the act – Page 7 – objet (a)

stavrakakis Žižek antigone the act

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias of an Ethics of the Political” Boucher, Geoff, and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, eds. Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Žižek. Great Britain: Ashgate. 2005. Print.

It is difficult to see, however, how the “inhuman” position of Antigone could point to an alternative formulation of the socio-political structure. … Antigone’s intransigence, her deadly passion, may thus be what creates her tragic appeal, but even by Žižek’s 1998 standards, one has to conclude that this makes her unsuitable as a model for transformative ethico-political action (173).

Unless of course, one reinterprets her in a substantial way. But then a certain paradox emerges: Antigone can only function as a model for radical political action on the condition that she is stripped of her radically inhuman (anti-social and anti-political) desire.

🙂 Stavrakakis isn’t clear on just exactly what it is in Žižek’s argument that he finds disagreeable. He thinks that Žižek has to ‘tame’ Antigone first in order to find her suitable for politics, that is ‘give way’ on her radical desire, which means, in this case, retreat or withdraw from her radical desire. For Stavrakakis: Wouldn’t the truly radical act be to traverse the lure of Antigone altogether? (174)

🙂 Stavrakakis points out that Lacan himself moved from this position on ethics outlined in this Book 7, to a different position in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where the idea of pure desire is questioned. “This shift needs to be taken into account when discussing the function of Antigone.

Desire not only loses its value as a pure force of transgression, but is also revealed as the ultimate support of power and the order of goods. As soon as jouissance acquires its central place in Lacan’s theoretical universe, desire is revealed as a defense against enjoyment, as a compromise formation, while drive emerges as the nodal point of his ethical thought (cites Zupančič, 2000:235) In that sense, desire can never be a pure transgressive force (175).

… desire also has precise limits. It [desire] is always conditioned by the structures of fantasy sustaining “hegemonic” regimes —regimes of power, consumption, and even resistance and transgression. It is always stimulated by the imaginary lure of attaining jouissance, but it is also sustained by the constitutive inability to realise such a goal. In that sense, desire”succeeds,” reproduces itself, through its own failure. This reproduction is not politically innocent. For example, consumer culture is partly sustained by the continuous displacement of final satisfaction from advertisement to advertisement, from product to product, from fantasy to fantasy (176)

The important “by-product” of this play is a specific structuration of desire which guarantees, through its cumulative metonymic effect, the reproduction of the market economy within a distinct “promotional culture“.

It is Lacan himself then who points the way to traversing the lure of Antigone by shifting his understanding of desire. This shift needs to be acknowledged as the radical break it truly represents. Any attempt to reconcile the “pure” desire of Antigone with the later conceptualisation and the critique of illusory desire and/or the ethics of desire with the ethics of drive —what Zupančič seems to attempt in the last pages of her Ethics of the Real — needs to be re-examined and further debated

*Undoubtedly desire and drive are related, but their relation seems to me to escape any logic of reconciliation or supplementation, which is how Zupančič ultimately views their relation. Her aim seems to be to “reconcile” desire with drive (Zupančič, 2000:238), something attempted through presenting drive as a “supplement” of desire (Zupančič, 2000:239): at the heart of desire a possible passage opens up towards the drive; one might therefore come to drive if one follows the ‘logic’ of desire to its limit (Zupančič, 2000: 243).

What is not given appropriate attention here is that reaching this limit entails a crossing which radically transforms our relation to desire. In other words, the limit of desire does not connote the automatic passage into a supplementary field of reconciliation; it primarily signifies a rupture, precisely because “desire never goes beyond a certain point” (Miller, 1996: 423).

Whereas Lacan’s early work and his conceptualisation of desire as something “always in violation, always rebellious and diabolical” —a position informing his reading of Antigone— leads to “the confusion between the drive and desire,” as soon as desire is reconceptualised as ultimately submissive to a law, a shift of almost “gigantic” proportions is insituted, and this shift needs to be acknowledged thoroughly (Miller, 1996: 422-423)

Miller, Jacques-Alain (1996). “Commentary on Lacan’s Text.” Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Eds). Albany: SUNY Press.

As Žižek himself has pointed out in another text, “[t]here is ethics —that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology— in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack” (Žižek, 1997c:214).

In order for a truly ethical fidelity to an event ot become possible another fidelity is presupposed, a fidelity that cannot be reduced to the event itself or to particular symbolisations of the event and has to retain a certain distance from them: a fidelity to event-ness as distinct from particular events, a “fidelity to the Real qua impossible” (Žižek, 1997c:215).

Such a standpoint not only presents the necessary symbolic prepartions for the proper ethical reception of the act/event, but also offers our best defense against the ever-present risk of being lured by a false event, a satanic miracle, against the ever-present risk of terror and absolutisation of an event, to use Badiou’s vocabulary (Badiou, 2001:85).

Of course, one should be aware that fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a certain betrayal, not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and divine positivity.

In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another fidelity — fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social — within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other (180).

The transformative potential of a Lacanian ethics of the political is a crucial issue that is far from settled.

dean universality the act

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

… universality, rather than a neutral position transcending politics, opens up as a split within the particular, as that which is displaced, or out of joint. (125)

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek on Butler

she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered by the hegemonic form of the big Other — what Lacan calls the ‘big Other’ are symbolic norms and their codified transgressions” [Ticklish Subject, 264]. (221, note 83)

Žižek conceives that act as a radical, uncertain gesture that breaks through the symbolic order. From the standpoint of this order and like the foundation of the order itself, the act is shattering and unethical — and this is the point, to break through the boundaries of the situation, to change its basic contours. In this way, the act is nondemocratic; it is not democratically legitimized in advance. Rather, it is a risk. There are no guarantees of success. Only retroactively, in light of what follows, can there by any sense of the act. Žižek writes,

An act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on the context.

Rather than a radical step toward freedom, the Boston Tea party could well have been a pathetic act of vandalism by men in unfortunate costumes. Likewise, the Los Angeles riots could have been the moment when the structures of class and race were radically transformed rather than merely the moment when rage combusted into violence and looting.(128-129)

Žižek emphasizes two features of the political act:

it is external to the subject. The act is not something that the subject figures out and decides to do having rationally considered a number of different options. On the contrary, insofar as the act is an intrusion of the Real, “the act is precisely something which unexpectedly ‘just occurs.’ An act is not intentional; it is something that the subject had to do, that it could not do otherwise, that just happened.
the genuinely political act intervenes from the position of the social symptom; it is not merely a transformation of the subject. Žižek explains, “An authentic act is not simply external with regard to the hegemonic field disturbed by it: an act is an act only with regard to some symbolic field, as an intervention into it.” To transform this field, rather than remain trapped within it, an act has to intervene from the standpoint of its hidden structuring principle, of its inherent exception.

For example, the political strategy of the Democratic Leadership Council in the United States has for all intents and purposes been to race the Republicans to the right. … Lost in this strategy are the poor: the exclusion of the poor was necessary for the restructuring of the democratic party. The poor, then, would constitute the symptom of the Democratic party, and an act would intervene from this position. (129-130)

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

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).

pluth politics calls into question the very organizing principle of the political

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

pluth badiou example of an event

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

Between November 1983 and February 1984, an automobile factory in talbot, France, was occupied by striking workers. Clashes occurred among the strikers themselves, as well as with the police. An attack happened on one of the shop floors by what the press called “non-strikers” — a group composed of predominantly North African migrant laborers, in fact. The attack was condemned by one of the largest unions in France, which, under some pressure, soon decided to encourage the acceptance of one of management’s earlier offers. Another major union called for an end to the occupation of the factory shortly thereafter.

As Badiou points out, the objective fact surrounding this event are quite simple and not all that unusual or unimaginable. What makes it an event in Badiou’s particular sense is what he calls the subjective break that followed from it. In the next elections, the Socialist Party, which was in power at the time, plummeted in the polls, the Communist Party became a nonentity, and the extreme Right of Le Pen gained ground. Badiou attributes these post-Talbot election results to several factors. The socialist government’s policy of industrial “restructuring” had been a manifest failure. The other left-wing parties had no ability to control the migrant workers, as Talbot showed. And finally, the Right was successfully able to rally the French public against the migrant workers at Talbot. The right wing was in fact doubly successful, because it did not only win votes with its racist appeals. Its attractiveness to the electorate even forced the Socialist Party to start talking about toughening up on immmigration (1985, 72). In other words, after Talbot the right wing was controlling the political debate within France, with everyone focusing on the “immigrant problem.”

These are some of the repercussions Talbot had in the political domain in France, but they do not tell us why Talbot was something that could be the source of a contemporary politics. What Badiou focuses on is anapparently straightforward statement the migrant workers were making at the time: “We want our rights” (1985, 73).

Yet this statement, Badiou claims, had no resonance at all in the French electorate, and he argues that structurally it could hot have any resonance within France. This is what makes Talbot so interesting for Badiou. “This statement, which does however bear on rights, is intrinsically unrepresentable, and it is in this unrepresentability that the politics of this statement consists.” (1985, 74).

Why this should be the case is not so clear. The statement had no place in the political discourse in France, according to Badiou, since a parliamentary democracy is about obtaining representation for different constituent groups in the state. One of the things at stake in the claims made by the Talbot workers is precisely which groups are officially in the state and which are not. While many of the workers had been living and working in France for over twenty years, they were still not citizens and had illegal status. The problem, then, was that “as the government and unions said in chorus: the rights in question do not exist” (1985, 75).

… the status of the statement in this particular example, and this particular context — “We want our rights” — can be compared to a Lacanian act. (152-153).

… The rights in question simply did not exist, and there was thus no political basis on which the workers could make such claims within France (153).

In other words, Talbot brought out the structural inability of “the political” to take into account demands from non-French workers in France (154).

pluth there is more to the subject than identity (on badiou)

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

There is more to the subject than identity, and I have been discussing how Judith Butler’s theory of identity and the subject does not describe a subject who does anything other than perform its identity. Lacan’s theory of the act, I am arguing, gives us a portrait of a subject doing something other than this. My study of the Fort-Da game … already showed this. … In the last chapter I portrayed Badiou, somewhat provocatively, as someone who is closer to Lacan’s theory of the subject than the most prominent of Lacanian advocates, Slavoj Žižek (149).

Badiou’s description of politics in his 1985 Peut-on-penser la politique? contrasts well with Butler’s description of an ethic of dis(identification) and is also useful for demonstrating what a Lacanian act beyond identification and recognition might look like when it is something other than a private affair, as the child’s Fort-Da game and Xénophon’s cross were (149).

Lenin claimed that there were three key sources of Marxist thought: German Idealism, the revolutionary French workers’ movement, and English political economy.

Marx’s originality consisted of using these three sources to elaborate on what Badiou calls a fundamental declaration of a social fact: “There is a revolutionary worker’s movement”

Badiou characterizes this declaration as follows: “It is not a matter of separating out and structuring a part of the existing phenomenon. It is a matter of a “there is,” of an act of thought cutting across a real [en coupure d’un réel]”

The declaration in the nineteenth century, that “there is a revolutionary worker’s movement,” is read by Badiou as a signifying act, as an attempt on Marx’s part to signify something that had not yet received signification in his time, thus its association with an act “cutting across a real.” 150

If much in Marx is effectively dead, then Badiou argues that this is because the original force of the founding declaration of Marxism has been exhausted. the existence of a revolutionary workers’ movement is no longer so evident, and, more importantly, it is no longer “traumatic” for us: The status of such a declaration in contemporary culture no longer has the effect of bringing a signifying impasse to bear on contemporary political discourse. That is, the existence of such a movement would no longer press upon us, forcing us into a new signifying production in order to make sense of it. In fact, we have an entire history of Marxist theory and practice in terms of which such a movement could be interpreted. But even the contemporary explanatory power of classical Marxist theory is exhausted, according to Badiou, because it has lost its real historical power. the historical referents upon which marxism was founded — German philosophy, French politics, and English economic theory — are no longer major referents for contemporary culture, to say the least!

Obviously, what Badiou suggests is that the emergence of politics now would have to occur from a different type of declaration, one that formally or structurally resembles Marx’s: that is, it would have to bring into signifiers something that has no representation in the political, or the state. With such a signifying act, Badiou believes that one would be more faithful to Marxism than a classical Marxist is, for one would then be developing a politics on the basis of a declaration that would again, cut across the real, which is precisely the kind of relationship between signifiers and the real described in Lacan’s theory of the act. (150-151).

Marxism applied a theoretical framework to what was at the time a new event. Badiou argues that the way to revive Marxism today is to apply a contemporary theoretical framework to what, for us, has the status of an event. 151

pluth on butler her lack of act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 14, 2009 at 15:16

Even attempts to avoid alienation by coming up with our own identities (say, in a project of aesthetic self-creation, or … in a Butlerian politics that affirms the openness of identity) are still always going to be geared toward getting recognition from the Other.

If we are interested in identity, in determining or asserting what we are (or even what we want to be), then we are interested in being objects of the Other’s desire. This interest relies upon an Other construed as a subject-supposed-to-know. No pursuit of the self, no matter how apparently subversive it may be, can avoid making an implicit appeal to this kind of Other. Both Butler and Lacan pursue the implications of this impasse, yet despite these similarities, there is an important difference in their results. (140)

Žižek points out (CHU: 124), that the dimension of the act is missing from Butler’s work … and that this is the real flaw … While Butler argues that the subject has no core, unchangeable identity, she does argue that the subject has an unchangeable fixation to identity as such. Her characterization of this fixation leads me to claim that despite her attempts to include a notion of agency in her work, her theory possesses a deterministic streak. The inclusion of a consideration of how acts use signifiers in a way THAT IS NOT BOUND UP WITH IDENTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION would remedy this. (141)

Butler’s accounts of agency and the subject do not require any notion of something external to or other than discourse. She can account for subjects and agents as well as transformations within the “matrix of intelligibility” from a perspective that only considers the discursively constructed nature of identity. Nevertheless Butler wants to avoid giving the impression that she adheres to an extreme “linguisticism.” … Butler wants to include some notion of the body in her account of identification while avoiding two things:

– On the one hand, she wants avoid making the body into a purely linguistic construct

– she also wants to avoid making the body into something simply outside of discourse. 144

In the Psychic Life of Power, the paradox of having to be subjected to power in order to be a subject comes under further scrutiny: “If the terms by which we gain social recognition for ourselves are those by which we are regulated and gain social existence then to affirm one’s existence is to capitulate to one’s subordination a sorry bind” (Butler Psychic 79, quoted in Pluth 147).

Butler reiterates here that it is only by being subjected to a signifier that identifies us that we can be subjects capable of resisting that identification, resisting a reduction to that signifier, and acting as agents. Once again, the preservation of some kind of relation to identity is absolutely crucial for Butler. Without a relation to an alienating identification, the kind of subversive activity she wants to affirm would not be possible. In fact, there would be no “subject” at all, and thus no chance for agency, without both an identity and the preservation of a frustrated relationship to this identity. 147

Because of being wed to the real in a different fashion, an act involves the realization that there is no Other of the Other, nothing behind the Other, as it were, acting as a ground.

Consequently an act transforms the subject (of fantasy) and consists of a signifying practice that does not rely on the Other as a guarantee of meaning and recognition. As … the Fort-Da game .. showed, an act is not for the Other.

Is Lacan’s idea of a desiring Other just like Butler’s idea of identity as a conflicted cultural field? They sound alike insofar as both involve a rejection of the fiction of an Other who is a subject-supposed-to-know. But the resemblance does not go much father. Butler’s “matrix of intelligibility,” out of which identity is forged, contains a multiplicity of signifiers whose interrelations can lead to unpredictable possibilities for identity.

But in Lacan’s work, an encounter with the Other’s desire is not an encounter with a multiplicity of signifiers offering various possibilities for identity. Rather, an encounter with the Other’s desire is an encounter with the absence of any signifier offering a support, guarantee, and recognition point for identity. It is such an absence that makes an encounter with the Other’s desire into an encounter with an impasse in symbolization, which is the mode in which the real appears in an act. Thus the encounter with the Other’s desire can be thought of as an encounter with the real. (148)

The difference between Lacan’s notion of a split, desiring Other and Butler’s notion of a multiple, conflicted social order is the difference between not having a signifier and having a cornucopia of signifiers, which is one way to figure the difference between a theory that includes the real in the symbolic, and a theory that overemphasizes the symbolic (although Butler would not use this term to describe her theory). While her discussion of the body as an impasse is an attempt to resolve this issue, it does not lead Butler to focus on how the subject may have a relation to something other than identity, and how the subject may be doing something other than performing identity —at least sometimes (148).

pluth butler the real2

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

On Butler’s conception of the body

As she describes it, the body presents language with a problem and is certainly not reducible to language, but the body is also not radically distinct from language, otherwise we would never be able to account for the body as a resistance to signification. Butler is trying to think of the materiality of the body as something experienced within language, and this actually sounds very much like the Lacanian understanding of the real as an impasse in signification (real2).

Only whenever Butler comes across the term real she systematically understands it to be a domain radically distinct from language and does not seem willing to acknowledge that there is another approach to the real in Lacan’s work, one where the real is just an “impasse in formalization.” 145

In Lacan’s work, the real is an “impasse in formalization” that can be handled in two different ways —

1. it can be covered up by creating a signified for it, or

2. it can be preserved in a particular type of signifying practice.

Badiou argued that Lacan’s theory embraced a covering up of, or a distancing of the subject from, the real, and I countered with the claim that Lacan actually embraced the alternative position in his theory of the act.

Butler’s notions of the body and passionate attachments to identity do not lead her to develop a theory of the act, which would be in part about renewing and rewriting our very attachment to identity itself. In other words, Butler does not seem to consider the possibility that certain signifying practices may be entirely outside the domain of identification. According to Butler, we remain committed to subjection, and thus identification, at the psychic or unconscious level. In fact, [for Butler] this is the very condition for us to be subjects at all. 146

pluth on Žižek badiou the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post first published May 14, 2009 at 12:04

The tendency in Lacan’s work to argue against identification is something about which Slavoj Žižek is keenly aware, but Zizek takes it too far by making any kind of signifying process apparently impossible for the subject of an act. As Žižek would have it, an act is a negation of any relation to signifiers whatsoever, and not just a negation of a specific configuration of signifiers, characterized by the Other as a guarantee of meaning and recogntion (the Other as subject-supposed-to-know).

If Lacan cannot theorize the positive consequences of an act without collapsing these consequences into merely another identification that seeks recognition from an established Other ( a repetition or reinstatement of some primordial law — the exclusion of the traumatic real), then Lacan’s theory is essentially conservative, and acts are basically similar to fundamental fantasies, despite their different use of signifiers, because both do the same thing with the real — they tame it (134).

The question that needs to be asked then is whether

Is there a theory of a “negative” signifying practice in Lacan’s work? Or

Are all signifying practices essentially conformist, necessarily seeking recognition from some big Other, thereby requiring us to say, with Žižek, that an act, and a subject, are only purely negative moments with no real consistency?

According to Pluth neither is the case. What Žižek does not consider is that an act must be A SIGNIFYING PROCESS, and must produce some sort of consistency, even if it is a consistency that is primarily NEGATIVE with respect to the Other as a “subject-supposed-to-know,” a consistency that can be called “NEGATIVE” because it brings an impasse into the Other (134).

ACCORDING TO LACAN ONE OF THE CONDITIONS FOR AN ACT IS THAT IT MUST TRANSFORM THE SUBJECT. (135)

… saying “no” is not enough for a transformation of the subject to come about. … for a transformation to occur, some kind of further signifying production would be necessary. Such an idea is worked out quite well in Badiou’s Théorie du sujet, as well as in his later work, Saint Paul, a work that plays a central role in Žižek’s critique of Badiou.

In these works Badiou shows us how an act does more than say “no” even though saying “no” is a crucial element of any act. As Badiou describes it, an act articulates a “no … but” (1997, 67-68).

In his reading of Paul’s letters, Badiou looks at how Paul effectively managed to operate a negation of the world of Roman law by profering new signifiers. Referring to St. Paul’s famous phrase, “You are no longer under the law, but under grace,”

If we conceive of an act in terms of a “no … but” structure, then it is easier to account for how an act would transform a subject. The transformation occurs not so much through the negation produced by an act but by the articulation of something else —by the production of a new signifier that negates. According to Badiou’s argument, this new signifier in Paul’s works is “grace,” a signifier that implied an entirely different subject-position from the ones recognized by the “Roman Other.”

In fact, maybe the negation can only be sustained as a negation if it is supplemented by a “but” supporting an alternative signifying practice. This is the point that needs to be retained, and it is a point made by both Badiou and Lacan (136).

Again, this reading of an act illustrates how a subject’s relation to signifiers is not always about identification. For there to be an identification, one has to add the further idea of an Other capable of bestowing recognition. If this idea is excluded from Badiou’s theory of the subject, as well as from Lacan’s theory of the subject in an act, then what we find in both is a subject produced by a signifying practice, a subject “attached” to signifiers, without this attachment involving an identification, or what Žižek called a, “subjectivization.” This is because the signifiers used rule out any recognition by the Other and do not depend upon a consistent Other for their meaning and validity. They are rather like puns, challenging the code that organizes a particular, suppsedly consistent Other —an Other who does not desire but is a subject-supposed-to-know.

pluth object a the act

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

By keeping object a separate from the ideal ego, the analyst emphasizes the originally separating role of object a itself. I take this to mean that another dimension of object a is brought to the fore — not its dimension as something that the Other is supposed to desire, and that I must therefore desire or identify myself with in order to get recognized by the Other. Rather what we see here is the dimension of object a as the Other’s desire as such, in its very inscrutability. This means that the object a refers one to the originally inscrutable and eventlike nature of the Other’s desire.

A subject can perhaps only be separated from its identity, from its ego-ideal, as well as from object a as something that is desired by the Other, when the eventlike nature of the Other’s desire is recalled. This shows that the other aspect of object a, it’s imaginary aspect as an object that the Other desires, is an invention. When the object a as the Other’s desire as such is recalled, the ego ideal loses its ground. The plane of identification would then be crossed. The subject would no longer have any motivation to identify with the analyst or with any particular signifier (131).

What crossing the plane of identification, traversing the fantasy, or an act amounts to is a return to an original position, one in which a subject is first subjected to a signifier. Does this not also mean to the moment at which a subject is first produced by a signifier?

WE KNOW THAT AN ACT IS SUPPOSED TO TRANSFORM AND ALSO RECREATE A SUBJECT.

There is a fundamental difference between fantasy and act, and what happens during an act is perhaps not simply the continuation of a fantasy structure. … An act entails an entirely different relation to the Other’s desire, and that, as a result, the relation to the Other entailed in an act is such that one cannot speak about an identification occurring in it (132).

In an act, there is a relation to the Other’s desire that does not consist of identifying with what that desire is supposed to be for — a quest for the signified of that desire. Rather, the signifying impasse characteristic of the Other’s desire is preserved and handled in a new way in an act, instead of being merely avoided or covered up, which is what an identification does, and this would be the “real” dimension of an act the way in which the real “excedes” in an act, as Badiou would put it.

If identification can still be spoken of here, then what we have is not an identification with a particular signifier that functions as an object of the Other’s desire but an “identification” with desire as such. The end of analysis can then be seen not as a mere repetition of the subject’s origin, but a repetition that recreates, bringing about a new way for the subject to be in relation to signifiers, the Other, and the real.

A distinction needs to be made between:

the Other as a site that can function to guarantee meanings and grant recognitions and
the Other’s desire, which ruins any such site.

pluth the act the other

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published May 13, 2009 at 13:30

The subject associated with Lacan’s theory of the act is a subject that is negative yet nevertheless consists in some way. It consists in a sustained signifying activity or process that is still not like the signifying practice that characterizes the subject-as-meaning. Žižek is right to see the Lacanian subject in negative terms, but the subject in an act is negative with respect to a particular configuration of the Other, to the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know. In this way it makes sense to speak of the subject in terms of a negative or destructive consistency or process (116).

An act does not make any demand on the Other, and is thus not about getting recognition from the Other.
Acts then, are ways of using signifiers in which identification is not at stake at all.

The problem with Žižek’s interpretation is that he does not allow for the subject of an act to consist of anything more than a “no!” — ultimately a “no” to signifiers as such. This makes the subject in Lacanian theory out to be more negative than it is (117).

The subject of an act is a product of a particular type of signifying process … a process that is not simply saying “no” to something, but a more nuanced “no … but.” (117)

The Other in Lacan’s later theory is not just the field of any signifying practice whatsoever but is a name for a particular organization within which some signifying practices are recognized as legitimate and others are not. This can be thought of as the Other who is a “subject-supposed-to-know.” An act’s use of signifiers, which is punlike insofar as the signifiers used are not immediately recognicable and able to be situated in the linguistic code, is not oriented toward obtaining recognition by the Other.

An act creates new signifiers and new significations, ones that do not involve getting recognized by the Other. But since acts, like puns, are not entirely nonsensical either, and since they are using signifiers and creating sense, something of the Other is used in them, without that Other being posited as a subject-supposed-to-know. This is the point that is overlooked in Badiou’s reading of Lacan. The very insistent or “ex-ceding” real that Badiou wishes to see taken into account in, and included in, a theory of the subject is present in Lacan’s theory of the act —precisely in the form of the creation of new signifiers, which is not simply a symbolic activity but includes the real in the symbolic (in the kind of exceeding Badiou is after, I believe) insofar as it brings about a signifying “tension.” (128)