Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
Politics is about a presentation that causes an impasse in representation. Such a presentation occurs, Badiou argues, when migrant workers say, “We want our rights.”
… politics for Badiou is not about the assertion of identity and the procuring of representation, and in this respect I see it as a continuation of Lacan’s project and a contrast to Butler’s work. With a theory of politics that includes a notion like the real as an impasse in signification, Badiou is able to highlight the kinds of effects politics has outside of calls for the recognition of identity. (154)
The resemblance between Lacan’s theory of the act and what Badiou calls politics should, then, be clear. Although the term Other is not used by Badiou in this context, the places where it would fit are obvious. The domain of the political — the state — resembles the Lacanian Other as a subject-supposed-to-know. Politics sustains an impasse in this Other, just as a Lacanian act emphasizes the Other’s lack of consistency, coherence, and totality.
Politics does not consist of repeating the circumstances of an event, of, for example, trying to bring about again what happened at Talbot. Instead, politics as a signifying act preserves the impasse in signification caused by the event.
Politics does not let this event stop being an event for the social. In other words, it does not let an event get fully absorbed or placed in the Other. Politics, then, is a signifying practice that remains faithful to the subjective rupture an event brings about. Politics’ reminder to the Other that all cannot be represented is what Badiou calls the subject-effect of politics. Thus the political subject for Badiou is essentially linked to rupture. The consistency of a political subject, oddly is nothing other than a consistency of a rupture. As Badiou (1982) described it in Théorie du sujet, the subject is a destructive consistency. 155
I argued in chapter 7 that in Lacanian theory the subject of an act is not something from which the real is excluded or repressed. While a signifying act does not present us with the real in the raw, it is not a completely tame real that it presents either. It is precisely the real’s status as an impasse in formalization and signification that is presented in an act. I opened this chapter by asking what the signifying practice of an act does if it does not make demands. If it does not seek recognition by the Other, then is it just a meaningless blah blah blah?
Badiou’s discussion of politics shows us how an act is not like this. Politics, as Badiou conceives it, does something to the social without articulating a demand to the social Other.
While such an act, strictly speaking, has no place, no meaning, in the Other, and while Badiou does not refrain from calling such an act “nonsensical,” such acts are not simply meaningless and are reminiscent of the way Lacan described puns. As Lacan described it, a pun contains a pas-de-sens, a step toward meaning that never gives a full incarnation of meaning in one signifier. This step, far from simply negating the Other, engages in something like a reinvention of the Other. Certainly since an act avoids making demands it does not engage with the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know, and it can be said to be in a negative relation to such an Other.
But by preserving some kind of relation to the creation of a new meaning, it manages to go toward the establishment of a different Other in the place of this Other-who-knows: an Other whose inconsistency and incoherence are laid bare.
Once again we can see how an act is not like the production of meaning in a metaphor. In chapter 2, I claimed that a metaphor succeeds in creating the illusion that there is an incarnation of an absent signified in one particular signifier (latent or manifest) in a signifying chain. this signifier then appears as an enigma, containing within it the keys to its own interpretation, an interpretation that only succeeds in giving more signifiers and never a final signified. Is the signifying production of an act doing something like this?
A distinction between creating a new signifier in an act and creating a new signified in metaphor ought to be maintained. A metaphor exploits signifiers that are already recognizable by the Other. It just deploys them in an unusual way. An act (like a pun) creates a signifier whose place in the Other itself is not assured, a signifier without well-established links to other signifiers that might be able to provide it with meaning. The signifier used in an act (and the phrase “We want our rights,” in Badiou’s discussion, can be taken as a signifier) is something less than an enigma, because it does not appear to be pregnant with any sense at all. It appears to be nonsensical, and yet it could make sense. So this is why I am saying that an act seems to bear more resemblance to the punning pas-de-sens than to metaphor. 156