Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.
A ‘truth’ which is clearly, then, not ‘true’ in the Platonic sense of corresponding to some perpetual higher order but is rather ‘true’ in the sense of the moment of a pure creation which would ‘expose’ the conventions of knowledge to be inadequate and force their reconfiguration. For Žižek, the act would be such a truth insofar as the act
would be that which would resist and refuse recuperation to the preexistent symbolic matrix.
Where something like a speech act would, by definition, rely ‘for its performative power on the pre-established set of symbolic rules and/or norms’, the Žižekian act would signal a break with any preestablished or given order.
(quoting from The Ticklish Subject)… Žižek emphasises Antigone’s willingness to risk her ‘entire social existence’, her defiance of the ‘social-symbolic power of the City embodied in the ruler (Creon)’. Through so doing, Antigone could be understood to have entered the realm of ‘symbolic death’, that is to say, she can be understood to have situated herself outside the symbolic space of what was, previously, her society. For Žižek, such a moment of self-expulsion is tantamount to a ‘suspension of the big Other’, a radical break with and from the Symbolic order.
Žižek and Butler
In order to emphasise and clarify this radical character of the act, the fact that the act should be radically divorced from the Symbolic, that it should be envisaged as irrecuperable to the Symbolic, Žižek contrasts it with what he terms the performative ‘staging’ of revolt, or ‘performative reconfiguration’ 39 of the Symbolic order. Such performative reconfiguration would be exemplified in the position taken by Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power where she discusses the possibilities of subjective ‘resistance to given forms of social reality’. In The Ticklish Subject Žižek responds to Butler’s advocation of forms of resistance which would successfully reconfigure and thus, contingently at least, offer the potential of ameliorating one’s social condition(s), warning against the illusion of assuming to have successfully challenged from within that which is always already in a position to recuperate any such challenge. The distinction here, for Žižek, is that between a reconfiguration which would maintain the terms of the Symbolic and a reconfiguration which would transform the very contours of the Symbolic and thus the terms in which the reconfiguration might be understood.41
Žižek’s point can perhaps be illustrated in the common-place notion of reverse discrimination where the very points of discrimination are precisely upheld in the process of their supposedly politically correct reversal. Some negative aspects of discrimination against ‘the disabled’, for example, may be addressed through the implementation of quotas for the employment of a certain percentage of ‘disabled’ workers but such regulation cannot but uphold the demarcation of certain people as ‘disabled’ and potentially stigmatised and maintain the significance of factors otherwise deemed ‘irrelevant’ to the criteria of employment or ability to ‘do the job’.
A position like Butler’s entails, for Žižek, both an overestimation of the effectivity of ‘performative reconfiguration’ and an underestimation of the potential for the more thoroughgoing revolt which would be exemplified in the character and act of Antigone.
For Žižek, it seems, it is this thoroughgoing rupturing status of the act with regard to the Symbolic, the impossibility of situating the act in or recuperating the act to the Symbolic which renders it ethical.
What, however, are we to make of Žižek’s insistence on the act as irrecuperable to the Symbolic? In the distinction that he puts forward between performative reconfiguration and absolute reconfiguration, one might be justified in asking how the latter might be possible. Clearly here Žižek is not suggesting that everything of the Symbolic is razed. He is not suggesting, for example, that the Greek spoken in Thebes would cease to be spoken after Antigone’s act. He appears, rather, to be suggesting that the meaning of the symbolic or social edifice is unavoidably altered.