36
joint:’ within a given social Whole, it is precisely the element which is prevented from
actualizing its full particular identity that stands for its universal dimension” (TS, 224).
22
Zizek suggests that the ultimate targets of the war on terror are “ourselves.” That is, “the
evocation of the external enemy serves to displace the focus from the true origin of tensions, the
inherent antagonism of the system,” (Welcome, 154).
23
This is of course one of the strangest elements of Hardt’s and Negri’s position: the multitude
provides the crises that Empire needs to realize itself as Empire.
24
In The Ticklish Subject, Zizek raises this point against Judith Butler, pointing out that “she
overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the
practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what
they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account,
even engendered by the hegemonic form of the big Other—what Lacan calls the ‘big Other are
symbolic norms and their codified transgressions” 264.
25
For a detailed discussion of the Act from the perspective of Lacan’s notion of passage a l’acte,
see Sarah Kay’s Zizek: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2003).
26
There is thus a similarity between Zizek’s account of the Act and Hannah Arendt’s idea of
action: for both, acts are risky interventions whose meaning is always retroactively determined
from the new circumstances that acts bring into being. A key difference between their accounts,
however, consists in the relation between speech and acts. For Zizek, following Lacan, real acts
lack the support of the symbolic order necessary for speech; they are Real (TS, 374).
27
Fragile Absolute, 143 -160. See also my discussion in “Zizek on Law.”
Convention