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The Act
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{{Topp}}[[actacte]] {{Bottom}} ([[Fr]]Image:Kida_a. ''[[actegif |right|frame]]'')
=Jacques Lacan=
==Behavior==
An "[[act]]" is not mere "[[act|behavior]]" -- such as that of all '''[[nature|animals]]''' -- but a uniquely [[act|''human'' act]], "since to our [[knowledge]] there is no [[other]] [[act]] but the [[human]] one."<ref>{{S11}} p. 50</ref>
==ParapraxesAnalysand==Hence someone may well commit an In '''[[actpsychoanalytic]] which he claims was un[[intentiontreatment]]al, but which ''' the [[analysissubject]] reveals to be is faced with the expression '''[[ethical]] [[duty]]''' of an assuming '''[[responsibility]]''' even for the '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]s''' expressed in his '''[[action]]s'''.
He must recognize even apparently accidental '''[[Freudaction]]s''' as [[true]] called these [[act]]s "which express an [[intention]], albeit [[parapraxesunconscious]]," or "and assume this [[bungled actionsintention]]as his own."
== Ethics of Psychoanalysis Conclusion==The A '''[[ethicsbungled action]] ''' is, as has been stated, successful from the point of view of [[psychoanalysis]] enjoin the [[analyst]] to assume [[responsibility]] for his or her [[act]]s (i.e. interventions in the [[treatment]]). The [[analyst]] must be guided (in these interventions) by an appropriate [[desire]], which [[Lacan]] calls the [[desire of the analystunconscious]].
It follows that, when it is fully and [[conscious]]ly assumed, "[[suicide]] is the only completely successful act."<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]] dedicates a year of his . ''[[seminarTelevision|Télévision]]'', [[Paris] ]: Seuil, 1973. ''[[Television|Television: A Challenge to discussing further the nature of the Psychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed. [[act|psychoanalytic actJoan Copjec]], trans.<ref>LacanDenis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton, 19671990]. p.66-87</ref>
An authentic Act follows the paradoxical logic of Hegel’s “[[negation]] of negation” and Lacan’s [[formula]] of [[feminine]] [[sexuation]]; that is, an Act does not pose itself against a [[master]]-[[signifier]] or work in opposition to a symbolic order because it [[exists]] totally within it, yet once decided, it reveals how this order is [[not-all]], incomplete; it opens up the [[void]] for which [[the Symbolic]] stands in. In order to illustrate the Act as a feminine gesture, Žižek refers to Sophocles’ [[Antigone]] and offers two ways to conceive of her refusal to Creon to bury her brother without a proper funeral. Th e first [[reading]] follows Lacan’s [[position]] in ''[[Seminar VII|Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis]]'', which sees Antigone’s Act as authentic because she redefines the Good itself outside of Creon’s Law. Žižek’s alternative reading, however, locates Antigone’s Act from within the logic of [[death drivemasculine]] ethics, for when she lists the things she is thus closely connected sacrificing (a [[future]] life with a husband and children of her own) she does not totally [[identify]] with her Cause, but, instead, presents herself as the exception; she invokes the [[Thing]] for which her sacrifice is made, her future family; and thus becomes a [[sublime]] [[figure]] that draws our pity (''FA'': 154). Žižek contrasts Antigone to two other [[ethics|ethical domainwomen]] in literature who, instead of sacrificing their Cause for something, sacrifice their Cause in the [[Lacanname]]of [[nothing]]: Medea of Greek [[tragedy]] and her contemporary [[counterpart]], Sethe in Toni Morison’s ''Beloved''s thought. Both of these [[figures]] commit an authentic Act when they [[murder]] their children, the former to destroy her husband Jason’s precious Thing, and the latter to save her children from slavery (FA: 153).
In ''[[The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters|Indivisible Remainder]]'' and ''[[The Abyss of Freedom|Abyss of Freedom]]'' Žižek reads this feminine logic of the not-all through Schelling’s [[materialist]] philosophy (as found in his [[three]] Weltalter drafts) to consider the primordial Act of beginning. Drawing from Schelling’s [[metaphysics]] of “contraction and expansion”, “form and ground” and “the rotary motion of the drives”, Žižek posits that the Act and the master-signifier are logically interconnected: while the Act serves to break through a [[limit]], deadlock or crack in the Symbolic, simultaneously the symbolic order unfolds only to “normalize” the Act. Th us the Act and the master-signifier are not two distinct phenomena, but rather two sides of the same entity. Th ere is, according to Žižek, no first primordial Act that serves as a [[temporal]] beginning; rather, there is an ongoing cycle of the master-signifier and the Act in [[logical]], as distinct from causal, sequence (''IR'': 155–61). The rotary motion of the [[drives]] opens onto desire; the movement from [[the Real]] to the Symbolic occurs in a series of doublings and re-markings. Again, the Act serves to reveal how the symbolic order is already split from within, and this radicalizes the Other, reconfiguring its founding coordinates.
In his treatment of the Act Žižek eventually follows Lacan’s move away from Antigone’s ethics towards the more silent but no less [[traumatic]] Act illustrated by [[Paul]] Claudel’s character Sygne de Coûfontaine in ''The Hostage''. Whereas Antigone maintained her desire and accepted her Fate by way of protesting against an [[external]] [[prohibition]] (Creon’s Law), Sygne’s Act of taking the bullet meant for her despised husband was rather an Act done according to “the innermost freedom of her being” (''LN'': 81). Th at is, hers is not a tragically sublime Act done for the sake of a higher Cause, but rather a non-response, which short-circuits the dimensions of form and [[content]], meaning and being. When her husband asks his dying wife why she saved him, Sygne does not reply, but rather her [[body]] responds with a tic, a grimace, which signals not a [[sign]] of [[love]], but rather the refusal of an explanation. Sygne’s “No”, according to Žižek, “is not a ‘No’ to a [[particular]] content … but a ‘No as such’, the form-of-No which is in itself the [[whole]] content, behind which there is nothing”. Synge’s tic is thus “ex-timate”, in the Lacanian sense, for it embodies a little piece of the Real, “the excremental [[remainder]] of a disgusting ‘pathological’ tic that sticks out of the symbolic form” (''PV'': 83).
In his later works (''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', ''[[Living in the End Times]]'' and ''[[Less Than Nothing]]''), Žižek combines Hegel’s “positing the presuppositions” together with Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s conception of “enlightened catastrophism” (''LN'': 982) to propose how an Act would present us with the (im)possibility of retroactively changing the [[past]] (of our future). His logic is as follows: our situation (our [[physical]] survival, for example) is doomed; we are already lost, and the only way to save ourselves is to act as if the apocalypse has already happened. That is, to get beyond our fetishistic disavowal and the [[madness]] of [[global]] capitalism requires that we re-orient ourselves not to death, but to the death-drive (requiring us to use the Real to reconfigure our symbolic order). By positing that the worst has happened, we would be free to (retroactively) create the conditions for a new order, to choose a path not taken, a prior cause given up as lost. We [[repeat]] not the same event in another variation, but rather bring into being (through [[repetition]], in the sense of [[repeating]] the cycle of abyssal Act and master-signifier) something new. Every ethical edifice, as Žižek argues, is grounded in an abyssal Act, and it is psychoanalysis that “confronts us with the zero-level of politics, a pre-political ‘transcendental’ condition of the possibility of politics”, which is the gap that opens the space for the political Act (''LN'': 963). Real change must coincide with our acceptance that there is no Other; and with this formal opening, actual freedom could erupt from an authentic political Act that would in turn change the very field of possibility itself. What Žižek’s theorizing of the Act offers us is a way to conceive of the [[impossible]] as possible, to see that reality is incomplete and split from within, that there is another world to [[construct]], even if we cannot grasp it in our present moment.
==See Also=={{See}}||* [[Analyst]]* [[Consciousness]]* [[Death drive]]||* [[Desire]]* [[Desire of the analyst]]* [Category:Psychoanalysis[End of analysis]]||* [[Ethics]]* [[Inherent transgression]]* [[Law]]||* [[Schelling]]* [[Subject]]* [[Symbolic]]||* [[Treatment]]* [[Category:Jacques LacanUnconscious]]{{Also}}{{OK}}[[Category:DictionaryPractice]][[Category:ConceptsTreatment]][[Category:TermsZizek Dictionary]]__FORCETOC__<references />