ABSTRACT
The ‘act’ has been invoked by Lacanian scholars as a useful device with which to engage in social, political and ideological critique. Key advantages of taking the act as an analytical and critical category include the shift in perspective it often promotes away from the content of an intervention toward the form of an intervention. Moving the act centre stage has thus tended to encourage scholars to focus on the modality of a political intervention rather than the content of its programme or vision (when, for example, appeals are made to a substantive notion of communism) and the shift that a political intervention produces rather than the agent of the intervention (e.g. the working class). Slavoj Žižek is widely acknowledged to be at the forefront of endeavours to elevate the act as a key analytical and critical category, drawing explicitly on Lacanian psychoanalysis to elaborate its formal parameters. This ‘turn to form’, however, is also expressed in the work of a range of other scholars including Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere and Ernesto Laclau. Nevertheless, Žižek’s work has come under some considerable critical scrutiny as part of a broader effort to develop a more robust and defensible understanding of the act. In this essay I touch on aspects of this debate focusing on the work of Žižek, assessing how this category has been, and can be, invoked to develop a critique of political economy generally and capitalism more specifically. I begin by sketching out the formal parameters of the act. I consider how this understanding of the act has been mobilized by Žižek in his critique of capitalism, before raising some concerns and suggesting ways these can be addressed. In particular, I point out how the very determination of an act as formally authentic relies on an insufficiently thematized appeal to a descriptive–normative content, comprising the context within which it intervenes. I argue that critics are right to be suspicious of the more spectacular renditions of the act and capitalism proffered by Žižek. Even so, there are also hints in his work of a more nuanced, albeit underdeveloped, sensibility, and from which one can draw important lessons for Lacanian discourse theory and analysis.
