Act

What is an act?

This question has arisen from previous posts on Hamlet. But we are not speaking of act in the theatrical sense. Rather, a Lacanian definition is sought (as filtered through Slav. again).

An elementary definition is proffered in Ethics of the Real:

“The act differs from an action in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I ‘accomplish’ – after the act I am simply not the same as before.”

A second occurs in Plague of Fantasies:

‘The act occurs as a ‘crazy’, unaccountable event which, precisely, is not willed. The subject’s will is, by definition, split with regard to an act: since attraction to and repulsion against the act are inextricably mixed into it, the subject can never fully ‘assume’ the act. In short, what Lacan calls ‘act’ has the precise status of an object, which the subject can never swallow, subjectivise – which forever remains a foreign body […] The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanisis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear.’

One does not recognise oneself in the act. ‘I cannot believe I just did that.' Thus, one’s Imaginary identity is shattered. Or one asks, legitimately, ‘Who is the ‘I’ responsible for what just happened?’ If it is not the Imaginary I, is it not in some sense the Subject itself that flashes into view here – the pure freedom of the subject? Or is it that a new subject is born through the act.

Is the Act something like an Event on the level of the individual? Henceforth, things cannot be the same again, there is no way back. Your previous history has now to be rethought from the point of view of the act. The act enlarges the concept that the individual had of his/ her self. The new concept cannot be dismissed, nor can it be quite faced or metabolised. Any attempt to face or metabolise it comes from within the old self. Thus it can only be faced or metabolised from a point of view appropriate to and created by the act itself.

So, when Zizek says the Act is an Object, this can be understood to mean it confronts us as something foreign, as not owned by/ belonging to the Subject. It is experienced as traumatic, as ‘too much’ to deal with. One cannot say of the act ‘this is mine.’

One wonders what the attraction of the Act is exactly. Is it not somehow this ‘more than’? That is to say: The act is always ‘more than’ our intention to do it. The potential to act is like a vortex, like the proverbial heady desire to jump from the cliff edge. But whereas one’s attraction to the act, one’s fatal curiosity, is always fraught and contradictory, the act itself knows no ambivalence. It introduces a line of demarcation which cannot be re-crossed. The act represents a kind of judgement or fatal exposure.

The act, like Badiou’s event, is incalculable. I do not know whether you can anticipate an Act, but there is a poem by Patrick Pearse which might illustrate some of this:

Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men's mouths;
A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost…

Pearse writes this poem shortly before his involvement in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. From every available point of view, in terms of calculable returns, what Pearse would go on to do was ‘folly’. (And it is folly partly because, precisely, its returns were not calculable). Pearse makes a wager, and an admission that what he is about to do will outrun any predictable framework. There are no existing criteria that he can appeal to in justification of his act. The act is thus perhaps a pure negative: it is the desire to blow open a hole in the existing framework, to transform the framework, but absolutely without any guarantees. Of course, if there were guarantees, then the act would be within the framework.

To accept this radical openness, this risk, this surrender to the incalculable is, I think, what is meant by the Lacanian phrase ‘to pass the act’. To ‘pass the act’ is to accept an empty desire: empty because it commits one the new, but not to any specific meaning. I am to set in motion a concatenation of events whose end or significance I can in no way envisage. And I am attracted to the act (as well as repelled by it) exactly on that account.

There is a line from Kafka that might be relevant here:
'From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. '

Anyway, comments and emendations most welcome, including examples of what you might consider an Act.