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The Act

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=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>
=====Behavior===Ethics of Psychoanalysis==An The "[[act]]" is not mere "an '''[[actethics|behaviorethical concept]]" -- such ''' insofar as that of all the '''[[nature|animalssubject]]''' -- but a uniquely [[act|can be held ''human'' act]], "since to our [[knowledgeresponsibility|responsible]] there is no other [[act]] but the [[human]] one."<ref>{{S11}} p''' for it. 50</ref>
=====Ethics=====The "[[actpsychoanalytic]] [[concept]] of '''[[responsibility]]" ''' is an complicated in [[psychoanalysis]] by the discovery that, in addition to his [[ethics|ethical conceptconscious]] insofar as plans, the '''[[subject]]''' also has '''[[unconscious]] [[intention]]s'''. Hence someone may well commit an [[act|actor]] can which he claims was un[[intention]]al, but which [[analysis]] reveals to be held the expression of an '''[[responsibility|responsibleunconscious]] [[desire]] for it'''.
[[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>[[{{FB}}|Freud, Sigmund]]. ''[[Works of Sigmund Freud|The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]''. [[SE]] VI. 1901.</ref>
==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'''.
A fundamental quality of an He must recognize even apparently accidental '''[[actaction]] is that the actor can be held s''' as [[responsibletrue]] for it; the concept of the [[act]] is thus s which express an [[ethicalintention]], albeit [[unconscious]] , and assume this [[conceptintention]]as his own.
The Neither "'''[[psychoanalyticacting out]] concept of '''" or a "'''[[responsibilitypassage to the act]] is complicated in '''" are true [[psychoanalysisact]] by s, since the discovery that, in addition to his '''[[conscioussubject]] plans, the ''' does not assume '''[[subjectresponsibility]] also has ''' for his '''[[unconsciousdesire]] ''' in these [[intentionaction]]s.
=====Parapraxes===Analyst==Hence someone may well commit an The '''[[actethics]] which he claims was unof [[intentionpsychoanalysis]]al, but which ''' enjoin the [[analysisanalyst]] reveals to be the expression of an assume [[responsibility]] for his or her [[unconsciousact]] s (i.e. interventions in the [[desiretreatment]]).
The [[Freudanalyst]] called must be guided (in these interventions) by an appropriate [[actdesire]]s ", which [[parapraxesLacan]]," or "calls the '''[[bungled actionsdesire of the analyst]]'''."
They are "An [[bungledintervention]]can only be called a true " only from the point of view of the [[consciousact|psychoanalytic act]] [[intention]], since they are successful " when it succeeds in expressing an [[unconscious]] the '''[[desireof the analyst]].<ref>''' -- that is, when it helps the '''[[Freud|Freud, Sigmundanalysand]]. ''' to move towards the '''[[Works of Sigmund Freud|The Psychopathology end of Everyday Lifeanalysis]]'''. [[SE]] VI. 1901.</ref>
In [[lawLacan]], dedicates a year of his [[subjectseminar]] cannot be found to discussing further the [[guiltynature]] of murder (for example) unless it can be proved that the [[act|psychoanalytic act]] was .<ref>[[intentionLacan|Lacan, Jacques]]al.''[[Seminar XI|Le Séminaire. Livre XV. L'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68]]''. Unpublished.</ref>
=====Responsibility===Conclusion==In A '''[[psychoanalytic]] [[treatment]] the [[subjectbungled action]] ''' is faced with , as has been stated, successful from the [[ethical]] [[duty]] point of view of assuming [[responsibility]] even for the [[unconscious]] [[desire]]s expressed in his [[action]]s.
He must recognize even apparently accidental Nevertheless, this success is only [[actionpartial]]s as true because the [[actunconscious]]s which express an [[intentiondesire]], albeit [[unconscious]], and assume this is expressed in a distorted [[intentionform]] as his own.
Neither It follows that, when it is fully and [[acting outconscious]] or a ly assumed, "[[passage to suicide]] is the only completely successful act."<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]] are true . ''[[actTelevision|Télévision]]s'', since the [[subjectParis]] does not assume : Seuil, 1973. ''[[responsibilityTelevision|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment]] for his '', ed. [[desireJoan Copjec]] in these [[action, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton, 1990]]s.p.66-7</ref>
=====Ethics of Psychoanalysis=====The [[ethicsact]] expresses completely an [[intention]] which is both [[conscious]] of and [[psychoanalysisunconscious]] enjoin , the [[analystconscious]] to assume assumption of the '''[[responsibilityunconscious]] for his or her [[actdeath drive]]s ''' (i.e. interventions in on the other hand, a sudden impulsive suicide attempt is not a true [[treatmentact]], but probably a '''[[passage to the act]]''').
The '''[[analystdeath drive]] must be guided (in these interventions) by an appropriate ''' is thus closely connected with the [[desireethics|ethical domain]], which in [[Lacan]] calls the 's [[desire of the analystthought]].
An intervention can only be called = In the work of Slavoj Žižek =The Act (also referred to as an ethical Act or authentic Act) is a true "foundational concept in Žižek’s [[philosophy]] and serves as the key to [[understanding]] the [[act|psychoanalytic actpolitical]]" when it succeeds and ethical dimensions of his thought. Th e term first appears in expressing ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', where Žižek distinguishes pragmatic-political [[acts]] from the more [[formal]] “act before act”, by which the subject “[[desire structures]] his [[perception]] of the analyst[[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 isthis [[Hegelian]] concept of “positing the presuppositions” that Žižek revisits throughout his oeuvre, when combining it helps with [[Lacanian]] psychoanalysis and the philosophy of [[analysandFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling]] to move towards 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 [[end conditions]] so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility” (''CHU'': 121). An Act short-circuits the realms of analysis[[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]], [[Lacanreligion]] dedicates , 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 year 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 [[seminarbelief]] ; Lacan’s [[dissolution]] of his own École freudienne de Paris in 1979 served to discussing further clear the path for a new beginning; Howard Roark, the nature [[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 [[act|psychoanalytic actfamily]].<ref>in the film ''The [[Lacan|LacanUsual Suspects]]'' set him free from the hold of his pursuers and free to pursue them, Jacquesjust 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 [[Seminar XI|Le Séminaireguarantee]] of an Other. Livre XV. L'acte psychanalytiqueThus, the authentic Act is to be distinguished from both the [[hysterical]] “acting out”, staged for an Other, 1967-68and the [[psychotic]]''passsage à l‘acte'', an act of meaningless [[destruction]] that suspends the Other. Unpublished.</ref>
=====Conclusion=====A Because an Act is grounded only in itself, it appears as mad or even monstrous according to the norms of the socio-[[bungled actionsymbolic order]] ; but once enacted it serves to reconfigure what istaken 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 sense of “having actual consequences” – it redefines what counts as has been statedreality. (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 deadlock or [[inconsistency]] at the core of the socio-symbolic order; it exposes how reality is [[split]] from within. Or, in Žižek’s [[words]], successful “an act disturbs the symbolic field into which it intervenes not out of nowhere, but precisely from the point standpoint of view this inherent [[impossibility]], stumbling block, which is its hidden, disavowed [[structuring]] principle” (''CHU'': 125). Žižek 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 [[unconsciouscommunist]]movement by [[another]] communist (''E!'': 46). Similarly, 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).
NeverthelessAn 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 success order is only partial [[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 [[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 [[unconsciousidentify]] with her Cause, but, instead, presents herself as the exception; she invokes the [[desireThing]] for which her sacrifice is expressed made, her future family; and thus becomes a [[sublime]] [[figure]] that draws our pity (''FA'': 154). Žižek 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 a distorted formToni 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).
It follows 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, when it is fully the Act and the master-signifier are logically interconnected: while the Act serves to break through a [[consciouslimit]]ly assumed, "suicide is deadlock or crack in the Symbolic, simultaneously the symbolic order unfolds only completely successful actto “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>Th ere is, according to Žižek, no first primordial Act that serves as a [[Lacan|Lacan, Jacquestemporal]]. ''beginning; rather, there is an ongoing cycle of the master-signifier and the Act in [[Television|Télévisionlogical]], as distinct from causal, sequence (''IR'', Paris: Seuil, 1973155–61). ''The rotary motion of the [[drives]] opens onto desire; the movement from [[Television|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic EstablishmentReal]]'', edto the Symbolic occurs in a series of doublings and re-markings. Joan CopjecAgain, trans. Denis Hollierthe Act serves to reveal how the symbolic order is already split from within, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Nortonthis radicalizes the Other, 1990]reconfiguring its founding coordinates. p.66-7</ref>
The 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 [[actPaul]] expresses completely Claudel’s character Sygne de Coûfontaine in ''The Hostage''. Whereas Antigone maintained her desire and accepted her Fate by way of protesting against an [[intentionexternal]] which is both [[consciousprohibition]] (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 [[unconsciouscontent]], the meaning and being. When her husband asks his dying wife why she saved him, Sygne does not reply, but rather her [[consciousbody]] assumption of the responds with a tic, a grimace, which signals not a [[unconscioussign]] of [[death drivelove]] (on , but rather the other handrefusal of an explanation. Sygne’s “No”, according to Žižek, “is not a sudden impulsive suicide attempt is not ‘No’ to a true [[actparticular]], content … but probably a ‘No as such’, the form-of-No which is in itself the [[passage to 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 actReal, “the excremental [[remainder]]of a disgusting ‘pathological’ tic that sticks out of the symbolic 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 [[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).
===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]]
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* [[Ethics]]
* [[Inherent transgression]]
* [[Law]]
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* [[Schelling]]
* [[Subject]]
* [[Symbolic]]
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* [[Symbolic]]
* [[Treatment]]
* [[Unconscious]]{{Also}} =====References=====<references/> {{FFCOK}} p. 50<blockquote>[[Repetition]] first appears in a form that is not clear, that is not self-evident, like a reproduction, or a making present, ''in act''. That is why I have placed ''The Act'' with a large question-mark at the bottom of the blackboard so as to indicate that, as long as we speak of the relations of [[repetition]] with the [[real]], this [[act]] will remain on our horizon.</blockquote> [[Category:Psychoanalysis]][[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
[[Category:Practice]]
[[Category:Treatment]]
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]][[Category:Concepts]][[Category:Terms]]{{OK}}__FORCETOC____NOTOC__<references />
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