What is the act?

Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Slavoj Žižek answers

The act — not activity, not the frenetic hyperactivity that fills our days, but the act proper — is perhaps the most difficult concept to hold steady, precisely because it slips away from the subject who performs it. Begin with what the act is not. Whenever someone is driven into frantic doing, the question to pose is: what is the underlying fantasy sustaining this activity?1

Activity, in this sense, is always phantasmically supported — it occurs within the frame of the big Other, within the symbolic coordinates that give it meaning and legitimacy. The act, by contrast, occurs ex nihilo, without any phantasmic support.2 It is an event on the side of the real object rather than the signifier — which is why it cannot be reduced to a speech act, which presupposes the subject's fundamental alienation in the symbolic order and requires that phantasmic scaffolding to function at all.3

Now the truly vertiginous part. The authentic act is not something the subject authors. After a genuine act, the reaction is always: "Even I don't know how I was able to do that — it just happened." The highest freedom coincides with the utmost passivity, with something like a reduction to an automaton blindly performing its gestures.45 Kant's description of how a direct insight into the noumenal God would turn us into lifeless puppets — subtract the scenic imagery, the fascination with Divine Majesty, reduce it to the bare entity performing what it does automatically — paradoxically fits the ethical act perfectly.6

The act just occurs; it surprises its own agent most of all. This is why the act divides the subject rather than expressing one. The authentic act I accomplish is always, by definition, a foreign body — something that simultaneously attracts and repels, and if I come too close to it, the result is my own aphanisis, self-erasure.7 There is a subject to the act, but it is not the subject of subjectivization, of integrating the act into the universe of symbolic recognition and assuming it as "my own" — it is an uncanny, acephalous subject through whom the act takes place as what is "in him more than himself." In the act, the subject posits himself as his own cause and is no longer determined by the decentered object-cause.89

And yet — and this is where the retroactive logic becomes essential — the act is not therefore groundless in any simple sense. An act retroactively posits its own reasons.10 It does not apply a preexisting norm; it creates a norm in the very act of applying it.11 Think of falling in love: I do not love a woman because she meets my preestablished criteria; if it is true love, I love her smile, her eyes, because they are hers — the reasons are generated retroactively by the love itself.12

Jacques-Alain Miller's formula captures this exactly: "the status of the act is retroactive" — a gesture "will have been" an act if, in its consequences, it succeeds in disturbing and rearranging the big Other.13 This is the trilogy that maps the possible relations to the big Other: acting out, which is a hysterical outburst within the same big Other; passage à l'acte, which destructively suspends it; and Tat-Handlung — Fichte's neologism for the founding gesture in which activity and its result fully overlap — which retroactively rearranges it.14

The authentic act belongs to the third register: it does not destroy the symbolic order, and it does not merely protest within it. It transforms the very coordinates of what was previously possible. The true trauma, then, is not that the act is forever out of reach. The trauma is the opposite: that acts do occur, that they happen, and that we must come to terms with them.15

Sources

  1. Whenever a subject is 'active' (especially when he is driven into frenetic hyperactivity), the question to be asked is: what is the underlying fantasy sustaining this activity?
    The Ticklish Subject, p. 382
  2. the act as real is an event which occurs ex nihilo, without any phantasmic support.
    The Ticklish Subject, p. 382
  3. we can perform speech acts only in so far as we have accepted the fundamental alienation in the symbolic order and the phantasmic support necessary for the functioning of this order
    The Ticklish Subject, p. 382
  4. after an authentic act, my reaction is always 'Even I don't know how I was able to do that, it just happened!'
    The Ticklish Subject, pp. 382–383
  5. in an authentic act, the highest freedom coincides with the utmost passivity, with a reduction to a lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures
    The Ticklish Subject, pp. 382–383
  6. Kant's description of how a direct insight into the Thing in itself (the noumenal God) would deprive us of our freedom and turn us into lifeless puppets if we subtract from it the scenic imagery... paradoxically fits the description of the (ethical) act perfectly
    The Ticklish Subject, pp. 382–383
  7. the authentic act that I accomplish is always by definition a foreign body, an intruder which simultaneously attracts/fascinates and repels me, so that if and when I come too close to it, this leads to my aphanisis, self-erasure.
    The Ticklish Subject, pp. 382–383
  8. an uncanny 'acephalous' subject through which the act takes place as that which is 'in him more than himself'
    The Ticklish Subject, pp. 382–383
  9. in the act, the subject, as Lacan puts it, posits himself as his own cause, and is no longer determined by the decentred object-cause.
    The Ticklish Subject, pp. 382–383
  10. an act is abyssal not in the sense that it is not grounded in reasons, but in the circular sense that it retroactively posits its reasons.
    Absolute Recoil, pp. 21–22
  11. An act is autonomous not when it applies a preexisting norm but when it creates a norm in the very act of applying it.
    Absolute Recoil, pp. 21–22
  12. I don't fall in love when I meet a woman who meets my preestablished criteria; if it's true love, then I don't love the woman for her smile, eyes, legs, etc.—I love her smile, eyes, etc. because they are hers.
    Absolute Recoil, pp. 21–22
  13. As Jacques-Alain Miller put it, 'the status of the act is retroactive': a gesture 'will have been' an act; it becomes an act if, in its consequences, it succeeds in disturbing and rearranging the 'big Other.'
    Less Than Nothing, pp. 220–221
  14. Acting out is a hysterical outburst within the same big Other; passage à l'acte destructively suspends the big Other; Tat-Handlung retroactively rearranges it.
    Less Than Nothing, pp. 220–221
  15. what is so difficult to accept is not the fact that the true act in which noumenal and phenomenal dimensions coincide is forever out of our reach; the true trauma lies in the opposite awareness that there are acts, that they do occur, and that we have to come to terms with them.
    The Ticklish Subject, pp. 382–383