Act and Event: Ethics and the Political in Trauma

Abstract

The previous chapters introduced Lacan’s concept of the real and related it to the fields of trauma, ethics and politics respectively. In Chapter 3, it became clear that the real cannot simply be equated with the external referent of our representations in the sense of the Kantian das Ding. Although the real by definition resists recuperation in the symbolic, it should not be conceived as a natural realm of being before it is contaminated and disrupted by the intervention of the signifier. Rather, the real is a strange sort of surplus created by our advent as beings of language, a dimension of being that only ever presents itself as a ‘lack’ in the signifying chains building up the plane of social reality. In Chapter 4, I drew primarily from Zupančič’s work to argue that Lacan grounded his specific conception of ethics in this lack. The fact that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ (Lacan, 1957–58) (that is, no external guarantee to ground the specific maxim that motivates our actions) necessitates the supplementation of some sort of ‘act’ that compensates for this lack. In what first appears as a paradoxical claim, the subject is considered the after-effect of this ethical act. Subjectivity and ethics are thus intimately connected with the limits of the symbolic-imaginary order; it is where this order ‘lacks’ something that the subject is called into being in a moment of terror.