Zizek alternative module

Our Alternative is To Reject the Idea Implicit in the Affirmative that One Must Identify Within the Boundaries of the System, Instead We Make the Impossible Choice of the Act, Which Recognizes the Lack Inherent In the False Choice of Our Subjectivity and Re-organizes the Co-ordinates of the WorldOnly this Impossibility Can Deal With The Fact that Within The Current Structure Revolution Will Never Occur Slavoj Zizek, Philosopher, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please! Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, 2000
Precisely because of this internality of the Real to the Symbolic, it is possible to touch the Real through the Symbolic - that is the whole point of Lacan's notion of psychoanalytic treatment; this is what the Lacanian notion of' the psychoanalytic act is about - the act as a gesture which by definition touches the dimension of some impossible Real. This notion of the act must be conceived of against the background of the distinction between the mere endeavour to solve a variety of partial problems' within a given field and the more radical gesture of subvert- ing the very structuring principle of this field. An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what appears to be `possible' - it redefines the very contours of what is possible (an act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to he impossible', yet it changes its conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility.:. So when we are reproached by an opponent for doing something unacceptable. an act occurs when we no longer defend ourselves by accepting the underlying premiss that we hitherto shared with the opponent; in contrast, we fully accept the reproach, changing the very terrain that made it unacceptable - an act occurs when our answer to the reproach is `Yes, that it is precisely what I am doingl' in
film, a modest, not quite appropriate recent example would be Kevin Kline's blurting out `I'm gay' instead of `Yes!' during the wedding ceremony in in and Out: openly admitting the truth that he is gay, and thus surprising not only us, the spectators, but even himself.51 In a series of recent (commercial) films, we find the same surprising radical gesture. In

Speed, when the hero (Keanu Reeves) is confronting the terrorist black- mailer partner who holds his partner at gunpoint, he shoots not the blackmailer , but his own partner in the leg - this apparently senseless act thomentarily shocks the blackmailei; who lets go of the hostage and runs away...In Ransom, when the media tycoon (Mel Gibson) goes on television to answer the kidnappers request for two million dollars as a ransom for ins son, he surprises everyone by saying that he will oiler two million dollars to anyone who will give him any information about the kidnappers, and announces that he will pursue them to the end, with all his resourccs, if they do not release his son immediately This radical ges- ture stuns not only the kidnappers - immediately after accomplishing it, Gibson himself almost breaks down, aware of the risk he is courting~ And finally, the supreme case: when, in the flashback scene from The Usual Suspects, the mysterious Keyser Soeze (Kevin Stacey) returns home and finds his wife and small daughter held at gunpoint by the members of a rival mob, he resorts to the radical gesture of shooting his wife and daughter themselves dead this act enables him mercilessly to pursue members of the rival gang,

their families, parents, friends, killing them What these three gestures have in common is that, in a situation of the forced choice, the subject makes the `crazy', impossible choice of, in a way striking at himself at what is most precious to himself. This act, far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned on oneself, rather changes the co-ordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself: by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him in check, the subject gains the space of free action. Is not such a radical gesture of `striking at oneself' constitutive of subjectivity as such? Did not Lacan himself accornplish a similar act of
`shooting at himself' when, in 1979, he dissolved the Ecole freudien de Paris, his agalma, his own organization, the very space of his collective life? Yet he was well aware that only such a `self-destructive' act could clear the terrain for a new beginning

The Alternative SolvesWhile Your Indictments of the Indeterminate World After the Act Assume a Causal Series, The True Act is Its Own Immediate Realization, Not a Process Which Reaches a Distant GoalOnly Radical Criticism, Which Cares Not For Success By the Standards of the System, Can Reach Outside the Boundaries it Already Accommodates Slavoj iek, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2002 (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-forleninist-intolerance.html)
Today we can already discern the signs of a kind of general unease. Recall the series of events usually listed under the name of Seattle. The ten-year honeymoon of triumphant global capitalism is over; the longoverdue seven-year itch is here-witness the panicked reactions of big media, which from Time magazine to CNN suddenly started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of "honest" protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one: how to actualize the media's accusations, how to invent the organizational structure that will confer on this unrest the form of a universal political demand. Otherwise the momenturn will be lost, and what will remain is a marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, endowed with a certain efficiency but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, and so forth. In other words, the key Leninist lesson today is that politics without the organizational form of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) new social movements is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution without a revolution!" Today's challenge is that there are two ways open for sociopolitical engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the long march through the institutions, or get active in new social movements, from feminism to ecology to antiracism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not political in the sense of the universal singular: they are one-issue movements that lack the dimension of universality; that is, they do not relate to the social totality. Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial. They only exploit the working classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives instead of identifying with it to the end.16 Is this also not the case with today's left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, and so on to score points over the conservatives without endangering the system. Recall how, at Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (a message that, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of the subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It's the same with all new social movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: systemic politics is always ready to listen to their demands, thus depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenic, open, tolerant, ready to listen to all; even if one insists on one's demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of negotiation. The Leninist Utopia What, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn't count, even if we define it in Merleau-Ponty's dialectical way (as the wager that the future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts); neither do any abstract-universal ethical norms." The

only criteria is the absolutely inherent one: that of the enacted utopia. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise that justifies present violence. It is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and the future, we are-as if by Grace-for a brief time allowed to act as if the utopian future were (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow-in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.