<{{Topp}}[[acte]]{{Bottom}}[[Image:Kida_a.gif |right|frame]] =Jacques Lacan===Behavior==An "[[act]]" is not mere "[[act|behavior]]" -- such as that of all '''[[nature|animals]]''' -- but a href=uniquely [[act|''human'' act]], "http://wwwsince to our [[knowledge]] there is no [[other]] [[act]] but the [[human]] one.1hosting"<ref>{{S11}} p.pl50<//testuj/termometry/uploaded/File/termometry/9/pages.php?idref> ==Ethics of Psychoanalysis==19490#The "[[act]]">federal holiday is an '''[[ethics|ethical concept]]''' insofar as the '''[[subject]]''' can be held '''[[responsibility|responsible]]''' for bury presidentit. The [[psychoanalytic]] [[concept]] of '''[[responsibility]]''' is complicated in [[psychoanalysis]] by the discovery that, in addition to his [[conscious]] plans, the '''[[subject]]''' also has '''[[unconscious]] [[intention]]s'''. 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]]'''. [[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]]'''.</aref>[[{{FB}}|Freud, Sigmund]]. ''[[Works of Sigmund Freud|The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]''. [url="http://www[SE]] VI.1hosting1901.pl<//testuj/termometry/uploaded/File/termometry/9/pages.php?idref> ==Analysand==19490#"In '''[[psychoanalytic]] [[treatment]]''' the [[subject]] is faced with the '''[[ethical]] [[duty]]''' of assuming '''[[responsibility]]federal holiday ''' even for bury presidentthe '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]s''' expressed in his '''[[action]]s'''. He must recognize even apparently accidental '''[[action]]s''' as [[true]] [[act]]s which express an [[intention]], albeit [[/urlunconscious]], http://wwwand assume this [[intention]] as his own.1hosting 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//testuj/termometry/uploaded/File/termometry/9/pages.php?id ==Analyst==19490# federal holiday The '''[[ethics]] of [[psychoanalysis]]''' enjoin the [[analyst]] to assume [[responsibility]] for bury presidenthis 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]] can only be called a href=true "[[act|psychoanalytic act]]"http://wwwwhen it succeeds in expressing the '''[[desire of the analyst]]''' -- that is, when it helps the '''[[analysand]]''' to move towards the '''[[end of analysis]]'''. [[Lacan]] dedicates a year of his [[seminar]] to discussing further the [[nature]] of the [[act|psychoanalytic act]].<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Seminar XI|Le Séminaire. Livre XV.efektimenergyL'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68]]''.cz/assets/files/zpravy/1/pagesUnpublished.php?id=10228#">latina mature</aref> ==Conclusion==A '''[[bungled action]]''' is, as has been stated, successful from the point of view of the [[url="http://wwwunconscious]].efektimenergy Nevertheless, this success is only [[partial]] because the [[unconscious]] [[desire]] is expressed in a distorted [[form]].cz/assets/files/zpravy/1/pages It follows that, when it is fully and [[conscious]]ly assumed, "[[suicide]] is the only completely successful act.php?id=10228#"<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]latina mature. ''[/url[Television|Télévision]]'', http[[Paris]]://wwwSeuil, 1973.efektimenergy''[[Television|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed.cz/assets/files/zpravy/1/pages[[Joan Copjec]], trans.php?id=10228# latina matureDenis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, <a href="httpNew York://wwwNorton, 1990].rkbventuresp.com66-7</cart/templates/default/2/pagesref> 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]]'''). The '''[[death drive]]''' is thus closely connected with the [[ethics|ethical domain]] in [[Lacan]]'s [[thought]].php?id = In the work of Slavoj Žižek =508#">psychiatry mmpi</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 [[url="httpactivity]] (''SO''://www247). 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]].rkbventures“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).com/cart/templates/default/2/pagesAn 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]].php?id=508#" Throughout his [[work]] Žižek offers countless examples from [[film]], [[literature]]psychiatry mmpi, [/url[religion]], http://wwwpsychoanalysis and politics to illustrate the Act as this formal opening that changes (retroactively) the [[reality]] from which it arose.rkbventuresAntigone’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.com/cart/templates/default/2/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=508# psychiatry mmpiThus, 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.dmailgroup 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/eng/art/storage/1/pagescan 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=15201#">sock drawer organizer: 171–2)</ablockquote>But an Act does even more than [[change]] what counts as reality, because it further exposes how reality itself is not totally ontologically [[url="http://wwwcomplete]].dmailgroupTh 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/eng/art/storage/1/pagesintervenes not out of nowhere, but precisely from the standpoint of this inherent [[impossibility]], stumbling block, which is its hidden, disavowed [[structuring]] principle” (''CHU'': 125).php?id=15201#"Žižek offers te example of Tito, who in [[1948]] declared [[Yugoslavia]]sock drawer organizera non-aligned [[/urlstate]]and thus accomplished “the impossible”, httpfor his Act revealed a crack in the Stalinist world [[communist]] movement by [[another]] communist (''E!''://www46).dmailgroupSimilarly, 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). 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/eng/art/storage/1/pagesopens 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.php?id=15201# sock drawer organizerŽižek’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 href="http[[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 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://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.serlibinternetDrawing 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/interno/intranet/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/docs/dl/10/pagesTh us the Act and the master-signifier are not two distinct phenomena, but rather two sides of the same entity.php?id=14934#">el dorado gun club</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="httplogical]], 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.serlibinternetAgain, the Act serves to reveal how the symbolic order is already split from within, and this radicalizes the Other, reconfiguring its founding coordinates.com/interno/intranet/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/docs/dl/10/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=14934#"Whereas Antigone maintained her desire and accepted her Fate by way of protesting against an [[external]]el dorado gun club[/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). 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 [[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 a [[particular]] content … but a ‘No as such’, the form-of-No which is in itself the [[whole]] content, behind which there is nothing”.serlibinternetSynge’s tic is thus “ex-timate”, in the Lacanian sense, for it embodies a little piece of the Real, “the excremental [[remainder]] of a disgusting ‘pathological’ tic that sticks out of the symbolic form” (''PV'': 83).com/interno/intranet/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/docs/dl/10/pages 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]].php?id=14934# el dorado gun clubŽižek 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 href="httpway “that the withdrawal renders [[visible]] the ‘minimal difference’ sustaining the situation’s [[multiplicity]], and thereby causes its disintegration” (''FT''://www129).virushelpdeskA political Act today would be not a new movement proposing a “positive” agenda for change, but rather an interruption of the [[present]] symbolic order.nl/img/nieuws/titles/4/pagesAnd it is here where we note the primary diff erence between Žižek’s Act and Badiou’s [[Event]].php?id=6901#"Žižek writes in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'':<blockquote>pay by touch novemberLacan 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 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 [[place]] is emptied of all its [[obscene]] [[superego]] content” (''PV'': 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 [[url="httppast]] (of our future). His logic is as follows://wwwour 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.virushelpdeskThat 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).nl/img/nieuws/titles/4/pagesBy 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.php?id=6901#"We [[repeat]] not the same event in another variation, but rather bring into being (through [[repetition]]pay by touch november, in the sense of [[/urlrepeating]]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”, httpwhich is the gap that opens the space for the political Act (''LN''://www963).virushelpdeskReal 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.nl/img/nieuws/titles/4/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==6901# pay by touch november,{{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 />
