Presentation short abstract

Seeks to consider the question of political acting in the face of the socio-environmental emergency.

Presentation long abstract

The paper seeks to consider the question of political acting in the face of the socio-environmental emergency. Despite widespread and often seemingly radical socio-environmental resistance and action in many parts of the world, they do not make much of a dent in altering the history of the world’s socio-environmental future. The paper examines the question of (political) resistance and the content of what constitutes ‘radical’ forms of action. Starting from the realities of the present climate emergency, the paper develops a series of interrelated arguments, articulated around the psychoanalytic notion of ‘acting’ and the subsequent distinction between ‘action’ and ‘act’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Through this, we argue that psychoanalytic theory can shed light on how act(ion) is influential in stabilizing and/or changing the status quo. In the paper, we distinguish the act from acting-out and passage-à-l’acte. In acting-out, the subject appears to know exactly what it seeks in order to escape a certain situation but remains desperately attached to an Other who holds the power to provide it. In contrast, the subject in passage-à-l’acte loses its connection to desire, and instead solely revolves around the break from (and destruction of) the situation altogether. It is only through the act that the subject can overcome itself, subscribe to a new situation, and be truthful to its own desire. We conclude that the act opens the terrain of radial political transformation, one that permits a re-organization of socio-ecological political order.