act (''acte'') {{Topp}}[[Lacan]] posits a basic distinction between mere '[[behaviour]]', which all [[animal]]s engage in, and '[[act]]s', which are [[symbolic]] and which can only be ascribed to [[human]acte] [[subjects]].<ref>{{S11Bottom}} p.50</ref> ==Responsibility==A fundamental quality of an [[actImage:Kida_a.gif |right|frame]] is that the actor can be held [[responsible]] for it; the concept of the [[act]] is thus an [[ethical]] [[concept]].
The =Jacques Lacan===Behavior==An "[[psychoanalyticact]] concept " is not mere "[[act|behavior]]" -- such as that of all '''[[responsibilitynature|animals]] is complicated in ''' -- but a uniquely [[psychoanalysisact|''human'' act]] by the discovery that, in addition "since to his our [[consciousknowledge]] there is no [[other]] plans, the [[subjectact]] also has but the [[unconscioushuman]] intentionsone."<ref>{{S11}} p. 50</ref>
==ParapraxesEthics of Psychoanalysis==Hence someone may well commit The "[[act]]" is an act which he claims was unintentional, but which '''[[analysisethics|ethical concept]] reveals to be ''' insofar as the expression of an '''[[unconscioussubject]] ''' can be held '''[[desireresponsibility|responsible]]''' for it.
The [[Freudpsychoanalytic]] called these acts [[concept]] of '''[[responsibility]]''' is complicated in [[psychoanalysis]] by the discovery that, in addition to his [[conscious]] plans, the '''[[subject]]''' also has '''[[parapraxesunconscious]] [[intention]]s'''. Hence someone may well commit an [[act]] which he claims was un[[intention]]al, or but which [[analysis]] reveals to be the expression of an '''[[bungled actionsunconscious]][[desire]]'''.
[[Freud]] called these [[act]]s "'''[[parapraxes]]'''," or "'''[[bungled actions]]'''." They are '"[[bungled' ]]" only from the point of view of the [[conscious ]] [[intention]], since they are successful in expressing an '''[[unconscious ]] [[desire]]'''.<ref>see [[{{FB}}|Freud, 1901bSigmund]]. ''[[Works of Sigmund Freud|The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]''. [[SE]] VI. 1901.</ref>
==ResponsibilityAnalysand==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'''.
He must recognise recognize even apparently accidental '''[[action]]s ''' as [[true ]] [[act]]s which express an [[intention]], albeit [[unconscious]], and assume this [[intention ]] as his own.
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.
== Ethics of Psychoanalysis Analyst==The '''[[ethics]] 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 analyst]]'''.
An [[intervention is ]] can only be called a 'true "[[psychoanalysisact|psychoanalyticact]] " when it succeeds in expressing the '''[[actdesire of the analyst]]''' -- that is, when it helps the '''[[analysand]]''' to move towards the '''[[end of analysis]]' ''.
A '[[psychoanalysis|psychoanalyticLacan]] dedicates a year of his [[actseminar]]' is an intervenion that succeeds in expressing to discussing further the [[desire nature]] of the analyst[[act|psychoanalytic act]] - that is, when it helps the .<ref>[[analysandLacan|Lacan, Jacques]] to move towards the . ''[[end of analysisSeminar XI|Le Séminaire. Livre XV. L'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68]]''. Unpublished. </ref>
Lacan dedicates a year ==Conclusion==A '''[[bungled action]]''' is, as has been stated, successful from the point of his seminar to discussing further the nature view of the psychoanalytic act[[unconscious]].<ref>Lacan, 1967-8</ref>
A bungled action Nevertheless, this success is, as has been stated, successful from the point of view of only [[partial]] because the [[unconscious]] [[desire]] is expressed in a distorted [[form]].
NeverthelessIt follows that, this success when it is fully and [[conscious]]ly assumed, "[[suicide]] is the only partial because completely successful act."<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Television|Télévision]]'', [[Paris]]: Seuil, 1973. ''[[Television|Television: A Challenge to the unconscious desire is expressed in a distorted formPsychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed. [[Joan Copjec]], trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton, 1990]. p. 66-7</ref>
It follows that, when it is fully and consciously assumed, 'suicide is the only completely successful The [[act'<ref>Lacan, 1973a: 66-7</ref>, since it then ]] 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]]''').
The '''[[death drive ]]''' is thus closely connected with the [[ethics|ethical domain ]] in [[Lacan]]'s [[thought]].
==Examples=In the work of Slavoj Žižek =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 not self-evident 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 constitutes an , 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” ('event' (or anCHU'act': 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]].
Examples 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 what Zižek calls his pursuers and free to pursue them, just as Mel Gibson’s [[character]] in the film ''Ransom'acts' vary widely 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 scope 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, andimpactthe [[psychotic]] ''passsage à l‘acte'', an act of meaningless [[destruction]] that suspends the Other.
At 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]]. Thus: <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 lowest level sense of agape there “having actual consequences” – it redefines what counts as reality. (T?: 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 kind deadlock or [[inconsistency]] at the core of Pollyannathe socio-ish'saying "Yes!" to life 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 mysterious synchronic multitudehidden, disavowed [[structuring]] principle” (''CHU' (Fragile Absolute': 125). Žižek offers te example of Tito, 103; also Frightwho in [[1948]] declared [[Yugoslavia]] a non-aligned [[state]] and thus accomplished “the impossible”, 172; cffor his Act revealed a crack in the Stalinist world [[communist]] movement by [[another]] communist (''E!'': 46). Ticklish SubjectSimilarly, 150Lenin’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).
Some characters in works An authentic Act follows the paradoxical logic of Hegel’s “[[negation]] of negation” and Lacan’s [[formula]] of literature [[feminine]] [[sexuation]]; that is, an Act does not pose itself against a [[master]]-[[signifier]] or film bwork in opposition to a symbolic order because it [[exists]] totally within it, yet once decided, it reveals how this order is [[not- perform an 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]]'act' , 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 [[masculine]] ethics, for when they 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 what they hold dearestis made, committing what Zižek calls her future family; and thus becomes a [[sublime]] [[figure]] that draws our pity ('a strike against 'FA'': 154). Žižek contrasts Antigone to two other [[women]] in literature who, instead of sacrificing their Cause for something, sacrifice their Cause in the self[[name]] of [[nothing]]: Medea of Greek [[tragedy]] and her contemporary [[counterpart]], Sethe in Toni Morison’s ''Beloved''. 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 example is Kevin SpaceyEssay on Schelling and Related Matters|Indivisible Remainder]]'' and ''[[The Abyss of Freedom|Abyss of Freedom]]''s shooting Žižek reads this feminine logic of the not-all through Schelling’s [[materialist]] philosophy (as found in his own wife [[three]] Weltalter drafts) to consider the primordial Act of beginning. Drawing from Schelling’s [[metaphysics]] of “contraction and daughterexpansion”, who “form and ground” and “the rotary motion of the drives”, Žižek posits that the Act and the master-signifier are being held hostage by rival gangsterslogically interconnected: while the Act serves to break through a [[limit]], deadlock or crack in The Usual Suspectsthe 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.<ref>(Fragile AbsoluteTh ere is, according to Žižek, no first primordial Act that serves as a [[temporal]] beginning; rather, 149there is an ongoing cycle of the master-50)</ref> Others literary characterssignifier and the Act in [[logical]], like Antigone and Sygneas distinct from causal,<ref>sequence (Enjoy!, 70ff''IR'': 155–61)</ref>, act in such a way are substitutes for . The rotary motion of the enigmatic [[objet petit adrives]] Because opens onto desire comes ; the movement from [[the Real]] to us from the OtherSymbolic occurs in a series of doublings and re-markings. Again, it is a mistake the Act serves to think of it as subversive; on reveal how the contrarysymbolic order is already split from within, it is banal in and this radicalizes the extremeOther, reconfiguring its founding coordinates.
==More==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 Ticklish SubjectHostage''. 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'': The Absent Centre 81). Th at is, hers is not a tragically sublime Act done for the sake of Political Ontologya higher Cause, this negative subjectbut rather a non-concept is brought 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 bear on a [[particular]] content … but a ‘No as such’, the issue form-of -No which is in itself the "ethical act" [[whole]] content, behind which there is nothing”. Synge’s tic is thus “ex- timate”, in the Lacanian sense, for it embodies a political act transgressing little piece of the rules Real, “the excremental [[remainder]] of a disgusting ‘pathological’ tic that sticks out of the established social ordersymbolic form” (''PV'': 83).
== 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 [[Kid multiplicity]], and thereby causes its disintegration” (''FT'': 129). A In Alphabet Landpolitical 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 [[ImageEvent]]. Žižek writes in ''[[The Ticklish Subject:Kida_a.gif The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|right|frameThe 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''Kid A In Alphabet Land Assails Another Abject Abstraction : 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 presented by Žižek in ''[[The Acrimonious Act!Parallax View]]''in the example of Hermann Melville’s character [[Bartleby]] in ''How Can Anyone Bear You? YouBartleby the Scrivener're Criminal! You Roar And Thunder Aphanisis, But There's A Corpse In Your Mouth! To You, a subject who interrupts the present political movement with his incessant and ambiguous retort “[[I Say No would prefer not to]].” His “No” affirms a non- I Can Pass Right Through You!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 [[Category:Kid A social]] regulations and the void of their absence”. In Alphabet Landother 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).
== References ==<references/>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=={{Footer Kid ASee}}||* [[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 />
