Remarks on Žižek’s Enjoy Your Symptom!

Like feminine subjectivity, the act involves the symbolic undecidability of the Real. The act is not founded in the symbolic register, in ideology, or in any psychological content. The act is founded only in itself; the act is excluded from the intersubjective network of the big Other insofar as it suspends the performative power of words. In an act, symbolic imperatives no longer oblige. Žižek describes the act as “[...] symbolic suicide: an act of ‘losing all,’ of withdrawing from symbolic reality, that enables us to begin anew from the ‘zero point,’ from that point of absolute freedom called by Hegel ‘abstract negativity.’” (EYS, p. 43) The act as symbolic suicide communicates nothing and expects nothing; in the act, the subject renounces support in the symbolic big Other. This renunciation involves a withdrawal so complete that the subject has nothing whatsoever left to lose, not even renunciation itself.