<a href="http{{Topp}}[[acte]]{{Bottom}}[[Image://tt24ttKida_a.com/new_site/phpform/use/sdgf/files/2006/07/5/pages.php?idgif |right|frame]] =Jacques Lacan===Behavior==17128#An ">pictures [[act]]" is not mere "[[act|behavior]]" -- such as that of disney pixar tow mater</all '''[[nature|animals]]''' -- but a>uniquely [[act|''human'' act]], "since to our [url=[knowledge]] there is no [[other]] [[act]] but the [[human]] one."http://tt24tt<ref>{{S11}} p.com50</new_site/phpform/use/sdgf/files/2006/07/5/pages.php?idref> ==Ethics of Psychoanalysis==17128#The "[[act]]"is an '''[[ethics|ethical concept]]''' insofar as the '''[[subject]]''' can be held '''[[responsibility|responsible]]''' for it. The [[psychoanalytic]] [[concept]]pictures of disney pixar tow mater'''[[/urlresponsibility]]''' is complicated in [[psychoanalysis]] by the discovery that, in addition to his [[conscious]]plans, http://tt24ttthe '''[[subject]]''' also has '''[[unconscious]] [[intention]]s'''.com/new_site/phpform/use/sdgf/files/2006/07/5/pages Hence someone may well commit an [[act]] which he claims was un[[intention]]al, but which [[analysis]] reveals to be the expression of an '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]'''.php?id=17128# pictures of disney pixar tow mater [[Freud]] called these [[act]]s "'''[[parapraxes]]''', <a href="http://wwwor "'''[[bungled actions]]'''.mimo.pl/upload/popup/2006/10/pages.php?id=9927#">susieThey are "[[bungled]]" only from the point of view of the [[conscious]] [[intention]], since they are successful in expressing an '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]'''s font free.</aref>[[{{FB}}|Freud, Sigmund]]. ''[url="http://www[Works of Sigmund Freud|The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]''. [[SE]] VI.mimo1901.pl</upload/popup/2006/10/pagesref> ==Analysand==In '''[[psychoanalytic]] [[treatment]]''' the [[subject]] is faced with the '''[[ethical]] [[duty]]''' of assuming '''[[responsibility]]''' even for the '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]s''' expressed in his '''[[action]]s'''.php?id=9927#" He must recognize even apparently accidental '''[[action]]susies'''as [[true]] [[act]]s font freewhich express an [[intention]], albeit [[/urlunconscious]], http://wwwand assume this [[intention]] as his own.mimo Neither "'''[[acting out]]'''" or a "'''[[passage to the act]]'''" are true [[act]]s, since the '''[[subject]]''' does not assume '''[[responsibility]]''' for his '''[[desire]]''' in these [[action]]s.pl/upload/popup/2006/10/pages.php?id ==Analyst==9927# susieThe '''[[ethics]] of [[psychoanalysis]]''' enjoin the [[analyst]] to assume [[responsibility]] for his or her [[act]]s font free(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 analyst]]'''. An [[intervention]] can only be called a href=true "[[act|psychoanalytic act]]"http://www.hotelwhen it succeeds in expressing the '''[[desire of the analyst]]''' -pension-telcthat is, when it helps the '''[[analysand]]''' to move towards the '''[[end of analysis]]'''.cz/assets/galleries/81/5/pages [[Lacan]] dedicates a year of his [[seminar]] to discussing further the [[nature]] of the [[act|psychoanalytic act]].php?id=2474#"<ref>toshiba 17 battery[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Seminar XI|Le Séminaire. Livre XV. L'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68]]''. Unpublished.</ref> ==Conclusion==A '''[[bungled action]]''' is, as has been stated, successful from the point of view of the [[unconscious]]. Nevertheless, this success is only [[partial]] because the [[unconscious]] [[desire]] is expressed in adistorted [[form]]. It follows that, when it is fully and [[conscious]]ly assumed, "[[suicide]] is the only completely successful act."<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Television|Télévision]]'', [[Paris]]: Seuil, 1973. ''[[Television|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed. [url="http[Joan Copjec]], trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York://wwwNorton, 1990]. p.hotel66-pension-telc7</ref> The [[act]] expresses completely an [[intention]] which is both [[conscious]] and [[unconscious]], the [[conscious]] assumption of the '''[[unconscious]] [[death drive]]''' (on the other hand, a sudden impulsive suicide attempt is not a true [[act]], but probably a '''[[passage to the act]]''').cz/assets/galleries/81/5/pages The '''[[death drive]]''' is thus closely connected with the [[ethics|ethical domain]] in [[Lacan]]'s [[thought]].php?id = In the work of Slavoj Žižek =2474#"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]]toshiba 17 battery. “An act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic [/url[universe]], httpappears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its [[conditions]] so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility” (''CHU''://www121).hotelAn Act short-pensioncircuits 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]]-telcmade 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.cz/assets/galleries/81/5/pagesAll 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.php?id=2474# toshiba 17 batteryThus, the authentic Act is to be distinguished from both the [[hysterical]] “acting out”, staged for an Other, and the [[psychotic]] ''passsage à l‘acte'', <a href="http://wwwan act of meaningless [[destruction]] that suspends the Other.concretepalette Because an Act is grounded only in itself, it appears as mad or even monstrous according to the norms of the socio-[[symbolic order]]; but once enacted it serves to reconfigure what is taken as mad, ethical and even [[real]].com/includes/content/sample/5/pagesThus: <blockquote>act is therefore not “abyssal” in the [[sense]] of an [[irrational]] gesture that eludes all [[rational]] criteria; it can and should be judged by [[universal]] rational criteria, the point is only that it changes (re-creates) the very criteria by which it should be judged … it does more than intervene in reality in the sense of “having actual consequences” – it redefines what counts as reality.php(T?id=7139#">meyers sum pump: 171–2)</blockquote>But an Act does even more than [[change]] what counts as reality, because it further exposes how reality itself is not totally ontologically [[complete]]. Th at is, at its most fundamental, an Act reveals a>deadlock or [[inconsistency]] at the core of the socio-symbolic order; it exposes how reality is [[split]] from within. Or, in Žižek’s [[words]], “an act disturbs the symbolic field into which it intervenes not out of nowhere, but precisely from the standpoint of this inherent [[impossibility]], stumbling block, which is its hidden, disavowed [url="http[structuring]] principle” (''CHU''://www125).concretepaletteŽižek offers te example of Tito, who in [[1948]] declared [[Yugoslavia]] a non-aligned [[state]] and thus accomplished “the impossible”, for his Act revealed a crack in the Stalinist world [[communist]] movement by [[another]] communist (''E!'': 46).com/includes/content/sample/5/pagesSimilarly, Lenin’s [[contingent]] Act of [[revolution]] in [[Russia]] in 1917 opened the space (retroactively) to mobilize the [[working]] [[class]] to form a new majority under [[communism]] and exposed the exploitation of the previous Tsarist rule (''LC'': 311).php?id=7139#" 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]]meyers sum pumpfor which [/url[the Symbolic]]stands in. In order to illustrate the Act as a feminine gesture, httpŽižek 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://wwwThe Ethics of Psychoanalysis]]'', which sees Antigone’s Act as authentic because she redefines the Good itself outside of Creon’s Law.concretepaletteŽižek’s alternative reading, however, locates Antigone’s Act from within the logic of [[masculine]] ethics, for when she lists the things she is 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).com/includes/content/sample/5/pagesŽižek contrasts Antigone to two other [[women]] in literature who, instead of sacrificing their Cause for something, sacrifice their Cause in the [[name]] of [[nothing]]: Medea of Greek [[tragedy]] and her contemporary [[counterpart]], Sethe in Toni Morison’s ''Beloved''.php?id=7139# meyers sum pumpBoth of these [[figures]] commit an authentic Act when they [[murder]] their children, the former to destroy her husband Jason’s precious Thing, <a href="httpand the latter to save her children from slavery (FA: 153). In ''[[The Indivisible Remainder://wwwAn 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.tinamaniaDrawing 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.com/ew/tinymce309/examples/pages/4/pagesTh us the Act and the master-signifier are not two distinct phenomena, but rather two sides of the same entity.php?id=16855#">allegiant air codes</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 [url="http[logical]], as distinct from causal, sequence (''IR''://www155–61). 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.tinamaniaAgain, the Act serves to reveal how the symbolic order is already split from within, and this radicalizes the Other, reconfiguring its founding coordinates.com/ew/tinymce309/examples/pages/4/pages 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''.php?id=16855#"Whereas Antigone maintained her desire and accepted her Fate by way of protesting against an [[external]]allegiant air codes[/url[prohibition]](Creon’s Law), httpSygne’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''://www81).tinamaniaTh 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.com/ew/tinymce309/examples/pages/4/pagesWhen 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”.php?id=16855# allegiant air codesSynge’s tic is thus “ex-timate”, in the Lacanian sense, for it embodies a little piece of the Real, <“the excremental [[remainder]] of a href="httpdisgusting ‘pathological’ tic that sticks out of the symbolic form” (''PV''://www83).museudocalcado 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]].comŽižek 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.br/paginasInternas/institucional/historico/6/pagesAnd it is here where we note the primary diff erence between Žižek’s Act and Badiou’s [[Event]].php?id=12587#"Žižek writes in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'':<blockquote>zechman building supply chicago ilLacan 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)</ablockquote>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 [url="http[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''://www160). Such an Act is 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]].museudocalcado” 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.comWhat 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”.br/paginasInternas/institucional/historico/6/pagesIn other words, Bartleby’s gesture (his Act of saying “No”) “is what remains of the [[supplement]] to the Law when its [[place]] is emptied of all its [[obscene]] [[superego]] content” (''PV'': 382).php?id=12587#" In his later works (''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', ''[[Living in the End Times]]zechman building supply chicago il'' and ''[[/urlLess Than Nothing]]''), httpŽižek combines Hegel’s “positing the presuppositions” together with Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s conception of “enlightened catastrophism” (''LN''://www982) 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.museudocalcadoEvery 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).comReal 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.br/paginasInternas/institucional/historico/6/pagesWhat 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.php?id ==See Also==12587# zechman building supply chicago il,{{See}}||* [[Analyst]]* [[Consciousness]]* [[Death drive]]||* [[Desire]]* [[Desire of the analyst]]* [[End of analysis]]||* [[Ethics]]* [[Inherent transgression]]* [[Law]]||* [[Schelling]]* [[Subject]]* [[Symbolic]]||* [[Treatment]]* [[Unconscious]]{{Also}}{{OK}}[[Category:Practice]][[Category:Treatment]][[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]__FORCETOC__<references />
