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So what is a proper act? Jacques-Alain Miller<ref>See Jacques-Alain Miller, "Des Semblants dans la Relation Entre les Sexes," ''La Cause Freudianne'' 36 (1997): 7-15.</ref> 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.<ref>Lacan's other example is that of Andre Gide's wife who, after his death, burned all his love letters to her, considered by him his most precious possession.</ref>
Would it not be possible, along these lines, also to interpret the unique figure of the <i>femme fatale</i> in the new noir of the 90s, as exemplified by Linda Fiorentino in John Dahl's <i>The Last Seduction</i>? In contrast to the classic noir <i>femme fatale</i> of the 40s, who remains an elusive spectral presence, the new <i>femme fatale</i> is characterized by direct, outspoken sexual aggressivity, verbal and physical, by direct self-commodification and self-manipulation. She has the "mind of a pimp in the body of a whore." Two dialogues are here indicative - the classic exchange of double entendres about a "speed limit" which finishes the first encounter of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred McMurray in Billy Wilder's <i>Double Indemnity</i>, and the first encounter of Linda Fiorentino with her partner in <i>The Last Seduction</i>. In the latter, Fiorentino directly opens up his fly, reaches into it and inspects his merchandise before accepting him as a lover: "I never buy anything sight unseen," she says, and later rejects any "warm human contact" with him.[8] <ref>I rely here on Kate Stables, British Film Institute, London.</ref> How does this brutal "self-commodification," this reduction of herself and her male partner to an object to be satisfied and exploited, affect the allegedly "subversive" status of the <i>femme fatale</i> with regard to the paternal Law of speech?
According to standard feminist cinema theory, in the classical noir, the <i>femme fatale</i> is punished at the level of the explicit narrative line. She is destroyed for being assertive and undermining the male patriarchal dominance and for presenting a threat to it. Although she is destroyed or domesticated, her image survives her physical destruction as the element which effectively dominates the scene. The subversive character of the noir films is exhibited in the way the texture of the film belies and subverts its explicit narrative line. In contrast to this classic noir, the neo-noir of the 80s and 90s, from Kasdan's <i>Body Heat</i> to <i>The Last Seduction</i>, at the level of explicit narrative, openly allows the <i>femme fatale</i> to triumph, to reduce her partner to a sucker condemned to death - she survives rich and alone over his dead body. She does not survive as a spectral "undead" threat which libidinally dominates the scene even after her physical and social destruction. She triumphs directly, in social reality itself. How does this affect the subversive edge of the <i>femme fatale</i> figure? Does the fact that her triumph is real not undermine her much stronger spectral/fantasmatic triumph, so that, instead of a spectral all-powerful threat, indestructible in her very physical destruction, she turns out to be just a vulgar, cold, manipulative "bitch" deprived of any aura?
So, if we return for a brief moment to <i>The Last Seduction</i>, Linda Fiorentino's gesture nevertheless does not quite fit the description of a true ethical act, insofar as she is presented as a perfect demoniac being, as the subject with a diabolical will who is perfectly aware of what she is doing; she fully subjectivizes her acts, insofar as her Will is at the level of her wicked deeds. As such, she remains a male fantasy: the fantasy of encountering a perfect subject in the guise of the absolutely corrupted woman who fully knows and wills what she is doing.
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.<ref>In a further elaboration, one should thus reread Lacan's matrix of the four discourses as three modes of coming to terms with the trauma of the analytic act. The master's semblance resides in the fact that he pretends to nominate and thus directly translate into the symbolic fidelity the dimension of the act. That is, the defining feature of the Master's gesture is to change the act into a new master-signifier. In contrast to the master, the hysteric maintains the ambiguous attitude of division towards the act, insisting on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of its symbolization. In contrast to both of them, the perverse agent of the university discourse disavows that the re there was the event of an act in the first place. By means of the chain of knowledge, he wants to reduce the consequences of the act to just another thing which can be explained away as part of the normal run of things.</ref>
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