{"id":3681,"date":"2009-08-24T15:49:46","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T20:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=3681"},"modified":"2009-10-30T19:13:45","modified_gmt":"2009-10-30T23:13:45","slug":"zizek-the-act-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/08\/24\/zizek-the-act-2\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017di\u017eek the act"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle<\/span>. New York: Verso, 2004.<\/p>\n

‘Acts’ in Lacan’s sense … are ‘impossible’ not in the sense of ‘it is impossible that they might happen’, but in the sense of the impossible that did happen<\/em>. This<\/em> is why Antigone was of interest to me: her act is not a strategic intervention which maintains the gap towards the impossible Void; rather, it tends to enact the impossible ‘absolutely’.\u00a0 I am well aware of the ‘lure’ of such an act — but I claim that, in Lacan’s later versions of the act, this moment of ‘madness’ beyond strategic intervention remains.\u00a0 In this precise sense, the notion of the act not only does not contradict the ‘lack in the “other’ which, according to Stavrakakis, I overlook — it directly presupposes it: it is only through an act that I effectively assume the big Other’s nonexistence, that is, I enact the impossible: namely, what appears as impossible within the co-ordinates of the existing socio-symbolic order (80).<\/p>\n

There are (also) political acts, for politics cannot be reduced to the level of strategic-pragmatic interventions.\u00a0 In a radical political act, the opposition between ‘crazy’ destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breaks down — which is why it is theoretically and politically wrong to oppose strategic political acts, risky as they may be, to radical ‘suicidal’ gestures\u00a0 \u00e1 la<\/em> Antigone: gestures of pure self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal. The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to put everything at stake for it, including our lives; but, more precisely, that only such an ‘impossilble’ gesture of pure expenditure can change the very co-ordinates of what is strategically possible within a historical constellation. <\/em>This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention in the existing order, nor its ‘crazy’ destructive negation<\/em>; an act is an ‘excessive’, transstrategic intervention which redefines the rules and contours of the existing order (80-81).<\/p>\n

… the utopia of a harmonious society is a kind of fantasy which conceals the structural ‘lack in the Other’ (irreducible social antagonism), and in so far as the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to traverse the fantasy — that is to say, to make the analysand accept the nonexistence of the big Other — is the radical democratic politics whose premises is that ‘society doesn’t exist’ (Laclau) not eo ipso<\/em> a post-fantasmatic politics? (108-109) … There is a whole series of problems with this line (Stavrakakis and Laclau) of reasoning.\u00a0 First, in its rapid rejection of utopia, it leaves out of the picture the main utopia of today, which is the utopia of capitalism itself … (109)<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 Note to Stavrakakis and his article on fantasy and the EU:<\/p>\n

The democratic subject, which emerges through a violent abstraction from all its particular roots and determinations, is the Lacanian barred subject, $, which is as such foreign to — incompatible with — enjoyment (111).<\/p>\n

So when Laclau and Mouffe complain that only the Right has the requisite passion, is able to propose a new mobilizing Imaginary, while the Left merely administers, what they fail to see is the structural necessity of what they perceive as a mere tactical weakness of the Left.<\/strong> … The only passion is the rightist defence of Europe — al the leftist attempts to infuse the notion of united Europe with political passion (like the Habermas-Derrida initiative) fail to gain momentum.\u00a0 The reason for this failure is precisely the absence of the ‘critique of political economy’: the only way to account for the shifts described by Stavrakakis (the recent crisis of democracy, etc.) is to relate them to what goes on in contemporary capitalism.<\/p>\n

The fundamentalist’ attachment to jouissance <\/em>is the obverse, the fantasmatic supplement, of democracy itself (113).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. New York: Verso, 2004. ‘Acts’ in Lacan’s sense … are ‘impossible’ not in the sense of ‘it is impossible that they might happen’, but in the sense of the impossible that did happen. This is why Antigone was of interest to me: her act is not a strategic intervention … Continue reading “\u017di\u017eek the act”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,106,41,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-subjectivity","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3681","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=3681"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4389,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3681\/revisions\/4389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}