Commitment to the Act
Ethics and/of the unconscious
What makes something ethical?
I don’t with to answer this from a meta-ethical perspective (i.e., establishing the grounds of the category of ‘ethics’). I wish to pursue this question from the position of the subject who is the actor of a moment. In the moment of an act, there is a subject who is implicated and propels (or is propelled by) this act. What constitutes this as ethical? Another way to ask this is: What does it mean for a subject to be ethical? Why do some things feel meaningless, and other things feel meaningful?
What is an ‘Act’?
In her book The Singularity of Being, Mari Ruti gives us some ideas of what constitutes an ‘act’ when she evokes Lacan’s theory of the sinthome:
While the symptom is a coded message to the Other in the sense that it is motivated by the subject’s (misguided) conviction that someone in the external world can decipher the meaning of its suffering, the sinthome operates independently of the conventions of intersubjective exchange. (61)
According to Ruti, the sinthome is closely associated with das Ding, the original object which was lost (although this gets complicated when we realize that the thing was never really in our possession in the first place — something not entirely relevant Ruti’s advancement…
