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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 [[treatmentunconscious]]).
The [[Lacanact]] expresses completely an [[intention]] which is both [[conscious]] dedicates a year of his and [[seminarunconscious]] to discussing further , the nature [[conscious]] assumption of the '''[[act|psychoanalytic actunconscious]].<ref>[[Lacan|Lacandeath drive]]''' (on the other hand, Jacquesa sudden impulsive suicide attempt is not a true [[act]]. , but probably a '''[[Seminar XI|Le Séminaire. Livre XV. L'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68passage to the act]]'''). Unpublished.</ref>
The '''[[death drive]]''' is thus closely connected with the [[ethics|ethical domain]] in [[Lacan]]'s [[thought]]. =In the work of Slavoj Žižek =Conclusion==The Act (also referred to as an ethical Act or authentic Act) is a foundational concept in Žižek’s [[philosophy]] and serves as the key to [[understanding]] the [[political]] and ethical dimensions of his thought. Th e term first appears in ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', where Žižek distinguishes pragmatic-political [[acts]] from the more [[formal]] “act before act”, by which the subject “[[structures]] his [[perception]] of the [[world]] in advance in a way that opens the [[space]] for his intervention”, and which allows him [[retroactively]] to posit the very presuppositions of his [[activity]] (''SO'': 247). It is this [[Hegelian]] concept of “positing the presuppositions” that Žižek revisits throughout his oeuvre, combining it with [[Lacanian]] psychoanalysis and the philosophy of [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling]] to conceive of the Act within a formal [[structure]] of [[paradox]]. “An act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic [[universe]], appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its [[conditions]] so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility” (''CHU'': 121). An Act short-circuits the realms of [[contingency]] and [[necessity]], immanence and transcendence, [[politics]] and ethics and [[cause]] and effect, for it is made without strategic calculations or consideration of outcomes; it opens a [[moment]] when absolute [[freedom]] coincides with an unconditional necessity, a moment when the subject is suspended between its [[being]] and [[meaning]]. Throughout his [[work]] Žižek offers countless examples from [[film]], [[literature]], [[religion]], psychoanalysis and politics to illustrate the Act as this formal opening that changes (retroactively) the [[reality]] from which it arose. Antigone’s [[refusal]] to bury her brother without a proper funeral retroactively provided an opening to posit the [[Good]] [[outside]] the limits of Creon’s law; the [[Christian]] God sacrificed his only son on the cross, which opened the space for [[belief]]; Lacan’s [[dissolution]] of his own École freudienne de Paris in 1979 served to clear the path for a new beginning; Howard Roark, the [[self]]-made architect in Ayn Rand’s ''The Fountainhead'', destroyed one of his own buildings in an act of freedom that illuminated how we are all bound by [[the symbolic]] [[order]]; Sethe in Toni Morrison’s ''[[Beloved]]'' killed her own [[children]] to free [[them]] from a [[life]] of slavery; Keyser Soze’s (Kevin Spacey) Act of killing his [[family]] in the film ''The [[Usual Suspects]]'' set him free from the hold of his pursuers and free to pursue them, just as Mel Gibson’s [[character]] in the film ''Ransom'' did when he turned the tables on his son’s kidnappers. All of these Acts entail a [[logic]] of “striking at oneself”, of sacrificing what one treasures most in order to go beyond the limits of the Law, to act without the [[guarantee]] of an Other. Thus, the authentic Act is to be distinguished from both the [[hysterical]] “acting out”, staged for an Other, and the [[psychotic]] ''passsage à l‘acte'', an act of meaningless [[destruction]] that suspends the Other.
It is this “No” that Žižek proposes as the kind of political Act that is needed today when [[capitalism]] assumes every [[transgression]], becoming a [[system]] that no longer excludes its [[excess]] but posits it as its driving force; a system that is covered over by our collective [[fetishistic]] [[disavowal]]. Žižek here takes up Badiou’s [[notion]] of subtraction, which, like Hegel’s ''[[Aufhebung]]'', posits a [[withdrawal]] from being immersed in a [[situation]] in such a way “that the withdrawal renders [[visible]] the ‘minimal difference’ sustaining the situation’s [[multiplicity]], and thereby causes its disintegration” (''FT'': 129). A political Act today would be not a new movement proposing a “positive” agenda for change, but rather an interruption of the [[present]] symbolic order. And it is here where we note the primary diff erence between Žižek’s Act and Badiou’s [[Event]]. Žižek writes in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'':<blockquote>Lacan insists on the primacy of the ([[negative]]) act over the (positive) establishment of a “new harmony” via the intervention of some new [[Master-Signifier]], while for [[Badiou]], the different facets of negativity (ethical catastrophes) are reduced to so many versions of the “betrayal” of (or infidelity to, or [[denial]] of) the positive [[Truth]]-Event. (''TS'': 159)</blockquote>For Žižek, as for Lacan, it is the [[death ]]-[[drive]] that is at work in the authentic Act, and so for both thinkers the Act is a purely negative [[category]]; it offers a way for the subject to break out of the limits of Being; it opens the gap of negativity, of a void prior to its being filled in (''TS'': 160). Such an Act is thus closely connected presented by Žižek in ''[[The Parallax View]]'' in the example of Hermann Melville’s character [[Bartleby]] in ''Bartleby the Scrivener'', a subject who interrupts the present political movement with his incessant and ambiguous retort “[[I would prefer not to]].” His “No” affirms a non-predicate and does not oppose or [[transgress]] against an Other, but rather opens up a space outside of the dominant hegemonic order and its negation. What this more silent Act does, according to Žižek, is open the space of the gap of the minimal [[difference]] “between the set of [[social]] regulations and the void of their absence”. In other words, Bartleby’s gesture (his Act of saying “No”) “is what remains of the [[supplement]] to the Law when its [[ethics|ethical domainplace]] is emptied of all its [[obscene]] in [[Lacansuperego]]content” (''PV''s thought: 382).
==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 />