Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.
… universality, rather than a neutral position transcending politics, opens up as a split within the particular, as that which is displaced, or out of joint. (125)
In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek on Butler
she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered by the hegemonic form of the big Other — what Lacan calls the ‘big Other’ are symbolic norms and their codified transgressions” [Ticklish Subject, 264]. (221, note 83)
Žižek conceives that act as a radical, uncertain gesture that breaks through the symbolic order. From the standpoint of this order and like the foundation of the order itself, the act is shattering and unethical — and this is the point, to break through the boundaries of the situation, to change its basic contours. In this way, the act is nondemocratic; it is not democratically legitimized in advance. Rather, it is a risk. There are no guarantees of success. Only retroactively, in light of what follows, can there by any sense of the act. Žižek writes,
An act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on the context.
Rather than a radical step toward freedom, the Boston Tea party could well have been a pathetic act of vandalism by men in unfortunate costumes. Likewise, the Los Angeles riots could have been the moment when the structures of class and race were radically transformed rather than merely the moment when rage combusted into violence and looting.(128-129)
Žižek emphasizes two features of the political act:
- it is external to the subject. The act is not something that the subject figures out and decides to do having rationally considered a number of different options. On the contrary, insofar as the act is an intrusion of the Real, “the act is precisely something which unexpectedly ‘just occurs.’ An act is not intentional; it is something that the subject had to do, that it could not do otherwise, that just happened.
- the genuinely political act intervenes from the position of the social symptom; it is not merely a transformation of the subject. Žižek explains, “An authentic act is not simply external with regard to the hegemonic field disturbed by it: an act is an act only with regard to some symbolic field, as an intervention into it.” To transform this field, rather than remain trapped within it, an act has to intervene from the standpoint of its hidden structuring principle, of its inherent exception.
For example, the political strategy of the Democratic Leadership Council in the United States has for all intents and purposes been to race the Republicans to the right. … Lost in this strategy are the poor: the exclusion of the poor was necessary for the restructuring of the democratic party. The poor, then, would constitute the symptom of the Democratic party, and an act would intervene from this position. (129-130)