Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
An act entails the demolition of the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know, the Other as a support of identification, capable of providing that treasure of treasures, recognition. 157
One important thing about the act as Lacan portrays it is that the subject is an effect of it and does not produce it. I still think that it is important to keep this in mind, lest something fundamental be misunderstood about what happens during a psychoanalytic cure — as well as elsewhere, in those moments when we humans, now and then, find ourselves in the process of an act.
I have been arguing that an act offers a way of thinking about manifestations of freedom without the usual presupposition of a sovereign, conscious subject exercising the freedom, or a structure of some type exercising its freedom in the subject’s place. An act is a production of the unconscious, which is, of course, not an irrational thing but a calculating, thoughtful thing — if it can be called a thing at all. …
While an act is signifying, and very much an affair of signifiers, it is not the result of a decision or an act of will or any conscious deliberation but should be seen as a production of the unconscious, a production whose conditions for emergence can be enhanced by certain things (such as what goes on in analytic discourse) (161).