ABSTRACT
The act is a concept often invoked by Lacan—notice for example the title of his seminar L'acte psychanalytique. It is also a concept utilised in his Ethics seminar where Jacques Lacan addresses Antigone's act, an act pushing to the limit "the realisation of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such" since Antigone "incarnates that desire". Zizek's paradoxical idealisation of Antigone as a model of radical ethico-political action seems also to conflict with his own Lacanian account of the act as a non-subjective, non-intentional encounter with the real. Lacan's reading of Antigone in the Ethics seminar is based on the antithesis between Creon's ethics of "the good of all", and Antigone's ethics, which is articulated around "a good that is different from everyone else's", a pure incarnation of the "laws of desire".
