{"id":2017,"date":"2009-02-20T17:51:23","date_gmt":"2009-02-20T22:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=2017"},"modified":"2009-11-17T14:11:28","modified_gmt":"2009-11-17T18:11:28","slug":"zizek-the-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/02\/20\/zizek-the-act\/","title":{"rendered":"zizek the act"},"content":{"rendered":"

An act does not simply occur within<\/em> the given horizon of what appears to be ‘possible’ \u2014 it redefines the very contours of what is possible (an act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility). So when we are reproached by an opponent for doing something unacceptable, an act occurs when we no longer defend ourselves by accepting the underlying premiss that we hitherto shared with the opponent; in contrast, we fully accept the reproach, changing the very terrain that made it unacceptable \u2014 an act occurs when our answer to the reproach is ‘Yes, that<\/em> is precisely what I am doing!’ (121).<\/p>\n

… far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler: what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’ aims at is not a mere displacement\/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring ‘principle’ of the existing symbolic order<\/strong>.\u00a0 Or \u2014 to put it in more psychoanalytic terms \u2014 the Lacanian act, in its dimension of ‘traversing the fundamental fantasy’<\/strong> aims radically to disturb the very ‘passionate attachment’ that forms, for Butler, the ultimately inelcutable background of the process of resignification (220).<\/p>\n

it is the very focus on the notion of Real as impossible that reveals the ultimate contingency, fragilty (and thus changeability) of every symbolic constellation that pretends to serve as the a priori horizon of the process of symbolization.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So lacan’s point in unearthing the ‘ahistorical’ limit of historicization\/redignification is thus not that we have to accept this limit in a resigned way, but that every historical figuration of this limit is itself contingent and, as such, susceptible to a radical overhaul.<\/p>\n

… with all the talk about Lacan’s clinging to an ahistorical bar, and so on, it is Butler herself who, on a more radical level, is not historicist enough: it is Butler who limits the subjet’s intervention to multiple resignifications\/displacements of the basic ‘passionate attachment’, which therefore persists at the very limit\/condition of subjectivity. <\/strong>Consequently, I am tempted to supplement <\/em>Butler’s series in her rhetorical question quoted above: ‘How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias, reversals, and performative displacements or resignifications …? <\/strong>(221)<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what appears to be ‘possible’ \u2014 it redefines the very contours of what is possible (an act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility). … Continue reading “zizek the act”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,106,41,20],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-2017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-thedebate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2017"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4525,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions\/4525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}