Bara Kolenc

T h e P a r a d o x e s o f t h e L i m pi n g C a u s e
in Kierkegaard, Hegel and Lacan

At this point, I should define unconscious cause, neither as an existent, nor as

a ουχ ον, a non-existent... It is aμη ον of the prohibition that brings to being an
existent in spite of its non-advent, it is a function of the impossible on which a
certainty is based.1

T
he constitution of the psychoanalytic subject is essentially determined
by a certain leap of causality. This leap does not take place as an effect of
the signifying chain, automaton, but rather as an effect of the automaton
always already being barred by tyche, the impossible encounter with the
real, or the encounter with the real as impossible. It is precisely this inherent im-
possibility, which does not allow for things to combine in a causal chain, but also
does not let them surrender to coincidence, that determines the function of the
limping cause operating in the unconscious.
The limping cause is a lost cause, but not a cause that was lost—precisely as lost it is
essentially at work. It grounds the subject, but it grounds it by way of undermining
the ground itself. It grounds it in the gap that always establishes a certain delay be-
tween cause and effect and thereby prevents the subject from arising as an effect of
a causal series structuring its history. Repetition in psychoanalysis means exactly
this: in the moment the subject emerges in the signifying chain, it retroactively
produces its own cause, but is at the same time prevented from establishing itself
as the effect of this cause.
The psychoanalytic conception of repetition and the limping cause as articulated
by Lacan through his reinterpretation of Aristotle’s coincidental causes automaton
and tyche can be read through Kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition. By intro-
ducing this paradox, Kierkegaard carries out a surprising tour de force: it is exactly
the structural impossibility of repetition that is the only condition of its possibility.
He thereby delineates a subversive ontology that departs from the classical ontol-
ogy of being: instead of the strict delimitation of the area of being and the area
of non-being, he claims that they mutually condition each other and structurally

S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 90-108
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 91
belong to one another. Through the prism of the limping cause we can read also
Hegel’s dialectics: negation is the constitutive moment of repetition as a co-deter-
mination of determinacy and indeterminacy, being and nothing, indistinction and
distinction, finitude and infinity.

The double paradox of repetition

In Kierkegaard’s famous book on repetition, published in 1843 under the pseudo-

nym Constantin Constantinus,2 we can trace a certain double paradox of repeti-
tion, which Kierkegaard himself did not expressly articulate, but whose exceptional
structure practically offers itself to thought, as it were. This paradox consists of two
premises, with each premise itself being a paradox.
The first premise of Kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition is established when
Kierkegaard faces a fundamental failure of repetition—the radical impossibility for
a given event to be repeated in the same form. This was precisely why he was dis-
appointed with his experimental trip to Berlin, which ended with his finding that
repetition is not possible:
After several days’ repetition of this, I became bitter, so tired of repetition
that I decided to return home. I made no great discovery, yet it was strange,
because I had discovered that there was no such thing as repetition. I be-
came aware of this by having it repeated in every possible way.3
Repetition, says Kierkegaard, the pure repetition of the same, is not possible. All
that constantly and stubbornly keeps returning is merely the failure of repetition.
There is a paradox here: nothing can be repeated, but this is also precisely what
keeps repeating.
At this point, Kierkegaard carries out an unexpected and key tour de force that de-
termines modernity: it is exactly the failure of repetition, says Kierkegaard, that is
the key to its success. The fact that it is merely the impossibility of repetition that
keeps repeating is what first even establishes the actual terrain of repetition, whose
condition of possibility is nothing but its fundamental impossibility: this stubborn
return of the failure of repetition is already repetition itself.
Kierkegaard thereby traces a new, modern logic of failure that does not bring resig-
nation and destruction, but is rather constructive insofar as it operates as the con-
dition of possibility of every kind of motion or change. Failure is not a hindrance
to the perfect repetition of the same, but is itself the very constitutive moment of
repetition. In psychoanalysis, the failure of repetition is the constitutive moment of
repetition as the movement of the signifying structure and the logic of alienation
through which the subject emerges in this signifying structure: “The function of
missing lies at the centre of analytic repetition. The appointment is always missed
– this is what constitutes, in comparison with tyche, the vanity of repetition, its
constitutive occultation.”4
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The second premise of Kierkegaard’s double paradox consists of another contra-
dictory situation traversing the logic of repetition: difference, the exception, will
not be reached beyond repetition, it will not be discovered in pure transgression,
deviation or variation, but will be produced only where it is impossible to look for
it—in the pure repetition of the same. The paradox here is that the deviation from the
repetition of the same is possible only through the repetition of the same:
Hope is a pretty girl, who slips away from one’s grasp. Recollection is a beau-
tiful older woman who never quite suits the moment. Repetition is a beloved
wife of whom one never tires because it is only the new of which one tires.
One never tires of the old, and when one has it before oneself, one is happy,
and only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be
something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy.5
Here, Kierkegaard again carries out a speculative twist similar to the first prem-
ise, turning the impasse of the paradox into the stem cell of thought: the new,
says Kierkegaard, is not something we must look for beyond repetition, beyond the
structures we are inscribed in. The greatest diversity, claims Kierkegaard, is the
greatest boredom—what is more boring than buying a different yoghurt every day,
sleeping with a different person every night, and changing our political affiliation
every month? Is not this the pure routine of the same? For Kierkegaard, diversity
is merely what is externalised, designated as interesting, which does not establish
difference, but forms the order of the general. The interesting, which Kierkegaard’s
aesthete indulges in—is nothing but exchangeability, which does not have the sub-
versive power of exception: exception, the Kierkegaardian impossible moment of
the ultimate realization of existence in repetition, precisely cannot be captured in
variations, but takes place through a radical repetition of the same.
The new will not be reached with its—always different—designation, or the varia-
tion of meaning, for, the moment we try to name difference, we necessarily lose it.
The new is not marked, named new, but always emerges behind our backs as an un-
codifiable and uncontrollable moment of repetition itself, as its inherent surplus—
lack. If we want to reach the movement of true repetition, we have to persist in its
paradoxical structure, the impossible repetition of the same, which in itself produces
difference, the new. The possibility of repetition lies precisely in its own impossibility:
this is the realization that elevates Kierkegaardian existence from an ethical to a
religious level.
The double Kierkegaardian paradox binds together its two premises, two com-
mitments of the impossible as the condition of possibility of repetition, which are
themselves paradoxes, that is: the paradox that repetition as repetition of the same
is not possible, and yet this impossibility keeps repeating, and, on the other hand, the
paradox that the condition of possibility of the emergence of difference is precisely the
perfect repetition of the same. The double paradox, the paradox of two paradoxes, is
therefore the following: although the repetition of the same is impossible, although
difference cannot be eliminated in order to achieve a perfect repetition, the condition of
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 93
possibility of the emergence of difference is, on the other hand, exactly the perfect repeti-
tion of the same.
Behind this exceptional supposition lies Kierkegaard’s theory of paradox as de-
veloped in Repetition and in Philosophical crumbs. Kierkegaard does not consider
paradox as such to be a hindrance to thought, but rather a revelation of the only
legitimate field of thought: a paradox is nothing but the very liveliness of thought—
it is only in a paradox that thought actually comes across itself (but precisely in
coming apart):
One should not think ill though of paradoxes, because the paradox is the
passion of thought and a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without
passion: a poor model. But the highest power of every passion is to will its
own annihilation. Thus it is also the highest passion of the understanding to
desire an obstacle, despite the fact that the obstacle in one way or another
may be its downfall. This is the highest paradox of thought, to want to dis-
cover something it cannot think.6
With the double paradox of repetition Kierkegaard carries out a twist that deter-
mines the modern subject—it is the fundamental, structural impossibility of repeti-
tion that is the only condition of its possibility. Consequently, Kierkegaard’s ontol-
ogy differs from the classical ontology of being in that the area of being and the
area of non-being are not strictly delimited, but mutually condition each other and
structurally belong to one another. Non-being is not beyond being, but is its inner
incision. Difference as the absolute other, as non-identity, is not ejected from the
field of the identity of one as its external limit, but determines it from within.
Because the ontology of being builds on a strict delimitation of identity and non-
identity, it can understand repetition only as reproduction of identical elements
where non-identity cannot enter. Difference as negation is ejected from the sys-
tem: non-identity is beyond the series, beyond the field of the thinkable. That is
why classical ontology can think difference only in the form of variation, as a spe-
cific difference that establishes variety within the very identity of being, without
thereby curtailing the formal division between the area of being and the area of
non-being. However, in order for the ontology of being to think difference that
does not introduce negation into the system, that does not desecrate the field of
being with the traces of non-being, it has to establish another delimitation: the de-
limitation between the general and the particular, the universality of form and the
particularity of its individual material realisations. The identity of one establishes
pure form that, as such, is unchangeable and absolutely reproducible, but insofar
as it is realised in material particularities, it generates diversity, an innumerable
multiplicity of variations. Thus, difference is inscribed in the ontology of being as
variation, as a positive material differentiating moment, which does not influence
the form of being itself—it cannot stand against it as negation, as non-being.
Kierkegaard’s theory of repetition brings a critique of two mechanisms of the on-
tology of being: the critique of the mechanism of reproduction as the repetition of
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 94
identical elements, which, at the level of form, perpetuates the unchangeability of
the one, and the critique of variation as merely material diversity, which does not
have the power of difference as negation, an exception that would cut into the very
identity of the one, the very form of being. Repetition is not reproduction insofar
as a certain difference is always already inscribed in every turn of the repetition
of the same and a priori undermines any pretension to identity from within, but, at
the same time, difference is not variation insofar as it does not operate merely in
the material area of positive diversities, but cuts into the very form of identity as
a subversive power of exception, as its internal other, as its constitutive negation.
However, Kierkegaard’s ontology, insofar as it turns away from the ontology of be-
ing, is not an ontology of non-being, an ontology of an eternally flowing becoming
of non-identities, an ontology of substitutivity and groundlessness, as traced in a
certain postmodern theory of simulacra. In Kierkegaard’s conception of repetition,
a certain identity is established—but this identity does not persist in time: in every
moment, the subject is born anew through the dialectics of repetition that retroac-
tively posits every identity as an identity of identity and non-identity and, through
it, a priori generates its history.
Non-being is always already inscribed in being or, as Lacan puts it, the one of the
unconscious is precisely the one of the rift, gap. The unconscious is not the field of
one, being. But it is also not the field of non-being. The unconscious, says Lacan,
opens the gap, which is pre-ontological; it is neither being nor non-being, but be-
longs to the register of the un-realized. As such, the unconscious is essentially a
discontinuity, inconstancy. There is no closed one here, no whole that precedes this
discontinuity and into which a difference cuts subsequently, making a fissure, a
break in the original oneness. But, on the other hand, just as there is no pre-exist-
ing identity, there is also no pre-existing non-identity; absence is also not the basis.
Lacan stresses this with his famous metaphor of silence and voice: there is no ini-
tial silence into which a voice shouts, he says, but it is the shout that yet establishes
the silence.7 Being and non-being as co-determining are produced at once with the
original cut: the unconscious is, says Lacan, “in profound, initial, inaugural, rela-
tion with the function of the concept of the Unbegriff—or Begriff of the original Un,
namely, the cut.”8
The double critique of reproduction and variation can also be found in Hegel, in the
rare passages where he discusses repetition. Even though Hegel does not develop
a theory of repetition, his theses on repetition concern the core of his dialectics.

The dialectics of repetition

Hegel very rarely talks about repetition, but we nevertheless have to say that He-
gelian dialectics is nothing but repetition par excellence. The classical field of re-
flection on Hegel’s theory of repetition is related to his famous idea of historical
repetition, which—in line with the retroactive logic of the productive conception of
repetition9—was first actually inscribed in the history of thought by Marx’s (but in
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 95
reality Engels’) retort on repetition in history.10 Instead of the classical discussions
on repetition that draw on Hegel’s perception of history, we will here proceed from
his The Science of Logic.
There is a passage in which Hegel briefly, but very clearly says something about
repetition as a purely structural matter. This passage can be found in Volume One
of The Science of Logic, in Remark 3 of the section on Becoming. This is how Hegel
defines becoming:
The unity, whose moments, being and nothing, are inseparable, is at the
same time different from these moments. It thus stands as a third with re-
spect to them—a third which, in its most proper form, is becoming.11
Hegel’s development of the initial hypothesis of The Science of Logic that pure being
and pure nothing are the same, and as such basically inseparable, which is also
the fundamental point of his dialectics, is that it is precisely this inseparability
of being and nothing that constitutes their difference. It is exactly this difference,
this necessary shift within every statement of identity, that is the inner motor that
establishes his dialectics as the dynamism of becoming and transition.
Being and nothing, says Hegel, do not exist for themselves, but are present only
through becoming or transition. Wherever there is talk of being and nothing, this
third, becoming, which is the truth of pure being and pure nothing, must be pre-
sent as their condition of possibility.
This third, Hegel continues, has different empirical shapes that abstraction sets
aside or neglects for the sake of “holding fast to its two products, being and noth-
ing, each for itself, and showing them as protected against transition.”12 The most
eloquent accounts of the impossibility of advancing from an abstraction to some-
thing beyond it, and of uniting the two, claims Hegel, are given by Jacobi in support
of his polemic against the Kantian a priori synthesis of self-consciousness, in his
Treatise Concerning the Undertaking of Critique to Reduce Reason to the Understanding
(Jacobi, Werke, Vol. III). Jacobi defines the task as follows:
[…] demonstrating the originating or the producing of a synthesis in a pure
somewhat, be it consciousness, space or time. Let space be a one; time a one;
consciousness a one. Now, do say how any of these three ‘ones’ purely turns
itself internally into a manifold: each is a one and no other. What brings
finitude into these three infinitudes? What impregnates space and time a
priori with number and measure, and turns them into a pure manifold? What
brings pure spontaneity (‘I’) into oscillation? How does its pure vowel sound
come to its concomitant sound, the consonant, or better, how does its sound-
less, uninterrupted sounding interrupt itself and break off in order to gain at
least some kind of self-sound, an accent?13
Hegel comments on Jacobi’s task as follows:
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 96
One sees that Jacobi very distinctly recognized that abstraction is a nonen-
tity, whether this nonentity is the so-called absolute (only abstract) space, or
the equally abstract time or abstract pure consciousness, the “I.” He insists
on this nonentity for the sake of maintaining the impossibility of any ad-
vance to an other, which is the condition of a synthesis, and to a synthesis
itself.14
Especially graphic is Jacobi’s description of the procedure for attaining the abstrac-
tion of space:
For a time I must try clean to forget that I ever saw anything, heard, touched
or moved anything, myself expressly not exempted. Clean, clean, clean must
I forget all movement, and let precisely this forgetting be my most pressing
concern, since it is the hardest. Just as I have thought all things away, so
must I also get perfectly rid of them all, retaining nothing at all except the
intuition, which violently held its ground, of the infinite immutable space. I
may not, therefore, think even myself back into it as something distinguished
from it yet equally bound to it; I may not let myself even be merely surround-
ed and pervaded by it, but I must rather give myself over to it totally, become
a one with it, transform myself into it; I must allow no leftover of myself
except this my intuition itself, in order to behold it as a truly self-subsisting,
independent, single and sole representation.15
In this void, states Jacobi, he encounters the opposite of what should happen to him
according to Kant’s assurance. He does not find himself to be a many and a mani-
fold but to be rather a one without any plurality and manifoldness; even more, he
himself is nothing but the impossibility itself, the nihilating of all things manifold
and plural. This is how Jacobi concludes: “any manifoldness and plurality ... are
revealed in this purity as a pure impossibility”16. Hegel responds that “the meaning
of this impossibility is nothing else than the tautology: I hold fast to abstract unity
and exclude all plurality and manifoldness; I keep myself in indistinctness and in-
determinacy, and look away from anything distinguished and determinate.”17
Kant’s a priori synthesis of self-consciousness, says Hegel, is diluted by Jacobi to
pure abstraction. He reduced the synthesis in itself to “the copula in itself;—an ‘is,
is, is’ without beginning and end, without ‘what,’ ‘who,’ or ‘which.’”18 This, says
Jacobi—and here we finally arrive at repetition—“this repetition of repetition ad
infinitum is the one single occupation, function, and production of the purest of all
pure syntheses; the synthesis is itself this mere, pure, absolute repetition.”19
The copula ‘is, is, is’ expresses abstract being, which allows no advance to the other,
is completely indeterminate, has no predicate and is not even a substance, but rath-
er a pure void, an empty space, a soundless sounding, a highly general sameness.
For Jacobi, repetition is thus precisely a sort of a stubborn persistence in the same, a
movement that produces nothing, a reproduction of the identical, whose most per-
fect form is possible precisely as a reproduction of the void, pure contentless form.
However, notes Hegel—and we must be careful here—“since there is no pause in it,
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 97
that is, no negation, no distinguishing, the synthesis is not a repetition but rather
undifferentiated simple being.”20
What Jacobi names the purest repetition of repetition itself—the return of the cop-
ula ‘is, is, is’ as the supposed absolute identity is for Hegel precisely not repetition,
but is, quite the opposite, an a priori structural abolishment of any possibility of
repetition.
If mental abstraction that tries to conceive something pure, for example, pure be-
ing (or pure consciousness or pure space or pure nothing), gets stuck in absolute
indeterminacy and cannot advance to anything determinate, cannot descend from
infinity to finitude, and if all that this abstraction manages to repeat is merely its
identity with itself, an ‘is, is, is’ or ‘I, I, I,’ then what we have here, says Hegel, is
precisely not repetition.

The correlation of content and form

Repetition is a process of the identity of identity and non-identity, within which

every identity is always the identity of identity and non-identity—in dialectical
transition, a difference is always at work.
Because this difference is nothing but negation, the minimal mark of this differ-
ence is not substantive, but quite formal—it does not concern any special signifier
but the signifying logic itself. Difference is not designated, named, bonded with a
signifier (it does not name a void, absence etc.), but appears merely in mediation,
through the form of the repetition of dialectical structure. And, yet—and herein lies
the fundamental twist of Hegel’s concept of repetition—it is precisely difference as
contentless and merely structural, as a connective-separative bond between being
and non-being, that can produce a meaning on its flip side and enable the descent
of the indeterminate to the determinate, the infinite to the finite. That repetition is
not reproduction, that repetition as reproduction is not possible, therefore means
for Hegel that there is no pure form.
It is exactly in this vein that Hegel’s criticism of Jacobi continues. First, says Hegel,
when Jacobi assumes his position in an absolute, abstract space, time and con-
sciousness, he transposes himself into something which is empirically false:
There is no such thing as a spatially or temporally unlimited space or time,
that is, none is empirically at hand which would not be filled with continu-
ous manifold of limited existence and of change, so that these limits and
these changes would not belong, unseparated and inseparably, to spatiality.
Consciousness is likewise filled with determinate sensation, representation,
desire, and so forth; it does not exist in concreto apart from some particular
content or other. ... Consciousness can indeed make empty space, empty
time, and even empty consciousness or pure being, its intended object and
content, but it does not stay with them. Rather, from this emptiness it passes
over—more than that, it forces itself over to a better content, that is, one
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 98
which is somehow more concrete and to this extent, however bad as content,
still better and truer. Precisely such a content is the synthetic as such, “syn-
thetic” understood in its more general sense. ... The synthesis contains as
well as exposes the untruth of those abstractions; in it they are in unity with
their other, are not therefore as self-subsistent, not as absolute but strictly
as relative.21
Hegel goes on to say that
it is the thought of pure space etc. (that is, pure space etc. taken in themselves)
which is to be demonstrated to be null, that is, what must be demonstrated
is that, as such a thought, its opposite has already forced its way into it, that
by itself it is already being that has gone outside itself, a determinateness.22
It is precisely through the perversion of the relation between abstraction and deter-
minateness, the classical differentiation between form and content, that the logic
of the signifier is unfolded in Hegel. This is something that Žižek also points out:
What is supposed to be the internal content expressed or externalised in
form is actually always already form, an effect of a decentralised process, a
surface effect; and, vice versa, what is supposed to be form, the medium of
the externalization of content, is actually the only content, i.e., a network of
mediations that produces the interior of meaning as its effect.23
Form and content always already correlate in the sense that the law of their cor-
relation is always established retroactively, as the product of the signifying chain.
Jacobi, who abstracts one and its other, avoiding their empirical shapes in order
to, as Hegel puts it, keep them far apart, cannot advance from one to many, from
pure indistinction to diversity. He presupposes pure formal being-in-itself of one
and the other, subject and object, and then tries to connect them from the outside,
subsequently. In this way, he excludes difference from the relation between one and
the other, which is why he conceives difference itself, that is, the distinction be-
tween one and the other, being and non-being—as something in itself, something
external.
However, in Kant’s a priori synthesis, one and the other, for example, I and the
world, concept and the thing in itself, subject and object, do not correlate a priori
as fixed given entities—which is what Hegel points out when he says that synthesis
must not be taken as a tying together of external determinations already at hand. On
the contrary, one and the other, that is, I and the world, concept and the thing in
itself, subject and object, correlate in mutual co-becoming: the synthesis of being-
in-itself and being-for-itself, says Hegel, is not external, subsequent, but immanent:
The synthesis which is the point of interest here must not be taken as a ty-
ing together of external determinations already at hand. Rather, the issue is
twofold: one of the genesis of a second next to a first, of a determinate some-
thing next to something which is initially indeterminate, but also one of im-
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 99
manent synthesis, of synthesis a priori—a unity of distinct terms that exists
in and for itself. Becoming is this immanent synthesis of being and nothing.24
Difference is not external to being and nothing, it is not established as their dis-
tinction in itself that puts them in an impossible relation from the outside, but is
inscribed in being itself as its internal gap: being is always already nothing, being
is fundamentally subjected to its own negation.25 Being as one already refers to
its other—and precisely herein lies the logic of Hegel’s dialectics. Being is its own
other and it is exactly this transition of one out of itself into its other, of indetermi-
nacy into determinacy and infinity into finitude (and vice versa) that is for Hegel
the true movement of repetition. The Hegelian formula of dialectics as the transition
of being-in-itself into its otherness and of this otherness back into being-for-itself is
therefore nothing other than the fundamental formula of repetition.
Hegel precisely defines the double critique of reproduction and variation in an ex-
ceptional sentence, which is also the only sentence in the Phenomenology of Spirit
that explicitly addresses the problem of repetition. We find this sentence in Para-
graph 14 of the Preface. The sentence about repetition is placed in the context of
the critique of scientific culture, which has not yet realised that pure knowledge is
precisely the path to it. Thus, says Hegel, one side “boasts of its wealth of material
and intelligibility,” that is, loses itself in pure empiricism and collecting examples,
while the other side, on the contrary, “scorns this intelligibility, and flaunts its im-
mediate rationality and divinity.”26
The first side thus deals with variation, the collection of diversity, while the second
side is the absolute as pure abstraction separated from any content. The two poles
are then externally reconciled and the principle of the masters of scientific culture
is that:
They appropriate a lot of already familiar and well-ordered material; by fo-
cusing on rare and exotic instances they give the impression that they have
hold of everything else which scientific knowledge had already embraced
in its scope, and that they are also in command of such material as is as yet
unordered. It thus appears that everything has been subjected to the abso-
lute Idea, which therefore seems to be cognized in everything and to have
matured into an expanded science.27
It is at this point that we come across the key sentence:
But a closer inspection shows that this expansion has not come about
through one and the same principle having spontaneously assumed differ-
ent shapes, but rather through the shapeless repetition of one and the same
formula, only externally applied to diverse materials, thereby obtaining
merely a boring show of diversity.28
The real difference, difference as form that introduces negation into being itself
and, precisely through change, which pertains to substance as such, also has an
effect in the material, will not be found in the boring show of diversity, which is
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 100
only an external application of the shapeless repetition of one and the same, it will
not be found in the diversity of the interesting, as Kierkegaard would say, rather,
difference as pure otherness can happen only as an inherent moment of repetition
that twists the same from within, changes it into a new relation between deter-
minacy and indeterminacy. Dialectics does not unfold through the reproduction
of the identical, which in the sense of variation imprints its unchangeable form in
always diverse materiality, but through the inner negation of the very form of iden-
tity, which on its flip side, as a sort of a side effect, produces a novum, a difference as
an exception that has an effect in the material. It is exactly this material effect that
triggers a new change of form, a new turn of the dialectics.

Repetition beyond reproduction and variation

Kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition can be discerned in Lacan’s conception

of repetition as the double movement of automaton and tyche, which establishes the
return of signs, repetition at the level of the symbolic, on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, the elusive circling of the non-representable remainder, gap, repetition
that circles the field of the real. In Lacanian theory, automaton refers to a network of
signifiers established in the register of the pleasure principle, while tyche operates
“beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by
which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.”29 Tyche, says Lacan,
is the encounter with the real. Repetition traces the return of structure, but only
in constantly perverting the structure itself, turning it through its own failure,
through the slip of representation that appears as its insufferable remainder, as that
whose meeting is essentially failed for the subject. However, this failure is also the
condition of possibility of representation and subject as such. Automaton and tyche
are two inclinations of the same process; they condition each other and are insepa-
rable. Or, as Dolar writes in a pithy formula: “tyche is the gap of the automaton.”30
Repetition results from the endeavour to abolish difference, to establish indistinc-
tion between both objects of repetition, but it is the very endeavour to do away
with difference that produces something that a priori terminates sameness and
that causes there to always be too much or too little repetition. The difference that
emerges as something superfluous, something that sticks out and as such prevents
the repeated to coincide with its own repetition is at the same time also a lack, a
complex of the repeated driven to another repetition. But what from the viewpoint
of the repeated is its unhealable wound is from the viewpoint of repetition its con-
dition of possibility.
We must refrain here from, on the one hand, jumping to the conclusion that assigns
reproduction to the symbolic repeatability of signs and, on the other, reserving
the thesis that repetition is not reproduction for ‘real’ repetition beyond the sym-
bolic. It is not the case that there is automaton as reproduction, on the one hand,
and tyche, which is beyond reproduction, on the other. On the contrary, tyche and
automaton are two sides of one and the same movement of repetition—repetition
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 101
that is not reproduction. The repetition of difference is involved in the movement
of the signifying structure, while, on the other hand, the signifying structure can
establish the platform for repeatability only through difference. Or, put differently:
it is precisely their intertwinement—tyche as gap is automaton—that separates repetition
from reproduction.
Observing children at play, Freud discovered something unusual—in their games
and activities, adults always search for something new, while children tirelessly
repeat the same game: “If a joke is heard for a second time it produces almost no
effect; a theatrical production never creates so great impression the second time
as the first; indeed it is hardly possible to persuade an adult who has very much
enjoyed reading a book to re-read it immediately. Novelty is always the condition of
enjoyment. But children will never tire of asking an adult to repeat a game that he
has shown them or played with them, till he is too exhausted to go on.”31
Adults always demand something new, different, and in this demand extend the
symbolic field in which they are placed by varying meanings. But this demand
for the new, says Lacan, precisely “conceals what is the true secret of the ludic,
namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition in itself.”32 Variation,
the designation of the new as interesting, precisely does not produce anything new:
“Whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, is merely alienation of its mean-
ing.”33 The child’s “requirement of a distinct consistency in the details of its telling
signifies that the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough
in its memorization to succeed in designating the primacy of the significance (sig-
nifiance) as such. To develop it by varying the significations is, therefore, it would
seem, to elude it. This variation makes one forget the aim (visée) of the significance
by transforming its act into a game, and giving it certain outlets that go some way
to satisfying the pleasure principle.”34
Insofar as repetition is not reproduction, variation as a possible way out of the
vicious circle of the supposed reproductive repetition turns out to be a pointless
task—a sort of a quixotic struggle with windmills. Variation stands against repro-
duction as a malevolent representative of a repressive instance of repetition, which
is nothing but an illusory notion of repetition as a pure repetition of the same (sign,
example, event) and is therefore itself illusory in its stand. Even more—insofar as
variation operates at the level of the return of signs where it wants to capture the
new in the field of meaning—it not only creates a phantom representative of dif-
ference, but thereby also annuls every possibility of difference. Meaning here is
not established as one of the walls of the subject’s impossibility, which within the
movement of separation and alienation is again and again established only in the
form of an empty signifier, but as an ossified signifier, a sort of a signifying buffer
that embeds itself in the gap of the signifying structure and precisely prevents for
something new in itself and as a necessary remainder to be produced in the move-
ment of the return of signs, in (the necessary and at the same time necessarily im-
possible) return of the same. Variation as a signifying representative of difference is
not only its lookalike, but actually operates as its uncanny double—it takes its place
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 102
and drives it out of its field: variation with a supposed departure from reproduction
not only stops the uncanny return of the same, but abolishes the very possibility
of difference.

The Zufall and the limping cause

Aristotle “manipulates two terms that are absolutely resistant to his theory, which
is nevertheless the most elaborate that has ever been made on the function of
cause,”35 says Lacan. Those two terms are tyche and automaton. And their stub-
bornness, their inherent resistance towards Aristotle’s system, functions exactly
within the realm of what Lacan calls the resistance of discourse: it is the indicator
that points to the flip side of discourse itself, where a certain compulsion is always
at work. A compulsion of thought, which has to deal with its own surplus, with
something standing out, something that cannot be incorporated into the system,
but which precisely in this deviation from itself defines the system as such. From
one perspective, what has emerged in the system appears as an interposition, but
at the same time it also functions as a gain: without the concept of coincidence (as
privation), Aristotle’s theory would not be what it is since it is what it is exactly in
the difference, the addition, the turns it brings in relation to Plato and the Eleat-
ics. Here, precisely through the most resistant concepts, the theoretical repetition
producing a novum, a difference, takes place.
The Eleatics believed that non-being cannot come out of being, which is why there
is no motion or becoming. Aristotle gets out of this conceptual squeeze, which Plato
also followed, by positing different ways of talking about being. He suggests two
possibilities (of talking about being in several ways): 1. introducing the aspects of
potentiality and actuality—this theoretical crutch helped the history of philosophy
get out of many an ontological quandary, and 2. introducing the concept of priva-
tion (στέρησις), which in Aristotle is not merely the name for absence, but also for
something that is hardly or barely present. It is precisely the idea of privation that
the concept of coincidence draws on.
Among coincidental causes (κατα συμβεβηκόϛ), Aristotle points out two that stand
out, almost become independent and take the place of causes in themselves. They
are tyche (τυχη), fortuna in Latin, chance, and automaton (τό αυτόματον), casus in
Latin, spontaneity. While automaton operates as a coincidental cause for all beings
and events in nature, tyche is a coincidental cause only for those things that can be
chosen and for those being capable of choice: “however, these events are said to be
chance events if they are choice-worthy and happen spontaneously to agents who
are capable of exercising choice.”36 Chance is actually a type of spontaneity: “The
difference between chance and spontaneity is that ‘spontaneity’ is the more general
term, in the sense that every chance event is a spontaneous event, but not every
spontaneous event is a chance event.”37
Chance and spontaneity are something inexplicable and indeterminate: “It is also
correct to say that chance is inexplicable (paralogon), because explanations can
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 103
only be given for things that happen either always or usually, but the province of
chance is things which do not happen always or usually. Since these kinds of causes
are indeterminate, chance is indeterminate as well.”38 Despite their indeterminate
status and inexplicability, automaton and tyche in Aristotle are nevertheless defined
as causes. Even though it operates beyond a clear end and purpose, coincidence
clearly has a certain key.
Coincidence, as that which is neither necessary nor usually, neither determinate
nor itself, but something fundamentally different, differentiating, is Aristotle’s
great (and of course heretic) invention, which resolves Hamlet’s dilemma—from the
viewpoint of becoming, to be or not to be precisely cannot be the question: “Noth-
ing comes in an unqualified sense from what is not, but we maintain that there still
is a sense in which things do come from what is not—that is, coincidentally: they
come to be something from the privation, which is in its own right something that
is not, and which does not remain.”39
With the concept of chance, Zufall, says Lacan, Freud takes us to “the heart of
the question posed by the modern development of the sciences, insofar as they
demonstrate what we can ground on chance.”40 Repetition is always something,
says Lacan, that happens as if by chance. But analysts do not let this deceive them.
Why? Lacan’s point here is not that nothing is coincidental, in the sense of prede-
termination that does not allow for deviation. If we must not let ourselves think
that something happened as if by accident, then there must be something in the
background, something that precisely makes a coincidence appear as a coincidence.
This is precisely what coincidence wants—to seem as a coincidence, a split, a mis-
take, a failure.
However, claims Lacan, this must not deceive us—us slipping or misspeaking is
not innocent, there is a cause behind this apparent coincidence. There is a cause,
but this cause is not a law. On the other hand, this cause is also not the key to the
puzzle, it is a key that opens Lynch’s blue box in which we will not find Meaning.
Coincidence must not deceive us in a triple sense: firstly, it must not deceive us
that there is nothing behind it, that it is merely a coincidence—for we know that
it is always a coincidence according to something; secondly, it must not deceive
us that—because we do not believe in coincidence as such—there is a necessity as
determination, a sort of a law, behind it; and thirdly, it must not deceive us into
believing that there is meaning behind coincidence revealing the actual truth.
What essentially determines the constitution of the psychoanalytic subject is nei-
ther a pre-given cause, which relates the subject and its history to a story about
the origin, the original trauma, nor any kind of a purpose that saves the subject
from its unpredictable emergence in the structure. On the other hand, however, the
emergence of the subject is not left to pure chance. Within the return of signs, there
is something that resists the causal logic and wants to seem like a coincidence, but
exactly where something wants to seem as a coincidence, says Lacan, a cause is at
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 104
work. However, this cause is itself a limping cause: the constitution of the psycho-
analytic subject is essentially determined by a certain leap of causality.
Freud’s theory of repression is an attempt at conceptualizing the logic of the lost
cause, which essentially determines the human psychic apparatus and is estab-
lished through a specific temporal and topological mechanism of repetition. In
psychoanalysis, the constitution of the subject does not involve repetition that is a con-
sequence of repression, repetition as a return to the originally repressed, missing sig-
nifier, that is, the failure of representation does not trigger repetition, but it is also
not the case that we repress because we repeat—as Deleuze would have it—that we are
always already in the field of the ever present quasi-causal asubjective becoming
into which the process of repression is subsequently included. Rather, as Alenka
Zupančič points out, repetition and repression are part of the same process. Just as in
Lacanian alienation the signifying pair emerges in the place of the first signifier, which
means that the signifying logic first starts with the dyad—logic that is, the moment
it is established, already bound to repetition—and that the first signifier exists only
in its own fall, so too, in Freudian repression, the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz41 as a mini-
mal signifying mark is established only with the repetition compulsion, while repetition
takes place precisely at the moment of the always already occurred repression of the
Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.42 The function of Freud’s hypothesis of primal repression,
which proceeds from the structure of substitutivity, is not to reveal the ultimate
foundation that the analysis is supposed to reach after peeling off all the layers of
“real repressions,” but, as Alenka Zupančič points out, to “ground the unconscious
in the leap of causality itself, in its gap.”43
That there is no original event functioning as the first cause in a signifying series,
to which clusters of shifted and repressed representations are then attached, means
not only that any signifier can assume the role of a supposed origin and that there
is no deeper meaning behind this, but also that we are always already in a lan-
guage, that, at the unconscious level, the subject emerges merely in a signifying
field and that there is no pre-signifying thing in itself, that is, that it exists merely
as non-existent, as a lack, a loss.
Moreover, what is important here is that we do not look at the fixation itself as an
original signifying gesture established in childhood, to which the patient returns
throughout their life through repressions and resistances, but that, looking from
a slanted perspective, we see that, through shifts, through repeating substitutive
forms and their repressions, in short, through the movement of repetition, the orig-
inal itself is retroactively produced. Fixation is not a past event, it is not a signify-
ing origin and it is not the cause of repression, it is rather the other way round: the
repetition of repression itself operates as a fixer that simultaneously produces and
solidifies its supposed origin.
However—and this is crucial,—this process does not involve only retroactivity,
nachträglichkeit, which retroactively establishes every cause as its own effect, as a
cause of a cause, it does not involve only the subject constantly producing its his-
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 105
tory anew. The point here is rather that it is precisely within retroactivity, where a
certain presence (the presence of the now) retroactively produces its own origin, that
a certain causal hole, gap is established, which a priori prevents this presence—that
is, the subject—to establish itself as a real effect of the origin that it produced as its
own cause.
As Lacan puts it: “What is realised in my history is neither the past definite as
what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am,
but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of
becoming.”44 Kierkegaard writes something similar in Repetition: “Repetition and
recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is
recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine rep-
etition is recollected forwards.”45
Within the logic of Nachträglichkeit, a certain intentionality towards the future
is established, a forward recollection, which does not only (retroactively) fabricate
the cause itself (as the cause of the cause), but also shifts, again and again (and in
advance), the return to it. The consequence of this is not a retroactive phantasmatic
fabrication of a traumatic event that would nevertheless somehow ground it in its
function of the origin, but an avant-garde forward movement of shifting within
which the phantasmatic fabrication of the origin does not operate only as a (ret-
roactively produced) trigger of a causal chain, but also as its unpredictable side
effect. And it is exactly within this side effect that a certain aspect, a certain real is
established, which, as Lacan emphasises, keeps psychoanalysis from turning into
an empty idealism of ‘life is a dream.’46

Envoi

With the double paradox of repetition which can be traced in his book Repetition,
Kierkegaard, on the one hand, delineates a new theory of the subject and its tem-
porality and, on the other hand, legitimises a certain logic of failure, which Lacan
posits as the constitutive moment of repetition in terms of the movement of the sig-
nifying structure, in which the subject emerges through the mechanism of aliena-
tion. Kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition carries out a tour de force that de-
termines the modern subject: the structural impossibility of repetition is the only
condition of its possibility. Kierkegaard thereby delineates a subversive ontology
that departs from the classical ontology of being: the area of being and the area of
non-being are not separated, but they mutually condition each other. Because the
ontology of being builds on a strict delimitation of identity and non-identity, it can
understand repetition only as a reproduction of identical elements and difference
only in the form of variation, as a specific difference that establishes variety within
the very identity of being. What is essential both for the constitution of the modern
subject and the modern understanding of the historical moment is that repetition
is structured in the conceptual departure both from the idea of reproduction as pure
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 106
formal repetition of the same, on the one hand, and the idea of variation as a sub-
stantive articulation of difference, on the other.
The critique of repetition as reproduction and difference as variation, which can
be found in Kierkegaard, Hegel and Lacan, delineates the theory of the subject
that, on the one hand, turns away from every teleology or the theory of pre-given
origin established by the classical ontology of being, while, on the other hand, it
also moves away from the postmodern theory of non-being, pure substitutivity,
simulacra, the absence of origin. By turning away from the idea of telos and the
origin, Kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition doesn’t abolish causality as such
but rather establishes a new causality, which, so to say, accounts with a certain slip,
with a leap that is inscribed in its very structure. It is precisely this leap of causal-
ity what Lacan calls an unconscious cause, a limping cause. Within the function of
the limping cause, something is at work. And what is at work is nothing but the
gap—the gap, inscribed in the very movement of repetition as its impossible condi-
tion of possibility.

Notes

1. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1998) 128.
2. Repetition, subtitled as An Essay in Experimental Psychology and organized around the
experimental trip to Berlin and the correspondence between Constantin Constantinus
and the Young Man (who are, as Constantinus admits by the very end of the book, the
two faces of the same person) reveals an exceptional structure: through the carefully
planned formal composition of the book, which realizes the complex concept of repeti-
tion that it presents, and through the hidden progress of the main character (who is itself
split) through the three levels of existence (the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious),
Kierkegaard’s theory of repetition overturns the traditional ontology of being as well as
the realistic, Newtonian conception of time.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009) 38.
4. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 128
5. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 3-4.
6. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 111.
7. “Where is the background? Is it absent? No. Rupture, split, the stroke of the opening
makes absence emerge - just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence,
but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence.” Lacan, Four Fundamental Con-
cepts, 40.
8. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 43. Here, Lacan captures the one of the rifts in the
following play on words: un- in French signifies one, while in German it means a negative
prefix non- or un-.
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 107
9. In relation to the thesis on the productive conception of repetition as one of the four
fundamental matrices of repetition, cf. Bara Kolenc, Ponavljanje in uprizoritev: Kierkegaard,
psihoanaliza, gledališče [Repetition and Enactment: Kierkegaard, Psychoanalysis, Theatre]
(Ljubljana: Analecta, DTP, 2014) 21–28.
10. This is Marx’s famous reference to Hegel’s statement on repetition, which has become
established as an indestructible aphorism, as an eternally returning sentence on the
Hegelian problem of repetition: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic
facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce.” Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte, https://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/
11. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010) 69.
12. Hegel, The Science of Logic, 69-70. Hegel’s examples of such a conceptual—and neces-
sarily abstract—“protection against transition” are Parmenides’ doctrine of being and
Spinoza’s and Fichte’s philosophy.
13. Hegel, The Science of Logic, 71.
14. The Science of Logic, 71-72.
15. The Science of Logic, 72.
16. The Science of Logic, 73.
17. The Science of Logic, 73.
18. The Science of Logic, 73.
19. The Science of Logic, 73.
20. The Science of Logic, 73.
21. The Science of Logic, 74.
22. The Science of Logic, 74.
23. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in označevalec [Hegel and Signifier], (Ljubljana: Analecta, DDU Uni-
verzum, 1980) 170.
24. The Science of Logic, 72.
25. In the notes to the sections on being, nothing and becoming, Hegel explained his
conception of the relation between being and nothing also by referring to Parmenides’
identity philosophy. As Gregor Moder wrote: “Hegel declares that pure being, without
any further determination, is a Parmenidian concept. But at the same time, he argues,
Parmenides failed to see that pure being has already become pure nothingness.” (Gregor
Moder, “Held Out into the Nothingness of Being: Heidegger and the Grim Reaper,” in
Filozofski vestnik, Ljubljana, 2 (2013): 97-114, 105.
26. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977) 8.
27. Hegel, Phenomenology, 8.
28. Hegel, Phenomenology, 8.
Bara Kolenc: The Paradoxes of the Limping Cause S10 & 11 (2017-18): 108
29. Hegel, Phenomenology, 53.
30. Mladen Dolar, “Comedy and its Double” in Stop that Comedy!: On the Subtle Hegemony of
the Tragic in Our Culture, ed. Rober Pfaller (Wien: Sonderzahl Press, 2005) 184.
31. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (New York: Norton, 1961) 29.
32. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 61.
33. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 61.
34. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 61-62.
35. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 52.
36. Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 47.
37. Aristotle, Physics, 46.
38. Aristotle, Physics, 45-46.
39. Aristotle, Physics, 29.
40. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 39.
41. There is a series of misunderstandings regarding Freud’s term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz,
originally named die psychische (Vorstellungs)Repräsentanz des Triebes, and its preinterpreta-
tion by Lacan. An extensive elaboration on this problem can be found in: Michael Tort, “V
zvezi s freudovskim konceptom ‘zastopnika” (Repräsentanz), in Problemi, 157/158 (Lju-
bljana): 105-108.
42. Repression is a complex process: on the border between consciousness and the uncon-
scious, the mechanisms of the return of the repressed, which demands constant creativity
from the psychic in forming substitutes, and repression, performed by the ego, demanding
a constant use of force to be able to produce new and new resistances, since the primary
struggle against the repressed continues in the secondary struggle against the substitute—
the symptom, are involved in a double movement. On another border, on the edge of the
signifying and the pre-signifying, in the impossible contact between the drive and represen-
tation, a movement whirling around the undetermined point of Vostellungsräpresentanz
takes place, driving the movement of repression and the return of repressed at a level
fundamental for the constitution of the psychic apparatus—this is a compulsion to repeat
the very act of the repression. This repetition compulsion is basic and we cannot get rid of it,
for it is a constitutive function of the psychic apparatus itself.
43. Alenka Zupančič, “Ponavljanje [Repetition],” Filozofski vestnik 1( 2007): 57-79, 69.
44. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 300.
45. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 3.
46. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 53.