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{{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 uniquely [[act|''human'' act]], "since to our [[knowledge]] there is no [[other]] [[act]] but the [[human]] one."<ref>{{S11}} p. 50</ref> <a href ==Ethics of Psychoanalysis==The "http://www[[act]]" is an '''[[ethics|ethical concept]]''' insofar as the '''[[subject]]''' can be held '''[[responsibility|responsible]]''' for it. 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'''.autoin 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]]'''.cz/obj/1132/4/pages [[Freud]] called these [[act]]s "'''[[parapraxes]]'''," or "'''[[bungled actions]]'''.php?id=1898#"They are "[[bungled]]" only from the point of view of the [[conscious]] [[intention]], since they are successful in expressing an '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]'''.<ref>fructosuria fructose intolerance aldolase[[{{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'''. He must 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 '''[url[subject]]''' does not assume '''[[responsibility]]''' for his '''[[desire]]''' in these [[action]]s. ==Analyst=="http://wwwThe '''[[ethics]] of [[psychoanalysis]]''' enjoin the [[analyst]] to assume [[responsibility]] for his or her [[act]]s (i.e.autoininterventions in the [[treatment]]).cz/obj/1132/4/pages The [[analyst]] must be guided (in these interventions) by an appropriate [[desire]], which [[Lacan]] calls the '''[[desire of the analyst]]'''.php?id=1898# An [[intervention]] can only be called a true "[[act|psychoanalytic act]]"when 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]]fructosuria fructose intolerance aldolaseto discussing further the [/url[nature]] of the [[act|psychoanalytic act]].<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, http://wwwJacques]].autoin''[[Seminar XI|Le Séminaire.cz/obj/1132/4/pagesLivre XV.php?id=1898# fructosuria fructose intolerance aldolaseL'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68]]''. Unpublished.<a href/ref> ==Conclusion=="http://wwwA '''[[bungled action]]''' is, as has been stated, successful from the point of view of the [[unconscious]].agcengineering Nevertheless, this success is only [[partial]] because the [[unconscious]] [[desire]] is expressed in a distorted [[form]].com/sessions/file/sfile/5/pages It follows that, when it is fully and [[conscious]]ly assumed, "[[suicide]] is the only completely successful act.php?id=7168#">wa stamp duty calculator</aref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Television|Télévision]]'', [[Paris]]: Seuil, 1973. ''[url="http[Television|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed. [[Joan Copjec]], trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York://wwwNorton, 1990].agcengineeringp.com66-7</sessions/file/sfile/5/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 =7168#"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]]wa stamp duty calculator. “An act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic [[/urluniverse]], httpappears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its [[conditions]] so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility” (''CHU''://www121).agcengineeringAn 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]].com/sessions/file/sfile/5/pages 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.php?id=7168# wa stamp duty calculatorAntigone’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. All of these Acts entail a href="http://www[[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.gourmetdiningllcThus, the authentic Act is to be distinguished from both the [[hysterical]] “acting out”, staged for an Other, and the [[psychotic]] ''passsage à l‘acte'', an act of meaningless [[destruction]] that suspends the Other.com/atmail/docs/php/language/en/3/pages 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 sense of “having actual consequences” – it redefines what counts as reality.php(T?id=11076#">suzanne fletcher worthing: 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).gourmetdiningllcŽižek 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/atmail/docs/php/language/en/3/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=11076#" 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]]suzanne fletcher worthingfor 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.gourmetdiningllcŽižek’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/atmail/docs/php/language/en/3/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=11076# suzanne fletcher worthingBoth 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://www153).wspl 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.lodzDrawing 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.pl/uploaded/File/rys/8/pagesTh us the Act and the master-signifier are not two distinct phenomena, but rather two sides of the same entity.php?id=18594#">imagemagick threshhold colors</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).wsplThe 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.lodzAgain, the Act serves to reveal how the symbolic order is already split from within, and this radicalizes the Other, reconfiguring its founding coordinates.pl/uploaded/File/rys/8/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=18594#"Whereas Antigone maintained her desire and accepted her Fate by way of protesting against an [[external]]imagemagick threshhold colors[/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.wsplSygne’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”.lodzSynge’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).pl/uploaded/File/rys/8/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=18594# imagemagick threshhold colorsŽižek 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).chilliorgA political Act today would be not a new movement proposing a “positive” agenda for change, but rather an interruption of the [[present]] symbolic order.cz/chilli/imidzkes/7/pagesAnd it is here where we note the primary diff erence between Žižek’s Act and Badiou’s [[Event]].php?id=3468#"Žižek writes in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'':<blockquote>s nchez coca cola tenerifeLacan 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="http[past]] (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.chilliorgThat 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).cz/chilli/imidzkes/7/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=3468#"We [[repeat]] not the same event in another variation, but rather bring into being (through [[repetition]]s nchez coca cola tenerife, 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, httpa pre-political ‘transcendental’ condition of the possibility of politics”, which is the gap that opens the space for the political Act (''LN''://www963).chilliorgReal 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.cz/chilli/imidzkes/7/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==3468# s nchez coca cola tenerife,{{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 />
