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I want to address the problem of identification by confronting the predominant deconstructionist doxa according to which the main problem with Lacanian theory - which allegedly also limits its political use - is that Lacan elevates the symbolic into a kind of transcendental position of a fixed normative order exempted from the transformative process of historical practice. According to this critique, the symbolic fixes in advance the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality and reduces all resistance to it to imaginary misrecognition. And if one does effectively break up the chains of the symbolic order, one is expelled into the void of psychosis. Since the main proponent of this criticism is Judith Butler, let me focus on her latest book, The Psychic Life of Power.<ref>Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). Numbers in parentheses refer to the pages of this book.</ref>

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 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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