Causation (Non-Relational)

Non-Relational Causation names the theoretical problem Harman's object-oriented ontology (OOO) sets itself as its central task: how can objects act upon one another if, at the ontological level, they are radically withdrawn and never directly touch? For OOO, every object retreats into an inaccessible interior that no relation — perceptual, causal, or conceptual — can penetrate. Causation must therefore occur without genuine contact between objects, making it structurally "non-relational." The argument in the source text (subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, p. 200) is that this formulation recapitulates the Lacanian Imaginary move: what begins as an epistemological limit — we cannot access the thing-in-itself — is quietly transposed into a positive ontological feature of the object itself. The object's withdrawal becomes its essential being, converting a problem of knowledge into a metaphysical doctrine. This is precisely the operation the Lacanian Imaginary performs when it totalises and fixes what is structurally incomplete.

The passage further proposes that the Lacanian objet petit a is better equipped than OOO to handle the underlying puzzle. Unlike Harman's withdrawn object, which produces a mystery about causation by ontologising inaccessibility, the objet a names the void or remainder that is the cause of desire — a cause that is itself lacking, non-substantial, and never fully present. Causation in this Lacanian register is already non-relational in a precise sense: the objet a is not a term standing in a symmetric relation to the subject but an asymmetric, structural cause that operates precisely through its absence. The problem of non-relational causation is thus reframed: the question is not how withdrawn objects manage to act on each other despite mutual inaccessibility, but how a constitutive lack — das Ding in its structural afterlife as objet a — can function as a cause without being a present entity at all.

Within subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, Non-Relational Causation functions as a diagnostic hinge. The source uses it to expose OOO's covert reliance on an Imaginary operation — the same move that Lacanian theory diagnoses as ideological in the strict sense: taking an epistemological impossibility (we cannot access the real object) and naturalising it as an ontological property (the object just is withdrawn). This connects the concept directly to the cross-referenced Imaginary and Ideology: the ontologisation of withdrawal is ideology at the level of ontology, a fantasmatic suturing of the gap that constitutive lack opens up.

The concept relates most tightly to Das Ding and Objet petit a among the cross-references. Das Ding is precisely the "excluded interior" — the void around which representation orbits without ever reaching it — that OOO's withdrawn object superficially resembles. But das Ding is not a positive withdrawn substance; it is a "locus of pure lack." The objet a, its structural heir, is the cause of desire that operates through absence rather than through hidden fullness. Non-Relational Causation thus names the problem that OOO raises but cannot solve from within its own framework, whereas the Lacanian lineage from das Ding through objet a provides a causality-of-the-void: cause without a cause-thing, relation without a relatum. The concept also touches Desire and Fantasy insofar as the objet a is what the fantasy frame ($◇a) positions as the engine of desiring causality — a non-relational, asymmetric pull rather than a symmetrical object-to-object transaction.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.200)

Harman stakes a claim in this essay to a new, non-relational model of causation, which he says will be the focus of his next work.

The phrase "non-relational model of causation" is theoretically loaded because it names the precise structural gap OOO cannot close from within its own ontology: if objects are radically withdrawn, any "model of causation" must account for effects without genuine contact, making causation definitionally non-relational — which is exactly the void-structure that the Lacanian objet a, as a cause that is itself a lack, already formalises. The deferral ("will be the focus of his next work") further signals that the problem remains unresolved within OOO, opening the theoretical space the source text fills with the Lacanian alternative.