Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.
The Symbolic order is necessarily experienced by the subject as Other, as an Other of which there is available no objective and totalising conception. That is to say, the Symbolic as Other figures only insofar as it figures in relation to the subject who would encounter it. The Symbolic order is a structural condition which, as it manifests for and in relation to the subject, can only be seen to exist insofar as it exists for that subject.
Conjoined with this, the Symbolic would be the field in which the subject would assume its constitution and, thus, from which it would retroactively posit its emergence. While, then, the Symbolic and the subject obviously cannot be reduced to (aspects of) one another, neither can they, in this context, be separated from one another.
The conception of the act as a reconfiguration of the Symbolic would then have to figure as a subjective undertaking. In terms of Antigone’s act, the act would not only be Antigone’s in the sense that she performs it but it would be hers in the sense that it is performed in relation to the Symbolic order as it manifests for her. This would be to acknowledge that the act can only be experienced by the subject. But even in order for the subject to be understood to have experienced the act or to have experienced itself as acting this would necessitate the act’s (re)inscription in the Symbolic.
The act, as coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity, is necessarily pulsational. One cannot (permanently) occupy the act.
We should perhaps remember here Lacan’s claim from Television that ‘Suicide is the only act which can succeed without misfiring’. Suicide would be such an act precisely because it is not, from the subjective perspective, reinscribed in the Symbolic.
There is in suicide no continuation, no possibility of recuperation by or to the Symbolic but also, quite clearly, no possibility of subjectivity either. That suicide is the only act which can succeed without misfiring is not to advocate suicide, it is, rather, to recognise the impossibility of other acts not misfiring. Suicide is the only act which would not entail a recuperation to the Symbolic by the subject who would have committed it.
The point remains here, however, even acknowledging this subjective relation to the Other , that any act at all, in Žižek’s understanding of it, might figure as ethical even if this means that it only figures as ethical for the particular subject who has acted. Which is precisely to say that there is available no means to differentiate the ethical from the unethical. To paraphrase Simon Critchley’s question concerning Badiou’s notion of the event, and there does appear to be some theoretical resemblance between Žižek’s ‘act’ and Badiou’s ‘event’, how and in virtue of what is one to distinguish an ethical act from a non-ethical act?
Invoking Kant, Žižek represents the ‘proper ethical act’ as ‘doubly
formal: not only does it obey the universal form of law, but this universal form is also its sole motive’. 45
Moreover, the proper ethical act is inherently transgressive. It is not merely a matter of allegiance to a universal duty without pathological motives but it is an allegiance to a form of action which will redefine the very form of the prior conception of what would constitute the good, the norm, the Symbolic order. Žižek’s ‘moral law does not follow the Good – it generates a new shape of what counts as ‘Good’’. The proper ethical act is then, for Žižek, not so much defined by its irrational nature but is that which would institute a new conception or criteria for what counts as rational at all. Nothing which precedes an act is adequate to the task of judging the act.
As Žižek himself makes clear, the act is radically distinguished from ‘a simple criminal violation’. This, not because the act is necessarily a violation without pathological intent or because the act is a violation in the name of a competing conception of right or justice but precisely because the act entails the assumption of cause by the subject without illusory appeal to some other (or Other) foundation for action. It is in this sense that the act would be properly described as a suspension of the Other.
The act is located at the limits of the authority of the Other, the act is the point of subjective intervention without appeal to an Other authority.
The Other, as we have seen, can be understood as coterminous with the Symbolic order insofar as it manifests as a subjective experience. The Other, that is, is the Symbolic order as it is, and with the specificity with which it is, encountered by the subject.
Das Ding is that which cannot be recuperated to either the Symbolic order or to the Imaginary order. It is that of the Real which would insist at the limits of subjective experience. It is, in the context of ‘intersubjectivity’, that of the other which cannot be accommodated to a point of recognition, that in the other which can neither form an aspect of identity nor be reduced to a point of signification. It is also, then, that in and of the subject which can neither be reduced to imaginary identification nor recuperated to a system of signification.
What Žižek characterises as the insistence of ‘the Other-Thing’ would be more accurately described as that in any encounter which cannot be recuperated to a totalising comprehension. It is the insistence of this Thing which cannot adequately be accommodated which would be indicative of the lack in both the other and the Other.
In the encounter with the Other, the Other is experienced as demanding of the subject. It is such a demand which would be indicative of das Ding, insofar as das Ding might be that which would satisfy this demand. In this sense, das Ding can be understood to be a name for that which the Other is experienced as lacking.
It is clear then that, as Žižek appears to acknowledge, there is no possible correlation between the (particular) insistence of the subject and das Ding. If there were, then this would be to simultaneously ‘solve’ the lack in the Other and the lack in the subject.
Which would be to say that there is no subject and no Other for the subject. There would be, that is, no Symbolic order in which the act could be (re)inscribed.
The act should rather be understood as the subject’s always inadequate response to the Other (and the other).
The act is the moment of production of something in response to the other and the Other, precisely in the sense that that something is not the Thing, is not adequate to das Ding. The act would be the moment of subjective assumption, the moment of the subject’s causing its desire to come forth.
But such desire is never something which would be ‘entirely given’, it is something which must be brought into the world anew. Insofar as the subject’s act is to be understood, it must be reinscribed in the Symbolic and, in being so inscribed, it does necessarily alter the Symbolic. It is in this sense that, as Žižek correctly notes, the act is a creatio ex nihilo.
It is in the act that ‘the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world’.
It must however by emphasised that it, the act, is commensurate with the moment of subjective assumption.
That is, that the act is the act for the subject who would have constituted itself in the act.
Or, phrased otherwise, the act is the subjective moment of assumption and is thus only experienced as such by the subject.
This is not to argue that Antigone is a non-ethical example.
It is rather to emphasise that the very concept of an ethical example is nonsensical.
The ethical consists in the moment of assumption of and as the cause of one’s existence as subject. It is availed of no exterior support or justification.