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→In the work of Slavoj Žižek
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 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 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.
