Pluth, E. (2016) Against Spontaneity: The Act and Overcensorship in Badiou, Lacan, and Žižek International Journal of Žižek Studies, Volume One, Number Two – Žižek and Badiou
Formis, Barbara Event and Ready-Made: Delayed Sabotage. Communication & Cognition Vol. 36, Nr. 1 & 2 (2003)
What we have in these cases is not an internal negation – in which one signifier negates others, which would be entirely an affair of the symbolic. We have instead a signifier as a thing beyond or outside of sense. Again, I think this is consistent with viewing these signifiers as mathemes.
Ed Pluth on the heels of his book in 2004 that I used in my dissertation, has come back with his theory of the signifier in the act. What makes for a signifier in the act and how does one define it? The Act brings something new into the situation, an articulation of new means that signifiers play a crucial role, but not in the standard sense. These signifiers cannot be called “classical” signifiers. The signiers in the Act are different. Here is Pluth:
“What is being looked for in this theory of how acts use signifiers, then, is a use of signifiers that is prior to, or at least beyond and outside of, the difference between sense and nonsense. Considering signifiers in acts as mathemes highlights that side of them that does not even appear to have a sense; and although devoid of sense, as mathemes such signifiers cannot properly be called nonsense either. [..] This notion of a signifier that is outside of sense – a signifier that purely performs, perhaps – has become a central component of Žižek’s discussions of acts.” (11-12)
What Pluth is addressing is a signifier that escapes all signification, but yet present in the Act. He states: “At stake in an act, I am arguing, is a different kind of signifier that, additionally, also resists any conversion of nonsense into sense. In other words, the mathematized signifier in an act does not offer any salvation of its apparent nonsense, and is outside any meaning-effect altogether.” (12)
“Practically speaking, the acts Žižek tends to study do not require anything beyond insistence and repetition: one simply refuses to allow the signifiers in the act to enter into a relationship to any other signifiers. This is crucial to the act’s ability to be an absolute, pure “no!” But Badiou studies how a truth procedure uses signifiers in a matheme-like fashion while also allowing for the signifiers to join to others in the construction of a new situation.” (21)