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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>

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]]'''.

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.

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]] to discussing further the [[nature ]] of the [[act|psychoanalytic act]].<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Seminar XI|Le Séminaire. Livre XV. L'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68]]''. Unpublished.</ref>

Nevertheless, this success is only [[partial ]] because the [[unconscious]] [[desire]] is expressed in a distorted [[form]].

It follows that, when it is fully and [[conscious]]ly assumed, "[[suicide ]] is the only completely successful act."<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Television|Télévision]]'', [[Paris]]: Seuil, 1973. ''[[Television|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed. [[Joan Copjec]], trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton, 1990]. p.66-7</ref>

The '''[[death drive]]''' is thus closely connected with the [[ethics|ethical domain]] in [[Lacan]]'s [[thought]].

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 “[[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]]. “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). 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]].

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 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 [[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. Thus, 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.

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. (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]], “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 [[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 [[communist ]] 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).

An authentic Act follows the paradoxical logic of Hegel’s “negation “[[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 ]] 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 [[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). 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: 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 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. Th us the Act and the master-signifier are not two distinct phenomena, but rather two sides of the same entity. 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 [[logical]], as distinct from causal, sequence (''IR'': 155–61). 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. Again, the Act serves to reveal how the symbolic order is already split from within, and this radicalizes the Other, reconfiguring its founding coordinates.

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''. 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'': 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 [[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”. Synge’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).

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 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 “[[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 [[past ]] (of our future). His logic is as follows: our situation (our physical 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.