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I want to address the problem of identification by confronting the predominant deconstructionist doxa according to which the main problem with Lacanian theory - which allegedly also limits its political use - is that Lacan elevates the symbolic into a kind of transcendental position of a fixed normative order exempted from the transformative process of historical practice. According to this critique, the symbolic fixes in advance the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality and reduces all resistance to it to imaginary misrecognition. And if one does effectively break up the chains of the symbolic order, one is expelled into the void of psychosis. Since the main proponent of this criticism is Judith Butler, let me focus on her latest book, <i>The Psychic Life of Power</i>.[1]<br><br>

Butler's, as well as Lacan's, starting point is the old Leftist one -- how is it possible not only to resist effectively, but also to undermine and/or displace the existing socio-symbolic network - the Lacanian "big Other" - which predetermines the only space within which the subject can exist. Significantly, Butler identifies "subject" with the symbolic position occupied within this space, while she reserves the term "psyche" for the larger unity encompassing that in the individual which resists being included in the symbolic space.[2] Butler, of course, is well aware that the site of this resistance cannot be simply and directly identified as the unconscious; the existing order of Power is also supported by unconscious "passionate attachments," attachments publicly non-acknowledged by the subject:

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If the unconscious escapes from a given normative injunction, to what other injunction does it form an attachment? What makes us think that the unconscious is any less structured by the power relations that pervade cultural signifiers than is the language of the subject? If we find an attachment to subjection at the level of the unconscious, what kind of resistance is to be wrought from that? (88).

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The exemplary case of the unconscious "passionate attachments" which sustain Power is precisely the inherent reflective eroticization of the regulatory power-mechanisms and procedures themselves. In the performance of an obsessional ritual, one designated to keep at bay the illicit temptation, the ritual itself becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction. It is thus the "reflexivity" involved in the relationship between regulatory power and sexuality, the way the repressive regulatory procedures themselves get libidinally invested, that functions as a source of libidinal satisfaction. And it is this radical masochistic reflective turn which remains unaccounted for in the standard notion of the "internalization" of social norms into psychic prohibitions.

Is this not the whole point of Lacan's reading of Antigone? Antigone effectively puts at risk her entire social existence, defying the socio-symbolic power of the city embodied in the rule of Creon, thereby "falling into some kind of death" - i.e., sustaining symbolic death, the exclusion from the socio-symbolic space. For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of such a momentary "suspension of the big Other," of the socio-symbolic network which guarantees the subject's identity; an authentic act occurs only when a subject risks a gesture which is no longer "covered up" by the big Other. For that reason, Lacan pursues all possible versions of this entering the domain "between the two deaths," not only citing Antigone after her expulsion, but also Oedipus at Colonus, King Lear, Poe's Mr. Valdemar, and so on. Up to Sygne from Claudel's Coufontaine-trilogy, their common predicament is that they all found themselves in this domain of the undead, "beyond death and life," in which the causality of the symbolic fate is suspended. Butler, in the above-quoted passage, too quickly conflates this act in its radical dimension with the performative reconfiguration of one's symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements. The two are not the same. In other words, one should maintain the crucial distinction between mere "performative reconfiguration," a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, fights against it an internal guerilla battle of turning against the hegemonic field its own terms, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity - in Foucault's terms, the passage from one episteme to another.<br><br>

Is it possible to undermine also the most fundamental level of subjection, what Butler calls "passionate attachments"? The Lacanian name for the primordial passionate attachments on which the very consistency of the subject's being hinges is, of course, fundamental fantasy. The "attachment to subjectivation" constitutive of the subject is thus none other than the primordial "masochist" scene in which the subject "makes/sees himself suffer," that is, assumes la doleur d' exister and thus provides the minimum of support to his being - like Freud's primordially repressed middle term "Father is beating me" in the essay "A Child is Being Beaten." This fundamental fantasy is thoroughly "inter-passive." In it, a scene of passive suffering, or subjection, is staged which simultaneously sustains and threatens the subject's being - only insofar, that is, as being remains foreclosed, primordially repressed. From this perspective, a new approach opens up to the recent artistic practices of sado-masochistic performance. In such practices, isn't this very foreclosure ultimately undone? In other words, what if the open assuming/staging of the fantasmatic scene of primordial "passionate attachment" is far more subversive than the dialectic rearticulation and/or displacement of this scene?<br><br>

So, back to Butler - the crucial question concerns the philosophical status of this original and constitutive <i>Hilflosigkeit</i>. Is this <i>Hilflosigkeit</i> not another name for the gap of the primordial dis-attachment which triggers the need for the fantasmatic primordial "passionate attachment"? In other words, what if we turn around the perspective and conceive of the obstacle which prevents the infans fully to fit into its environs - this original "out-of-joint" state - in its positive aspect, as another name for the very abyss of freedom, for that gesture of "disconnecting" that liberates a subject from its direct immersion into its environs? Or, to put it in yet another way - true, the subject is as it were "blackmailed" into passively submitting to some form of the primordial "passionate attachment," since, outside of it, he simply does not exist. This non-existence is not directly the absence of existence, however, but a certain gap or void in the order of being which "is" the subject itself. The need for "passionate attachment" to provide a minimum of being implies that the subject qua "abstract negativity," qua the primordial gesture of dis-attachment from its environs, is already here. Fantasy is thus a defense-formation against the primordial abyss if dis-attachment that "is" the subject itself. At this precise point, then, Butler should be supplemented - the emergence of the subject and subjection in the sense of the "passionate attachment," i.e. submission to some figure of the Other, are not strictly equivalent, since, for the "passionate attachment" to take place, the gap which "is" the subject must already be here. Only if this gap is already here, can we account for how it is possible for the subject to escape the hold of the fundamental fantasy.[5]<br><br>

So what is a proper act? Jacques-Alain Miller [6] proposes as the definition of "a true woman" a certain radical act - the act of taking from man, her partner, of obliterating, destroying even, that which is "in him more than himself," that which "means everything to him" and to which he holds more than his own life, the precious agalma round which his life turns. The exemplary figure of such an act in literature is that of Medea who, upon learning that Jason, her husband, plans to abandon her for a younger woman, kills their two young children, her husband's most precious possessions. It is in this horrible act of destroying that which matters most to her husband that she acts as une vraie femme, as Lacan put it.[7]<br><br>

Is this gesture of intentionally and brutally dropping the spectral aura of the traditional <i>femme fatale</i> not another version of the act of une vraie femme? Is not the object which is to her partner "more than himself," the treasure around which his life turns, the <i>femme fatale</i> herself? By brutally destroying the spectral aura of "feminine mystery," by acting as a cold manipulating subject interested only in raw sex, reducing her partner to a partial object, the appendix to - and the bearer of - his penis, does she not also violently destroy what is "for him more than himself"? The enigma of this new <i>femme fatale</i> is that although, in contrast to the classic <i>femme fatale</i>, she is totally transparent, openly assuming the role of a calculating bitch, the perfect embodiment of what Baudrillard called the "transparency of Evil," her enigma persists. Here we encounter the paradox already discerned by Hegel - sometimes, total self-exposure and self-transparency, i.e. the awareness that there is no hidden content, makes the subject even more enigmatic. Sometimes, being totally outspoken is the most effective and cunning way of deceiving the Other. For that reason, the neo-noir <i>femme fatale</i> continues to exert her irresistible seductive power on her poor partner. Her strategy is the one of deceiving him by openly telling the truth. The male partner is unable to accept this, and so, he desperately clings to the conviction that, behind the cold manipulative surface, there must be a heart of gold to be saved, a person of warm human feeling, and that her cold manipulative approach is just a kind of defensive strategy. So, in the vein of Freud's well-known Jewish joke "Why are you telling me that you are going to Lemberg, when you are actually going to Lemberg?" the basic implicit reproach of the sucker-partner to the new <i>femme fatale</i> could be formulated as "Why do you act if you are just a cold manipulative bitch, when you are really just a cold manipulative bitch?"<br><br>

This allows us further to specify the Lacanian notion of an authentic act. Act is to be opposed to mere activity. Activity relies on some fantasmatic support, while the authentic act involves disturbing - "traversing" - the fantasy. In this precise sense, act is for Lacan on the side of the object qua real as opposed to signifier - to "speech act." We can only perform speech acts insofar as we have accepted the fundamental alienation in the symbolic order and the fantasmatic support necessary for the functioning of this order, while the act as real is an event which occurs ex nihilo, without any fantasmatic support. As such, act as object is also to be opposed to the subject, at least in the standard Lacanian sense of the "alienated" divided subject. The correlate to the act is a divided subject, but not in the sense that because of that division act is always failed or displaced. On the contrary, act as traumatic tuche is that which divides the subject who cannot ever subjectivize this act, assume it as "his own," posit himself as its author-agent. The authentic act that I accomplish is always by definition a foreign body, an intruder which simultaneously attracts/fascinates and also repels me, so that, if and when I come too close to it, this leads to my aphanisis, self-erasure. If there is a subject to the act, it is not the subject of subjectivization, of integrating the act into the universe of symbolic integration and recognition, of assuming the act as "my own," but rather it is an uncanny "acephalous" subject through which the act takes place as that which is "in him more than himself." Act thus designates the level at which the fundamental divisions and displacements usually associated with the "Lacanian subject" [11] are momentarily suspended. In the act, the subject, as Lacan puts it, posits itself as its own cause and is no longer determined by the decentered object-cause. Thus if we subtract from it its scenic imagery, its fascination with the divine majesty, and reduce it to the essential, Kant's well-known description of how a direct insight into the noumenal God as the Thing in itself would deprive us of our freedom and turn us into lifeless puppets paradoxically fits perfectly the description of the ethical act.[12] This act is precisely something which unexpectedly "just occurs." It is an occurrence which most surprises its agent itself.[13] The paradox is that in an authentic act, the highest freedom coincides with the utmost passivity, with a reduction to a lifeless automaton who just blindly performs its gestures. The problematic of act thus compels us to accept the radical shift of perspective involved in the modern notion of finitude. What is so difficult to accept is not the fact that the true act - in which noumenal and phenomenal dimensions coincide - is forever out of our reach. The true trauma resides in the opposite awareness that there are acts, that they do occur and that we have to come to terms with them.<br><br>

Consequently, this Lacanian notion of act also enables us to break with the deconstructionist ethics of the irreducible finitude, of how our situation is always that of a displaced being, caught in a constitutive lack, so that all we can do is to assume heroically this lack, to assume heroically the fact that our situation is that of being thrown into an impenetrable finite context. The corollary of this ethics, of course, is that the ultimate source of totalitarian and other catastrophes is man's presumption that he can overcome this condition of finitude, lack and displacement, and "act like God," in a total transparency, surpassing his constitutive division. Lacan's answer to this is that absolute/unconditional acts do occur, but not in the idealist guise of a self-transparent gesture performed by a subject with a pure will who fully intends them. They occur, on the contrary, as a totally unpredictable tuche, a miraculous event which shatters our lives. To put it in somewhat pathetic terms, this is how the "divine" dimension is present in our lives, and the different modalities of ethical betrayal relate precisely to the different ways of betraying the act-event. The true source of evil is not a finite mortal man who acts like God, but a man who disavows that divine miracles occur and reduces himself to just another finite mortal being.[15]<br><br>

1. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). Numbers in parentheses refer to the pages of this book.<br>