Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
There is more to the subject than identity, and I have been discussing how Judith Butler’s theory of identity and the subject does not describe a subject who does anything other than perform its identity. Lacan’s theory of the act, I am arguing, gives us a portrait of a subject doing something other than this. My study of the Fort-Da game … already showed this. … In the last chapter I portrayed Badiou, somewhat provocatively, as someone who is closer to Lacan’s theory of the subject than the most prominent of Lacanian advocates, Slavoj Žižek (149).
Badiou’s description of politics in his 1985 Peut-on-penser la politique? contrasts well with Butler’s description of an ethic of dis(identification) and is also useful for demonstrating what a Lacanian act beyond identification and recognition might look like when it is something other than a private affair, as the child’s Fort-Da game and Xénophon’s cross were (149).
Lenin claimed that there were three key sources of Marxist thought: German Idealism, the revolutionary French workers’ movement, and English political economy.
Marx’s originality consisted of using these three sources to elaborate on what Badiou calls a fundamental declaration of a social fact: “There is a revolutionary worker’s movement”
Badiou characterizes this declaration as follows: “It is not a matter of separating out and structuring a part of the existing phenomenon. It is a matter of a “there is,” of an act of thought cutting across a real [en coupure d’un réel]”
The declaration in the nineteenth century, that “there is a revolutionary worker’s movement,” is read by Badiou as a signifying act, as an attempt on Marx’s part to signify something that had not yet received signification in his time, thus its association with an act “cutting across a real.” 150
If much in Marx is effectively dead, then Badiou argues that this is because the original force of the founding declaration of Marxism has been exhausted. the existence of a revolutionary workers’ movement is no longer so evident, and, more importantly, it is no longer “traumatic” for us: The status of such a declaration in contemporary culture no longer has the effect of bringing a signifying impasse to bear on contemporary political discourse. That is, the existence of such a movement would no longer press upon us, forcing us into a new signifying production in order to make sense of it. In fact, we have an entire history of Marxist theory and practice in terms of which such a movement could be interpreted. But even the contemporary explanatory power of classical Marxist theory is exhausted, according to Badiou, because it has lost its real historical power. the historical referents upon which marxism was founded — German philosophy, French politics, and English economic theory — are no longer major referents for contemporary culture, to say the least!
Obviously, what Badiou suggests is that the emergence of politics now would have to occur from a different type of declaration, one that formally or structurally resembles Marx’s: that is, it would have to bring into signifiers something that has no representation in the political, or the state. With such a signifying act, Badiou believes that one would be more faithful to Marxism than a classical Marxist is, for one would then be developing a politics on the basis of a declaration that would again, cut across the real, which is precisely the kind of relationship between signifiers and the real described in Lacan’s theory of the act. (150-151).
Marxism applied a theoretical framework to what was at the time a new event. Badiou argues that the way to revive Marxism today is to apply a contemporary theoretical framework to what, for us, has the status of an event. 151