ABSTRACT
Žižek's uncompromising 'passion for the Real' clears a space for radical 'freedom', violent transgression. G. Steiner asserts that the Urnatur of language is silence, in three senses. First, the silence that antedates speech, before speech emerges with the hominid brain. Second, the silence that eerily surrounds all speaking, like the joyless silence of the empty school or the deserted factory, or the tangible silence of the countryside. Lastly, the Holocaustal silence of the 'Night of the world' – the No. I can't ever speak of such things. For Lacanians and thus for Žižek, release or break-out from enslavement, alienation and estrangement in the Symbolic is via the 'ethical act', whereby the anti-Oedipal subject reverses the 'forced choice' of the Oedipal era, between Symbolic castration and the potential for psychosis. For Žižek, the death drive is not the blind pointless will to self-destruction, but the violent energy required for the Act-Event to blast a way through the ontological blockage.
