For more than two decades, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has been ‘exploding’ the world of academy with a reflection that aims to present the possibility of a ‘truly political act’ that constructs its own conditions of possibility in the way of event. This is an act that would apparently be “impossible” to imagine in a given situation but that it would be nonetheless present as possibility, in the inconsistency that would characterize any symbolic register.
This article seeks to trace the genealogy of such an act which Žižek has conceived as inscribed in a given situation, but radically new at the same time. In this regard, it is stated that the Žižekian act is inseparable from a materialist ontology of an ‘All-non-All’ or an inconsistent all, defended by Žižek. Hence, the features of the act that this article identifies: its “impossibility”, the traversal of fantasy and its militant subjective constitution, only become intelligible when
they are interpreted in view of this materialist ontology. There would be the key that would permit to decipher the main premises of the radical political act (and its polemic theoretical and political derivates). This article ends by reflecting on the normative consequences that a radical political act, in this way conceived, would have to a general notion of democracy.