Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
Lacan seems to have favored a certain kind of subject, one that is engaged in maintaining an inconsistency in the Other, one that signifies in such a way that the order of the Other itself gets scrambled. Instead of merely seeking a signification for an event in terms already available in the Other, an act puts a resistance to signification into words. … A pun creates a new signifier that resist signification without being completely nonsensical. It is a signifier that is not simply “the Other’s” but forces a new place for itself in the Other (115).
While it is fairly easy to see how acts use signifiers in a way that is different from other signifying practices, the position of the subject in an act, and whether this subject differs, structurally, from the subject as meaning, remains to be explored.
One attractive aspect of the subject-as-meaning was that such a subject seemed more or less thinglike and substantial: a knot of signifiers, if you will. This can be thought of as a “subject as substance”: not the thinking substance that characterized the Cartesian cogito but substancelike nonetheless. The view of the subject as a thing, however, and not as an agent, although it does insist and repeat.