{"id":7587,"date":"2011-04-17T13:42:41","date_gmt":"2011-04-17T18:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=7587"},"modified":"2015-07-19T12:43:03","modified_gmt":"2015-07-19T16:43:03","slug":"7587","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/04\/17\/7587\/","title":{"rendered":"calum on \u017d the act part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.”<\/a> The Letter<\/em> , 34, 2005, 1-28.<\/p>\n

J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960.<\/em> Trans. D. Porter. London, Routledge, (1986) 1992.
\nS. \u017di\u017eek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?<\/em> London, Verso, 2001.
\nJ. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan<\/em>. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis<\/em>. Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Penguin, (1973) 1977.
\nJ. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan<\/em>. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book II. The Ego in Freud\u2019s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55.<\/em> Trans. S. Tomaselli., New York, Norton, (1978) 1988.
\nJ. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan<\/em>. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960.<\/em> Trans. D. Porter. 1992. London, Routledge, 1986,<\/p>\n

The term \u2018act\u2019<\/span>, in Lacanian theory, is differentiated from the sense of \u201cmere behaviour\u201d by the location and persistence of desire<\/span>. This is to say that the act is necessarily a subjective undertaking and that it can be understood to be coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity and the responsibility entailed in such an assumption<\/span>,the Freudian Wo Es war, soll Ich werden<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Where behaviour would describe the response to needs, for example, the act <\/span>is defined by the impetus of desire. Desire<\/span> makes the subject act and as such the weight of responsibility for the act committed lies with the subject. Desire<\/span> cannot be treated as a given which would determine the subject\u2019s act without the subject\u2019s volition. The very subjectivity which would be taken to act cannot be described without the manifestation of desire<\/span> which would allow its constitution. But such desire must always be particular to the subject; it is the subject\u2019s desire. The act<\/span> would be the moment of subjective assumption in which the desire which is in one is manifest and thus brought into existence. The act in this sense should be understood to be coterminous with the emergence of desire<\/span>; the act is desire made manifest.<\/span> It is in this sense that the Lacanian act is always, necessarily, idiotic, in the etymological sense, wherein idios<\/em> would designate \u2018one\u2019s own\u2019.<\/p>\n

There is in the act<\/span>, says Lacan, always \u2018an element of structure, by the fact of concerning a real that is not self-evidently caught up in it\u2019. This would appear to correspond to the structure we encounter in Antigone<\/strong>. The laws of the gods \u2018speak\u2019 from beyond, that is, on the side of the Real<\/span>. Which is, of course, to say they do not in fact speak at all. They are manifest in Antigone<\/strong> and given expression through her act in such a way that \u2018it isn\u2019t a question of recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted\u2019<\/em>. In giving voice to the law of the gods, Antigone<\/strong> should be understood to have created and brought forth \u2018a new presence in the world\u2019<\/em>. She should, that is, be understood to have named her desire and, moreover, assumed herself as the cause of this desire<\/span>.<\/p>\n

For \u017di\u017eek, Antigone functions as the ethical example par excellence insofar as she is understood to \u2018exemplify the unconditional fidelity to the Otherness of the Thing that disrupts the entire social edifice\u2019.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Capitalising the \u2018O\u2019 of \u2018Other\u2019 in the \u2018Otherness of the Thing\u2019, \u017di\u017eek<\/strong> can be understood to be emphasising the Thing<\/span>, das Ding, as it relates to the field of the Symbolic. That is to say, das Ding<\/span> as it would represent the limits of the Symbolic field, das Ding<\/span> as indicative of the insistence of the lack in the Other as it is experienced by the subject. It is, as such, that das Ding<\/span> would be understood as (a name for) that which would disrupt \u2018the entire social edifice\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

The act, for \u017di\u017eek, describes the moment of suspension of the Symbolic, the recognition of the limits of the Symbolic. In such a moment of recognition it is not that the Other would somehow be suspended to be subsequently resolved as a moment of a dialectic or integrated into a subsequent schemata. The act<\/span>, for \u017di\u017eek, is not a moment of Aufhebung.<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rather, in the \u017di\u017eekian<\/strong> act<\/span>, one would assume the very location of the lack which persists in the Other<\/strong>:“it is not so much that, in the act, I \u2018sublate\u2019\/\u2018integrate\u2019 the Other; it is rather that, in the act<\/span>, I directly \u2018am\u2019 the Other-Thing.”<\/em><\/p>\n

For \u017di\u017eek, the ethical import of the act<\/span>, (and the act is for \u017di\u017eek the very definition of the ethical moment<\/strong>), is separated from any notion of responsibility for or towards the other<\/span>. His is not an ethics of responsibility but, rather, his understanding of ethics is as the momentary and, in the moment, absolute suspension of the Symbolic order. The ethical act<\/span>, for \u017di\u017eek, is neither a response to the other nor a response to the Other.<\/p>\n

The (ethical) act proper is precisely neither a response to the compassionate plea of my neighbourly semblant (the stuff of sentimental humanism), nor a response to the unfathomable Other\u2019s call.11<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek contrasts this notion of the \u2018ethical act\u2019 as assumption of the lack in the Other, as the assumption of the location of das Ding, with the Derridean notion of ethics as decision. A notion described by Critchley<\/strong> as follows:<\/p>\n

the political decision is made ex nihilo, and is not deduced or read off from a pre-given conception of justice or the moral law, as in Habermas, say, and yet it is not arbitrary. It is the demand provoked by the other\u2019s decision in me that calls forth political invention, that provokes me into inventing a norm and taking a decision. The singularity of the context in which the demand arises provokes an act of invention whose criterion is universal.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek perceives in this passage, and by extension, in the Derridean original, \u2018two levels of the decision\u2019.13 It is with this bifurcation of the decision that \u017di\u017eek takes issue.<\/strong> The decision, understood as the act<\/span>, would, for \u017di\u017eek, have to be such that the two moments of decision he perceives in Derrida\u2019s and Critchley\u2019s accounts would coincide. Here, Antigone is offered as the paramount example.11<\/p>\n

Is it not, rather, that her decision (to insist unconditionally on a proper funeral for her brother) is precisely an absolute decision in which the two dimensions of decision overlap?14<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek\u2019s point here is that separating the decision into two moments, into, that is, the \u2018decision to decide\u2019 and \u2018a concrete actual intervention\u2019, is to render the decision or the act<\/span> as non-absolute. That is, it is to render the act as less than an act<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The act<\/span>, for \u017di\u017eek, as we have seen, is situated in the moment of suspension of the Other, what he terms directly \u2018being\u2019 the \u2018Other-Thing\u2019,\u00a0 the assumption by the subject of the irrecuperable rent in the social edifice.<\/p>\n

To incorporate as a necessary aspect of the act<\/span> its reinscription in the Symbolic is, for \u017di\u017eek, to miss the radicality of the act<\/span>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The question which insists here is that, in divorcing the act<\/span> from any reinscription in the symbolic, is not one necessarily, from a Lacanian perspective at least, rendering the act as the impossibility of the ethical?<\/p>\n

That is to say, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s deployment of the ‘act’<\/span> appears closer to what Lacan designates as passage \u00e0 l\u2019acte, an action in which one takes flight from the Other, an action which would properly entail the, albeit momentary, dissolution of the subject and consequent impossibility of the ethical.<\/p>\n

Phrased otherwise, the act<\/span> so divorced from its reinscription is not party to a judgement which, in Lacan\u2019s understanding, would define the ethical;<\/p>\n

an ethics essentially consists in a judgement of our actions, with the proviso that it is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgement, even if it is only implicit. The presence of judgement in both sides is essential to the structure.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28. J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. D. Porter. London, Routledge, (1986) 1992. S. \u017di\u017eek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London, Verso, 2001. J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques … Continue reading “calum on \u017d the act part 1”<\/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":[38,79,106,41,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-ethics_real","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7587","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=7587"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7606,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7587\/revisions\/7606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}