Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. D. Porter. London, Routledge, (1986) 1992.
S. Žižek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London, Verso, 2001.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Penguin, (1973) 1977.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli., New York, Norton, (1978) 1988.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. D. Porter. 1992. London, Routledge, 1986,
The term ‘act’, in Lacanian theory, is differentiated from the sense of “mere behaviour” by the location and persistence of desire. This is to say that the act is necessarily a subjective undertaking and that it can be understood to be coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity and the responsibility entailed in such an assumption,the Freudian Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.
Where behaviour would describe the response to needs, for example, the act is defined by the impetus of desire. Desire makes the subject act and as such the weight of responsibility for the act committed lies with the subject. Desire cannot be treated as a given which would determine the subject’s act without the subject’s volition. The very subjectivity which would be taken to act cannot be described without the manifestation of desire which would allow its constitution. But such desire must always be particular to the subject; it is the subject’s desire. The act would be the moment of subjective assumption in which the desire which is in one is manifest and thus brought into existence. The act in this sense should be understood to be coterminous with the emergence of desire; the act is desire made manifest. It is in this sense that the Lacanian act is always, necessarily, idiotic, in the etymological sense, wherein idios would designate ‘one’s own’.
There is in the act, says Lacan, always ‘an element of structure, by the fact of concerning a real that is not self-evidently caught up in it’. This would appear to correspond to the structure we encounter in Antigone. The laws of the gods ‘speak’ from beyond, that is, on the side of the Real. Which is, of course, to say they do not in fact speak at all. They are manifest in Antigone and given expression through her act in such a way that ‘it isn’t a question of recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted’. In giving voice to the law of the gods, Antigone should be understood to have created and brought forth ‘a new presence in the world’. She should, that is, be understood to have named her desire and, moreover, assumed herself as the cause of this desire.
For Žižek, Antigone functions as the ethical example par excellence insofar as she is understood to ‘exemplify the unconditional fidelity to the Otherness of the Thing that disrupts the entire social edifice’.
Capitalising the ‘O’ of ‘Other’ in the ‘Otherness of the Thing’, Žižek can be understood to be emphasising the Thing, das Ding, as it relates to the field of the Symbolic. That is to say, das Ding as it would represent the limits of the Symbolic field, das Ding as indicative of the insistence of the lack in the Other as it is experienced by the subject. It is, as such, that das Ding would be understood as (a name for) that which would disrupt ‘the entire social edifice’.
The act, for Žižek, describes the moment of suspension of the Symbolic, the recognition of the limits of the Symbolic. In such a moment of recognition it is not that the Other would somehow be suspended to be subsequently resolved as a moment of a dialectic or integrated into a subsequent schemata. The act, for Žižek, is not a moment of Aufhebung.
Rather, in the Žižekian act, one would assume the very location of the lack which persists in the Other:“it is not so much that, in the act, I ‘sublate’/‘integrate’ the Other; it is rather that, in the act, I directly ‘am’ the Other-Thing.”
For Žižek, the ethical import of the act, (and the act is for Žižek the very definition of the ethical moment), is separated from any notion of responsibility for or towards the other. His is not an ethics of responsibility but, rather, his understanding of ethics is as the momentary and, in the moment, absolute suspension of the Symbolic order. The ethical act, for Žižek, is neither a response to the other nor a response to the Other.
The (ethical) act proper is precisely neither a response to the compassionate plea of my neighbourly semblant (the stuff of sentimental humanism), nor a response to the unfathomable Other’s call.11
Žižek contrasts this notion of the ‘ethical act’ as assumption of the lack in the Other, as the assumption of the location of das Ding, with the Derridean notion of ethics as decision. A notion described by Critchley as follows:
the political decision is made ex nihilo, and is not deduced or read off from a pre-given conception of justice or the moral law, as in Habermas, say, and yet it is not arbitrary. It is the demand provoked by the other’s decision in me that calls forth political invention, that provokes me into inventing a norm and taking a decision. The singularity of the context in which the demand arises provokes an act of invention whose criterion is universal.
Žižek perceives in this passage, and by extension, in the Derridean original, ‘two levels of the decision’.13 It is with this bifurcation of the decision that Žižek takes issue. The decision, understood as the act, would, for Žižek, have to be such that the two moments of decision he perceives in Derrida’s and Critchley’s accounts would coincide. Here, Antigone is offered as the paramount example.11
Is it not, rather, that her decision (to insist unconditionally on a proper funeral for her brother) is precisely an absolute decision in which the two dimensions of decision overlap?14
Žižek’s point here is that separating the decision into two moments, into, that is, the ‘decision to decide’ and ‘a concrete actual intervention’, is to render the decision or the act as non-absolute. That is, it is to render the act as less than an act.
The act, for Žižek, as we have seen, is situated in the moment of suspension of the Other, what he terms directly ‘being’ the ‘Other-Thing’, the assumption by the subject of the irrecuperable rent in the social edifice.
To incorporate as a necessary aspect of the act its reinscription in the Symbolic is, for Žižek, to miss the radicality of the act.
The question which insists here is that, in divorcing the act from any reinscription in the symbolic, is not one necessarily, from a Lacanian perspective at least, rendering the act as the impossibility of the ethical?
That is to say, Žižek’s deployment of the ‘act’ appears closer to what Lacan designates as passage à l’acte, an action in which one takes flight from the Other, an action which would properly entail the, albeit momentary, dissolution of the subject and consequent impossibility of the ethical.
Phrased otherwise, the act so divorced from its reinscription is not party to a judgement which, in Lacan’s understanding, would define the ethical;
an ethics essentially consists in a judgement of our actions, with the proviso that it is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgement, even if it is only implicit. The presence of judgement in both sides is essential to the structure.