Commitment to the Act

What makes something ethical?

I don’t with to answer this from a meta-ethical perspective (i.e., establishing the grounds of the category of ‘ethics’). I wish to pursue this question from the position of the subject who is the actor of a moment. In the moment of an act, there is a subject who is implicated and propels (or is propelled by) this act. What constitutes this as ethical? Another way to ask this is: What does it mean for a subject to be ethical? Why do some things feel meaningless, and other things feel meaningful?

What is an ‘Act’?

In her book The Singularity of Being, Mari Ruti gives us some ideas of what constitutes an ‘act’ when she evokes Lacan’s theory of the sinthome:

While the symptom is a coded message to the Other in the sense that it is motivated by the subject’s (misguided) conviction that someone in the external world can decipher the meaning of its suffering, the sinthome operates independently of the conventions of intersubjective exchange. (61)

According to Ruti, the sinthome is closely associated with das Ding, the original object which was lost (although this gets complicated when we realize that the thing was never really in our possession in the first place — something not entirely relevant Ruti’s advancement of the theory of the act). That is, it is the subject of the non-linguistic, non-social, and non-signified/-able pulsions of jouissance that propels one towards the sinthome.

In doing this, the subject steps outside of the symbolic and into the real, into the core of one’s existence, which looks and feels like a rupture because it cannot be understood in the proper cognitive sense. It cannot even be written about (hence the awkwardness of such terms). The act, for Ruti, is when we are implicated in the Event which is produced by our sinthomal movements.

Okay, so there are multiple elements here, and let’s try to bring them together in technical terms, then break them apart in more concrete language.

The sinthome is directed by and through jouissance toward das Ding. In doing so, the subject of the drive is produced, which is outside of and against any kind of symbolic structure or organization that typically dictates social life. In these moments of rupture, one is living one’s singularity, one’s deepest and rawest existence. Simultaneously, this produces and is produced by (causality here goes both ways) an Event. In one’s commitment to this Event — and hence in one’s commitment to one’s singularity — the individual can be said to be in the ‘act’, and can be said to be living ethically.

An example Ruti gives is loving someone of the same sex or different race if you are from a symbolic structure (be it familial or political-cultural) that shuns such relations. In loving this other person, you have stepped beyond these terms of sociality and risk losing your position of subjecthood. In many cases (and in many countries and times), this can lead to literal destitution: death. In other places and times, this might look like being cut off forever from your family of birth.

The object of the other person of the different race/same sex functions as das Ding, and therefore is the object of your drive or jouissance. Moving towards them lovingly is sinthomal. It is widely believed that Henry James was homosexual to some degree. If this is true, why did he write such long and dense novels? This would be acting within one’s symbolic structure. He could retain his status as subject and “stuff one object (objet a) after another into the lack within [his] being, only to discover that no object can fully make up for the loss of [das Ding]” (Ruti, 60).

Can we predict an act?

An obvious example of an act is political revolution. A structure or system is directly abolished and overthrown to install a new system. In this case, it is the moment of overthrow that the Event emerges, and it is hope of a better world which functions as the sinthome of the revolutionaries. The commitment to their act (i.e., going through with their plans) is a direct example of stepping outside of one’s symbolic structure and risking subjective destitution and personal destruction.

What is it with the act that appeals to so many people throughout history, both personally and politically? The difference here is the difference between phenomenology/existentialism and psychoanalysis.

For an existentialist, an act could be done with intentionality. It is only one’s conscious commitment to one’s own cause, or ‘project’, that an act becomes ethical. So the “why” of this act can perhaps be articulated — in a treatise, let’s say.

For psychoanalysis, the act is unconsciously produced: the subject doesn’t see it coming. The act descends upon the subject in a rather uncontrollable way. We don’t really get a say in who we love, we simply love them — in many cases, despite everything.

Could we have predicted that Marcel Duchamp would draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa in 1919? It seems obvious, doesn’t it? At a time when artists were beginning to subvert and perverse their historical legacies and medium, it can be expected that someone will take the most sacred of all artistic objects and play with its gender, another sacred category.

From a phenomenological point of view, you can construct an Event, and therefore an act. You can manipulate certain conditions (almost like a “flow” state) in order to embrace one’s authenticity. We could, therefore, probably predict Duchamp’s defamation of the Mona Lisa. After all, this is an obvious move in the history of art. This means that an act is teleological: it can both be predicted and therefore historicized.

However: an act is not a move, not in the existential sense, at least. An act, again, is an accident. Reading Duchamp’s Mona Lisa psychoanalytically, we could say that he was overtaken by this impulse to re-do this piece of art; he was overwhelmed, that is, by his sinthome and only then could he commit himself to it. Every attempt to say whether or not an Event could have been predicted is retroactive for this reason. The subject in the moment does not know when or how or what will be produced, he can only commit himself to this process. We then, as a culture, try to make sense of things following the rupture. This is like the Lacanian technique of variable length sessions. After the analysand says something on accident — after, that is, the unconscious emerges — we have a tendency to ‘cover it up’: “I did not mean to say this, I meant to say that. I must be tired or something.” Cutting the session at such a moment, before it can be justified, leaves us suspended over our singularity, over the rupture which was unconsciously created.

The ‘Ethical’ Act?

So the commitment to an act is what constitutes an ethical subject. And this raises some very interesting questions and scenarios like, “What if the act is horrific and hurts other people. Does my commitment to it determine its ethicality?” What’s at stake is the classical debate between moral relativism and objectivism.

This does indeed open up the “hero” to a great many pitfalls. In fact, it is no wonder why the hero of the Greeks or the hero of the Romantics have fallen out of favor today: it represents a majestic yet tyrannical articulation of a single person’s or culture’s values at the expense of the subjugation of the other. And most would not consider this an ethical act.

So one thing is true of the act: it can only be internally judged — it has its own logic. For, if it could be judged from the outside, it did not actually do anything to rupture the symbolic. But who, then, must it answer to? Is it merely the rapturous self-judgement and self-fashioning of Nietzsche? Or can we think about how the act relates to the social world of others and the Other? Ruti would want to say the latter. Demonstrating Zizek’s own way of thinking about the act, she states:

[T]he subject who endures the act emerges from the experience a different being … This statement about rebirth is important, for it raises the possibility of future repercussions. … This should not be confused with the idea that the act consciously aims at change, let alone social change. (68)

The tension which emerges is the following: on the one hand, the act has the potential to transform the subject into something new; on the other hand, this transformation cannot be said to be the cause or the motivation for the act — and, even more, change is not promised. These can both be true because the act simply “fractures the subject’s usual life-world and taken-for-granted mode of being” which can lead the subject to “question the underpinnings of its existence in ways that provoke a sudden shift in perspective” (69). The act can, but only as an effect, move things around.

And this is a tension because there are two elements in the act: the symbolic and the Event. The symbolic will take form again after the Event — of this, there is no doubt. What form will the symbolic take, though? And what is the Event doing to the symbolic? Those are the questions at stake.

For Ruti, what makes an act ethical is its dignity. If the actor wields its power and transgressive desire to murder, hurt, or degrade the other, this is not ethical. It is just a senseless act, an act without dignity — a simulacrum of an act. It has the form of an act, but not the content of an ethical act. She wants the ethical act to be grounded in protecting or serving “the underdog.” But this is now outside the realm of Lacanian ethics.

I foregrounded this essay at the beginning by saying I am not concerned with whether or not something is moral; I am concerned with how the subject is implicated in its own act. That is, how the subject is situated in relationship with its own desire. To summarize: the drive of the subject to doggedly pursue its sinthome beyond what is socially acceptable or inter-subjectively coherent is what constitutes an ethical act, and therefore an ethical subject. Giving ground relative to one’s desire — i.e., identifying one’s desire with the Other — is what rids the subject of its ethical capacity.

I would claim that only once this is done, once a rupture takes place and the subject(s) is suspended and its groundlessness is laid bare, can something actually take place. I often liken this to belief: only once one fully and completely doubts one’s object of belief can the belief be said to be authentic.