects through narcissistic identification, a loop in which the subject recognises itself in the representations the social offers and thereby reproduces both itself and the order. On this account, nothing exceeds the representational apparatus — there is no remainder, no resistance, no outside. Copjec's intervention is to replace this model with one anchored in the death drive. It is the death drive — not pleasure, not identification — that is the true cause linking the psychic and the social, precisely because the death drive does not return subjects to a satisfying image but compels repetition around an irrecoverable, constitutive loss.

The "causal relation" is therefore defined by the irreducibility of the Real as its operative term. Cause here carries a non-standard philosophical weight: it is not efficient causation in the mechanistic sense (a prior event producing a posterior effect), nor is it the ideological interpellation through which a subject is "hailed" into a pre-given social position. It is rather a causation structured by the absence at the heart of the drive — what Lacan, reading Aristotle through psychoanalysis, articulates as tuché (the encounter with the Real) rather than automaton (the chain of signifying repetition). The death drive, on Copjec's reading, is the ontological condition of possibility for the pleasure principle and for the social field itself, and the "causal relation" designates precisely this grounding function: the Real as an irreducible remainder that no representational apparatus — no ideological machine, no symbolic interpellation — can fully absorb.

This concept appears in radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso and is central to Copjec's overall polemic against historicist theory's absorption of the subject into discursive or ideological construction. The concept is most directly an extension and re-specification of the Death Drive as cross-referenced: where the standard post-Lacanian reading positions the death drive as the compulsion to repeat around constitutive loss (as synthesized in the canonical definition), Copjec gives this a political-theoretical application by making the death drive the operative term of a causal relation — one that structurally excludes the possibility that the social order ever fully produces or captures the psychic subject. This move explicitly resists the Identification model: the historicist account Copjec critiques is precisely one in which subjects are formed through narcissistic or symbolic identification with the representations the social order supplies. Against this, the causal relation grounded in the death drive marks a point where identification fails, where the Real does not yield to the mirror.

The concept also implicitly positions itself against the Interpellation and Ideology cross-references (though their full syntheses are not provided here): Althusserian/Foucauldian accounts treat the social as constitutive of the subject through mechanisms of recognition and address, leaving no remainder. Copjec's causal relation inserts the Real — the death drive's irrecoverable loss — as exactly what interpellation cannot assimilate. The concept further resonates with Lack and Fantasy: if fantasy is the structural frame that papers over constitutive impossibility (as in the canonical Fantasy definition), then the causal relation Copjec proposes is what underpins the necessity of that fantasy — the death drive causes the lack around which fantasy is constructed, and no social apparatus can eliminate this cause by filling in the lack with representations.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (page unknown)

I will describe this relation as a causal one. But, reader, please beware: a definition of cause that depends on and is produced through a definition of the death drive will certainly not be familiar.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it explicitly sutures two non-standard concepts — "cause" and "the death drive" — into a mutually defining pair: cause is not prior to but "produced through" the death drive, meaning causality itself must be rethought from the ground of Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology rather than taken from philosophical tradition. The warning to the "reader" performs the very conceptual rupture the argument enacts: the familiar (mechanistic, linear, or even Althusserian) notion of cause is being displaced by one whose logic is internal to the structure of the drive.