Category: Žižek

dean democracy

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

🙂 Why do we all have such a hard on for democracy?

Žižek’s answer is

democracy is the form our attachment to Capital takes; it is the way we organize our enjoyment.  He writes, “what prevents the radical question of ‘capitalism’ itself is precisely belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism.” Faithful to democracy, we eschew the demanding task of politicizing the economy and envisioning a different political order. (102)

With respect to the moral law, the stain of enjoyment does not involve any pathological content or empirical object. Rather, the wiping out of all pathological objects produces a new kind of nonpathological object — objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. (108)

Thus, the crucial link between Kant and the Jacobins, between the categorical imperative and democratic invention, involves objet petit a: just as superego stains the moral law, so does it appear as a stain on the empty place of democracy. … This stain onthe empty place of democracy takes the form of the sublime, pure, body of the People, that is, of the Nation. … In this way, formal democracy is tied to a contingent, material contnet, to some sort of nation or ethnicity, to a fantasy point that resists universalization (109).

… democracy is ultimately inseparable from nationalist violence.  It is linked to the fantasy point of a people that calls it into being (113).

Once cultural politics morphed into capitalist culture, identity politics lost its radical edge (116).

dean capitalism discourse of university

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the University


S2 —> a
S1      $

S2 (knowledge, the string of signifiers) is in the first position, that of the agent or speaker. This tells us that under capitalism, the facts speak. They are not grounded in the Master (S1), although they rely on a hidden or underlying supposition of power, of the authority that they command (S1 is in the position of truth). Because this authority is hidden, the facts claim that they speak for themselves.  What do they mean? Well, that is a matter of opinion — and each is entitled to his own opinion.  The facts, or the knowledge that speaks in the discourse of the university, are not integrated into a comprehensive symbolic arrangement; instead, they are the ever conflicting guidelines and opinions of myriad experts. Thus they can advise people to eat certain foods, use certain teeth-whiteners, wear certain clothes, and drive certain cars. The experts may evaluate and judge all these commodities, finding some safer or more reliable and others better values for the money. Experts may make economic and financial suggestions, using data to back up their predictions.

S2 addresses a and, hidden underneath a is the subject $. This tells us that knowledge, or the experts, address the subject as an object, an excess, or a kernal of enjoyment. The object addressed by the experts, then, might be the person as a body or set of needs, the person as a collection of quantifiable attributes, or the person as a member of a particular demographic,

but the person is not addressed as what we might typically understand as the reasonable subject of liberal democratic politics.The person is addressed as an object and thus is less a rational chooser than an impulse buyer, a bundle of needs and insecurities, desires and drives, an object that can be propelled and compelled by multiple forces. As a version of university discourse, capitalism does not provide the subject with a symbolic identity. (98)

The formula shows that $ does not identify with S1. The subject is merely the remainder of a process in which knowledge addresses enjoyment.

Recall that Žižek argues that late capitalist societies are marked by (1) an injunction to enjoy and (2) the decline of symbolic efficiency.

Late capitalist subjects are encouraged to find, develop, and express themselves.  They are enjoined to have fulfilling sex lives and rewarding careers, to look their very best — no matter what the cost — and to cultivate their spirituality.  That these injunctions conflict, that one cannot do them all at once, and that they are accompanied by ever present warnings against potential side effects, reminds us that we are dealing with the SUPEREGO. (99)

The decline of symbolic efficiency (or the collapse of the big Other) refers to the ultimate uncertainty in which late capitalist subjects find themselves.

dean discourse of analyst pervert on lenin

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the Analyst

The discourse of the analyst has the same structure as the perverse discourse. The difference between the discourse of the analyst and the perverse discourse rests in the ambiguity of objet petit a (occupying here the position of agent).

  • In the perverse discourse, objet petit a designates the subject’s ($ in the position of addressee) enjoyment. That is, the pervert is the one who knows what the subject desires and makes himself into an instrument of that desire.  Accordingly we see how the formula places knowledge (S2) in the position of truth, supporting the object that speaks. (89)
  • In the discourse of the analyst, this knowledge (S2) is the “supposed knowledge of the analyst.” This means that in the analytic setting, the subject presumes that the analyst knows the secret of its desire. But, this presumption is false.  The enigmatic analyst simply adopts this position, reducing himself to a void (objet petit a) in order that the subject will confront the truth of her desire.  The analyst is not supported by objective or historical knowledge. rather, the position is supported only by the knowledge supposed by the subject through transference. Analysis is over when the subject comes to recognize the contingency and emptiness of this place. Žižek follows Lacan in understanding this process as “traversing the fantasy,” of giving up the fundamental fantasy that sustains desire. (89)

Thus, whereas the pervert knows the truth of desire, the analyst knows that there is no truth of desire to know.

The process of traversing the fantasy, of confronting objet petit a as a void, involves “subjective destitution” As the addressee of the speaking object, the subject gives up any sense of a deep special uniqueness, of certain qualities that make him who he is, and comes to see himself as an excremental remainder, to recognize himself as an object. Neither the symbolic order nor the imaginary realm of fantasy provides any ultimate guarantees. They cannot establish for the subject a clear, certain, and uncontested identity. they cannot provide him with fundamental, incontrovertible moral guidelines. What is left out, then, is the authority of the Master (S1, now in the position of production). (89)

Žižek views the discourse of the analyst as homologous to revolutionary emancipatory politics. What speaks in revolutionary politics is thus like objet petit a, a part that is no part, a part that cannot be recuperated into a larger symbolic or imaginary unity. Such a part, in other words, is in excess of the whole.

In emphasizing the structural identity between revolutionary politics and the discourse of the analyst, moreover, Žižek is arguing that the revolutionary act proper has no intrinsic meaning. It is a risk, a venture that may succeed or fail. Precisely what makes revolution revolutionary is that it leaves out (produces as remainder) the authority of a Master: there are no guarantees.(90)

For Žižek, what was remarkable about Lenin was his willingness to adopt this position. Žižek emphasizes two specific moments: 1914 and 1917. In 1914 Lenin was shocked and alone as all the European Social Democratic parties (excluding the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) turned to patriotism … falling ini with the prevailing nationalist fervor. Yet this very catastrophic shattering of a sense of international workders’ solidarity, … “cleared the ground for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International — and Lenin was the only one who realized this, the only one who articulated the Truth of the catastrophe” … Likewise in April 1917, most of Lenin’s colleagues scorned his call for revolution. Even his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, worried that Lenin had gone mad, but Lenin knew that there was no proper time for revolution, that there are no guarantees that it will succeed.  More importantly he knew that waiting for such an imagined proper time was precisely the way to prevent revolution from occuring. … Lenin is remarkable in his willingness to take the risk and engage in an act for which there are no guarantees. We should recall that the odds were fully against Lenin — in peasant Russia he did not even have a working class that could take power. (90)

Against communist dogma regarding the laws of historical development and the proper maturity of the working class, Lenin urged pushing through with the revolution. He did not rely on objective laws of history. He also did not wait for permission or democratic support.  He acted without grounds, inventing new solutions in a moment when it was completely unclear what would happen. He refused to wait for authorization or do what other thought he “ought” to do, doing instead what he had to do. Lenin, then, takes the position of objet petit a. The truth of his view does not rest in  laws of history but in its own formal position in an uncertain situation, a position marked by the Leninist Party (91).

Unlike (Agamben), Žižek does not abandon law and sovereignty. Lenin’s greatness is not simply that of a risk taker but of a founder, one who takes responsibility for introducing a new order. … addressing the fundamental political problems of the day — antatgonism in an era post-property and the exclusions and violence of neoliberal capitalism — is a matter not of escaping or abandoning the law but of traversing the fantasies that support the law, confronting the  perversity and enjoyment in our relations to law.  … possibility of moving from law to love. (92-93)

dean university discourse as capitalism

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006.  Print.

Discourse of the University


S2 —> a
S1      $
  • S2 or knowledge is in the position of the speaking agent. S2 addresses objet petit a the little nugget or remainder of enjoyment.
  • S1 (the Master) is in the position of truth, and the subject ($) is in the position of production.
  • This is a discourse in which knowledge speaks, the rule of experts.
  • What is hidden under the facts however, what the facts want to deny, is the way they are supported by power and authority (S1 below the bar, in the lower left-hand corner; the Master in the position of truth).
  • As Žižek argues, the “constitutive lie” of university discourse is its disavowal of its own performative dimension. University discourse proceeds as if it were not supported by power, as if it were neutral, as if it were not, after all, dependent upon and invested in specific political decisions.
  • Capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, as a generation of critiques of technocracy and instrumental reason made clear, emphasize expertise. Capitalists ground the expertise in efficiency as understood by economic theory.  Capitalism addresses the subject as a kind of object, providing no real ideological or symbolic locus of subjective meaning. We see this in the way capitalism undermines symbolic identities, how it undermines such forms of attachment through the revolutionary force of ever expanding and intensifying markets. Instead of a symbolic identity of the kind provided by a Master, capitalism offers its subjects enjoyment (objet petit a). (83-84)

For Žižek, the most interesting aspect of modern power captured by the formula of the discourse of the university stems from the distinction between the upper and lower levels of the diagram.  The upper level S2 —> a expresses the fact of contemporary biopolitics (knoweldge addressing objects, treatinig subjects as objects) while the lower S1 —> $ marks the “crisis of investiture,” or the collapse of the big Other …

In contemporary capitalist society biopolitics appears in two forms: the life that has to be respected and the excess of the living other that one finds harassing, unbearable, and intolerable.

  • Thus, in one respect, the other is fragile and vulnerable. It must be fully respected.
  • In another, the fragility of the other is so great, the need for respect so strong, that anything can harm it; everything is dangerous

Žižek argues that the discourse of the university enables us to understand how these two attitudes are two sides of the same coin. They are both brought about by a crisis in meaning, by “the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself.”  That is to say, the structure of university discourse reminds us that authority is presupposed yet denied by expert rule; the Master does not speak and does not occupy the position of agent; rather, he occupies the position of Truth (85).

Yet whereas capitalism is a self-revolutionizing economic form, one in whose very crises, inequities, and excesses drive its productivity, Stalinism was a self-revolutionizing political form. Stalinism tried to attain (and surpass!) capitalist productivity without the capitalist form, without, in other words, class struggle. Once class struggle officially ended with the 1935 constitution, the revolutionizing impulse of capitalism came under the control of the political domain in the form of terror.  As a consequence, the inequities of capitalism shifted into social life as more direct forms of hierarchy and domination. Žižek writes, “In the Soviet Union from the late 1920s onwards, the key social division was defined not by property, but by direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education).  For this reason, Žižek can say that Stalinism was the “symptom” of capitalism. It was a symptom insofar as it revealed the truth about the social relations of domination that capitalist ideology presents as free and equal. (86)

real of woman

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-131

The production of the excluded ‘reality’ of women is evident in, for example, the case of sexual harassment.

Before feminist activism in this area, social discourses did not represent the ‘experience’ of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment existed as a social practice, but it was not possible to articulate that experience as such within the symbolic economy of existing social discourses. These experiences were literally ‘not spoken of’.

Yet at the same time, the sexual harassment of women is a social practice that is produced by gendered social relations. The social discourse produces both the practice and its disavowal. The exclusions of social fictions can be traced to the operation of a phallic Symbolic order that produces discourse as discourse and subject as subject.

In Lacanian terms, the production of the real of women as an excluded term of discourse is linked to the impossibility of symbolically rendering women in a phallocentric Symbolic order. The Lacanian position links the excluded real of women to the symbolically repudiated female body of the Mother in a phallic Symbolic order. In feminist terms, this symbolic economy renders ‘women’ as either the phantasy of The Woman or as an excluded term. In this formulation, feminist discourses articulate the founding symbolic repudiation of the excluded real of women.

Unlike social fictions, feminist discourses render the real of women not as lack but symbolize and reinscribe it into the signifying chain. This reinscription shifts the relation of symbolic elements within the chain, producing a new chain of signifiers. This reinscription produces a new discourse and thus a different representation of women.

Instead, the a should be understood as analogous to the Lacanian concept of the Real. This concept is one of Lacan’s most difficult and complex, as he uses it in many linked senses and its meaning changes over the course of his work. … Lacan posits the Real as excess, impossibility and lack. In Lacan’s earlier work, it is a material plenitude which exceeds the Symbolic order, and in which nothing is lacking … In Lacan’s later work, the real is impossible (‘le réel, c’est impossible’) (S17: 143). It is a logical obstacle that cannot be represented within the symbolic (S17: 143). For this reason, the Real is also lack in language, because it marks that which the Symbolic cannot symbolize. No signifying chain can represent it in its totality – hence its impossibility. Something must always fall out of discourse, which is its excluded a. 131

In this way, the Real can also be understood as the hole in the Symbolic order, the impossibility on which that order is predicated and the absence that it encircles. 131

It is not the matching of a signifier to its correlative signified, because there is no metalanguage able to tell the truth about truth and no transcendental signifier that can fix meaning as a correlate of reality (Lacan 1965: 16, Éc: 867– 868). Knowledge is a discourse of the Real, diffracting it through the prism of discursive structures. The production of a new signifying chain represents a different relation to the Real, and with it a new ‘real’.

My account of feminist knowledge does not understand the Real as a fixed entity that the act of knowing passively uncovers. Rather, it is the constitutive ‘outside’ of the existing limits of discourse. An effect of the excess plenitude of the Real is theoretical and political possibility.

If the Symbolic order does not represent the totality of being, then language can take a different form, can represent a different relationship to the Real, and can represent a different Real. It becomes possible to signify the Real differently. Such a conception grants a utopian dimension to knowledge, for if it is not immutable, then the world that it represents is not given, and it can describe a different Real.

Accordingly, knowledge exists in both a present and a future signifying relation to the Real. If the Real is an impossible plenitude, it becomes possible to accept that we can never fully know or represent it, while also accepting that it offers a multiplicity of possibilities.

There can be other symbolic exclusions from discourse, such that the operations of discourse are less costly to those excluded others of the Symbolic order.

We need not conflate the lack in the symbolic with a Symbolic that represents femininity as lack. To claim that it is possible to change a signifying relation to the Real (and with it the signifying relation to object, self and others) is not to claim that it is possible to obtain a mystical fusion with the plenitude of the Real, in which language is adequate to its all and the speaking being suffers no loss. My conception of feminist discourse assumes that there is no knowledge that can ever provide a full and adequate representation of the world. Rather, knowledge is necessarily incomplete, situated and partial, such that it cannot ever represent all, or be a transcendental Truth.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 132.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/oculryerson/Doc?id=10098962&ppg=145

Copyright ? 2004.  Routledge.  All rights reserved.

sharpe subjectivity hegelian

The Jacobin Reign of Terror … for Hegel, is that within it for the first time subjects could at any moment ‘lose everything’ with no hope of any equivalent return. To quote The Phenomenology of Spirit

… all these determinations [that the subject receives in its ‘acculturation’ hence] have vanished in the loss suffered by the self in absolute freedom: its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive … [Hegel, 1997:362]

… it is only when the individual has experienced this ‘terror of the negative’, and had the courage to see in what appeared to him qua particular Self as a groundless alien force something which is ‘immediately one with self-consciousness’, that full ‘self-consciousness’ emerges. [Žižek 1999a: 94] (139).

‘Subject’ [thus] emerges at this very point of utterly meaningless voidance brought about by a negativity which explodes the frame of balanced exchange.  That is to say, what is ‘subject’ [in Hegel] if not the infinite power of absolute negativity/mediation … [for] whom every ‘pathological’ particular positive content [henceforth] appears as ‘posited’, as something externally assumed? [Žižek, 1993, 27; Hegel 1997: 355-63] (139)

Žižek thus comments that what ‘… Bataille fails to … note … is that the modern (Cartesian) subject no longer needs to sacrifice goats intestines, his children, and so on, since his very existence already entails the most radical … sacrifice, the sacrifice of the very kernel of his being’. [Žižek, 1996a 125 … ] (139).

In Hegel, who for Žižek most consistently thought through this subject’s philosophical subversion, the ‘Cartesian’ subject corresponds to: ‘.. the purely negative gesture of limiting phenomena without providing any positive content that would fill out the space beyond the limit.’ [Žižek, 1993, 21]

From Hegel’s Realphilosophie of 1805-6:

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity — an unending wealth of presentations, images, none of which occurs to him or is present … here shoots out a bloody head, there a white shape … [Žižek, 1991a, 87; 1997b:8; 1992: 50; 1999b: 136] (139)

sharpe the Other is itself divided the Other does not exist

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

Žižek’s position is that ideology primarily captures subjects at the level of their unconscious beliefs, and that it does this by structuring their access to jouissance (99).

Žižek proposes … that the answer to how one can still speak from ‘outside’ of the big Other of a hegemonic ideological system comes from a more detailed ontology of this Other itself.  … the Other is itself divided and/or inconsistent, and so contains the resources of its own critique (100).

Modernity, Žižek repeats, is that ‘enlightened’ epoch wherein: “… the symbolic substance (the “big Other” qua texture of symbolic tradition) can no longer contain the subject, can no longer hold him to his symbolic mandate. [Žižek, 1992: 134 (Sharpe’s italics)]

Žižek’s argument is that sexuality only emerges in the first place at the points of the failure of what can be sanctioned by social discourse (113).

sharpe real of jouissance

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

Žižek’s contention is that the social conditions of the contemporary would demand nothing less than a radical rethinking of the discursive constitution of subjectivity as such. … what risk theory fails to register, and what it falls to a psychoanalytically based analysis to register, is the changed situation of contemporary subjectivity vis-à-vis the ‘Real of jouissance’ (86).

I know very well that symbolic conventions are empty, yet I continue to follow the social expectations [as the only means to attain to money, power, sex (etc.) = because I believe through the duped other(s)].

So Žižek’s position is that we should defitely not be taken in by the contemporary subject’s conscious sense of himself as something of ‘an outlaw … staying clear of binding commitment’ (Žižek, 1991b: 103, 102) Perhaps more than ever, Žižek argues, today’s subjectivity is radically conformist. “… instead of the symbolic Law, we have a multitude of rules to follow” What Žižek is referring to are the multitude of  ‘… imaginary ideals (of social success, of bodily fitness…)’ with which the multimedia, and in particular advertising discourse, solicit us.

From Žižek in 1991:

… [w]hat usually goes unnoticed [by social psychology] is that this disintegration of the ego-ideal entails the installation of a ‘maternal‘ superego taht does not prohibit enjoyment, but, on the contrary imposes it and punishes ‘social failure’ in a far more cruel and severe way, through an unbearable and self-destructive anxiety.  All the babble about the decline nof ‘paternal authority’ merely conceals the resurgnece of this incpmparably more oppressive agency. 89

sharpe jouissance

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

🙂  Žižek argues against Arendt that the Nazis were merely boring bureaucrats, doing their duty as an rational boring administrator would, simply as a procedure to be followed.  What this misses out on is what Žižek’s calls surplus enjoyment.

… the Nazis experienced their deeds as perversely enjoyable (73). … the processes of ‘rationalisation’ pointed to by Weber et al. themselves generate an excess of obscene jouissance which they can neither control, nor cease politically to depend upon.

sharpe jouissance mother

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

… the maternal body is held to be subjects’ first love object. … Her body is at least retroactively perceived by the subject ot have been the repository of a sovereign jouissance yet unhindered by the sacrifices demanded of us as speaking, socialised subjects.

So, by asserting that the imposition of the Law of culture actually liberates the child’s desire from its abjection before the mother, Žižek contends that unshackled jouissance is far from the untarnished Good … What Žižek suggest, indeed, is that the ‘primordial repression’ of this Thing operated by the absolute prohibition of incest is minimally necessary for subjectivity to emerge. This action ‘castrates‘ the subject — no matter of which sex — not in any literal sense, but in the sense of cutting it off irrevocably from its first object of desire [da Mada RT].  It frees subjects from an over-proximity to the lethal substance of jouissance that would render them incapable of anything resembling normalised social existence. (67)

sharpe regimes of enjoyment

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

Žižek as Theorist of Ideology: Two Transpositions

  1. Žižek argues primary site of subjective inscription for an ideology is not the consciousness of ideological subjects, but the Freudian unconscious.
  2. Ideology today doesn’t claim to structure the horizons of meaning of its subjects, … than how its ‘terms and conditions’ enable and structure … ‘regimes of enjoyment.’ (31)

There is no identity that is not a relational identity.  Every identity is formed in differentiation from an other, or grounded through reference to an other that guarantees its own consistency, at least as a regulative ideal to be strived towards. (32)

… there is no identity that is not grounded in a reference to some guaranteeing Other (42).

🙂 We need to question the “strength of argumentation as a factor motivating individual and collective action. … — between subjects’ conscious self-evaluations, and the beliefs that inform what they actually do (40).

The key thing about Lacan, for Žižek, is that this scepticism about the modern Cartesian subject, evidenced as early as the first essay in the Ecrits, did not commit him to a total dismissal of the relevance of the category of the subject.  To call into question the sovereignty of individuals’ conscious self-perceptions, according to Lacan, does not mean that one can immediately pass into a reflection that centres itself on ‘the body’, the ‘text’ or some trans-subjective ‘will’ or ‘power’. … What is passed over … is that possibility which Freud opened up: namely, that the ‘mind’ is not reducible to consciousness, and that — as such — the consciousness-body opposition might not exhaust the field proper to subjectivity (40).

  1. Lacan’s unconscious subject REMAINS a subject. … At any given moment, that is to say, I might be playing out my neuroses, largely unaware of the true nature of my desire, etc. Yet this does not mean that at some future time, I might not be brought to a heightened self-awareness. This is precisely the possibility that psychoanalysis qua ‘talking cure’ affords, and without which it would be simple perversity (40-41).

Žižek sees in psychoanalytic theory per se a means of uncovering how the most powerful structures of subjective motivation capable of being harnessed for social reproduction are importantly beneath subjects’ conscious control. An account of the unconscious, Žižek believes, will thus significantly sophisticate existing political theories (44).

Žižek’s position is that, from around the time of the mirror stage (six to eighteen months), human needs are irrevocably caught up in the dialectics of the subject’s exchanges with others, and its demand to be loved by them. The child thus, as it were, needs to be taught how to desire, he stresses. Its first question is not ‘what do I want’, but ‘what do the others want from me?’ or: ‘what am I for them?” (45).

pluth an act entails the demolition of the other as subject-supposed-to-know

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

An act entails the demolition of the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know, the Other as a support of identification, capable of providing that treasure of treasures, recognition. 157

One important thing about the act as Lacan portrays it is that the subject is an effect of it and does not produce it.  I still think that it is important to keep this in mind, lest something fundamental be misunderstood about what happens during a psychoanalytic cure — as well as elsewhere, in those moments when we humans, now and then, find ourselves in the process of an act.

I have been arguing that an act offers a way of thinking about manifestations of freedom without the usual presupposition of a sovereign, conscious subject exercising the freedom, or a structure of some type exercising its freedom in the subject’s place. An act is a production of the unconscious, which is, of course, not an irrational thing but a calculating, thoughtful thing — if it can be called a thing at all.  …

While an act is signifying, and very much an affair of signifiers, it is not the result of a decision or an act of will or any conscious deliberation but should be seen as a production of the unconscious, a production whose conditions for emergence can be enhanced by certain things (such as what goes on in analytic discourse) (161).