#radical act

[findingpeacethroughchaos]

[crickettgrrrl]

[random-bookquotes]

I think that in addition to self-care we need to take care of ourselves by taking care of each other. I say that as someone with a disability. It’s a radical act to take care of each other, and it’s a revolutionary act to ask others to take care of us.

Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.

[saintmadness]

How love and communism changes the past

“Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always-already loved you, as if our love was destined long before we met.  My present love causes the past which gave birth to it”

Žižek — Event: Philosophy in Transit — p. 111.

For me at least, this provides one of the better entry-points from which to understand Žižek’s concept of an “authentic act.”  A significant part of my research — that the recomposition of an emancipatory anti-capitalist politics pivots on the manifest realization that not only is the enunciation that communism is necessary to terminally end the power of capital, but as the real movement which abolishes the present state of things, communism is already an active force of the present; it is necessary, it is possible, and it is very much alive — relies on the Žižekian-inspired notion of the “radical act.”

I have written previously that:

One of Žižek’s most insistent political prescription is that what is required today is a radical “Act” (Sharpe and Boucher 2010: 181).  Specifically, an injunction to “repeat Lenin” and generate a radical Act of another “October 1917” (Boucher 2010: 1).  Lenin, devoid of ideological baggage, remains an obvious reference point for those concerned about radically transforming the world, rather than merely reforming the existing system (Robinson and Tormey 2007).  Lenin has a reputation for intransigence, determination and ruthlessness that drove his ambition to be part of a movement which could seize power, retain that power, and subsequently use it to achieve substantial social transformation.  In the words of Žižek, Lenin “wasn’t afraid to succeed” (Žižek 2002a: 6).  Žižek’s “Leninism” cannot be understood outside the context of his theory of a radical Act.  In essence, an Act signals “a sudden change of perspective, whereby what first appears to be the supreme ideological guarantee of meaningfulness and order abruptly reveals its flipside that consists of the utter nonsense of obscene and idiotic enjoyment” (Bosteels 2011b: 180).  In other words, “an Act is not only a gesture that ‘does the impossible,’ but an intervention in social reality which changes the very co-ordinates of what is perceived as ‘possible’” (Žižek 2002b: 167).  An Act ruptures our attachment to the status quo.  For Žižek, the point of a radical Act is precisely to adopt a signifier (‘Lenin’) of ultimate transgression, to then “identify with the symptom” (Lenin was someone who immediately perceived the revolutionary chance and imposed his vision) and subsequently explode the existing assemblage of social relations (Robinson and Tormey 2007).  The Act is, for Žižek, a way of escaping from the closed teleology of traditional Marxism, with its belief in the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse through internal contradictions, without sacrificing a belief in the possibility of fundamental change (Sheehan 2012: 84).  Žižek demands the Leninist gesture as a way of initiating a political project that would undermine the totality of the global-liberal-capitalist world-order and unabashedly assert itself as acting on behalf of those who form “part-of-no-part” in capitalist society.  In recent times, Žižek does not detect capitalism’s death throes in the global financial crisis of 2008, seeing it instead as only making the system stronger – however, there is hope in an Act:

“An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible – an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.  This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies today’s global capitalism” (Žižek 2010b: 94).

Žižek stresses how effecting a change to the political order of capitalism requires a disruption to the Symbolic order, a breaking down of the existing horizons of meaning, and how this can be translated into concrete political action (Sheehan 2012: 85). 

The radical act holds the same place as falling in love.  It is the contingent manifestation of the decision to act against the exigencies of capital, and once the commitment is made to act, one’s fidelity to communism appears as necessary (the only logical thing that could have occurred), and as something towards which humanity was always moving.  Differently: communism emerges through the contingent decision to act; then, once it is manifest, it doesn’t becomes something stagnant, it evolves, it imposes on humanity an emancipation, one that continually seeks to inscribe on our being all the consequences of no longer being fettered to the dictates of capital, to structure our emancipation around fidelity to the event of communism.

Perhaps we can re-write Žižek’s quote:

“Fidelity to communism changes the past: it is as if we were always-already communists, as if our emancipation was destined long before we acted.  This present communism causes the past which gave birth to it.”

[quotecollector14]

This is my place. It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.

Terry Tempest Williams, Listening to the Land

[thesegirlsrock]

Radical Act - Trailer