Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: New York, 2007.
True, an act does not produce a subject who is identified with any particular signifier, but it does not produce a subject separate from signifiers altogether either. How can signifiers be used such that they avoid making a demand on the Other for recognition? If an act uses signifiers in a punlike way, and if it does not make a demand on the Other, then what does it do? Is it simply incomprehensible? A meaningless blah blah blah? (139)
Signifiers must be employed in some way in an act, but this does not mean that an act has to fall on either side of an unsatisfactory division: on the one hand, a meaningless, onanistic blah blah blah, in which what is enjoyed is nothing but the sound of one’s own voice; or on the other hand, an either latent or manifest attempt to get recognized by the Other by means of what is being said. As Lacan puts it in one of his late seminars, what he is aiming at is a kind of signifying activity that can be found in “some artistic practices,” one that could be said to be “beyond the symbolic” (XXIV, Ornicar?, 15:12). This does not mean it would be preverbal or nonverbal, however. Lacan says instead that it should be seen as “hyper-verbal,” “a verbal to the second power” (XXIV, Ornicar?, 15:12) (139)