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risk.
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There are no guarantees of success (Welcome, 225). Indeed, only retroactively, in light
of what follows, can there be any sense of the act. Zizek writes: “an act is always a specific
intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an act or a ridiculous
empty posture, depending on this context” (Welcome, 152). So, rather than a radical step toward
freedom, the Boston Tea Party could well have been a pathetic act of vandalism by men in
unfortunate costumes. Likewise the Los Angeles riots could have been the moment when the
structures of class and race were radically transformed rather than merely the moment when rage
combusted into violence and looting.
Zizek emphasizes two features of the political act. First, it is external to the subject. That
is, the act is not something that the subject figures out and decides to do having rationally
considered a number of different options. On the contrary, insofar as the act is an intrusion of the
Real, “the act is precisely something which unexpectedly ‘just occurs’’ (TS, 375). So, an act is
not intentional; it is something that the subject had to do, that it could not do otherwise, that just
happened. Second, the genuinely political act intervenes from the position of the social
symptom; it is not simply some sort of transformation of the subject (CHU, 124). Zizek
explains: “an authentic act is not simply external with regard to the hegemonic field disturbed by
it: an act is an act only with regard to some symbolic field, as an intervention into it” (CHU,
125). To transform in this field, rather than remain trapped within it, an act has to intervene from
the standpoint of its hidden structuring principle, of its inherent exception. For example, the
political strategy of the Democratic Leadership Council in the United States has for all intents
and purposes been to race the Republicans to the right. Clinton Democrats, then, emphasized
“wefare reform” as they tried to appeal to what they perceived to be average or middle class
Americans. Lost in this strategy are the poor: the exclusion of the poor was necessary for the
Convention