Between action and act: On the 9-N m Catalonia's and the limits of performativity

© 2017 CSIC. I. By referring to Michel Foucault's and Jacques Lacan's works, and also taking as reference the popular consultation which took place in Cataluña on November 9th 2014, the purpose of this article is to draw the limits of Judith Butler's theory of performativity with respect to the subject of the political and its agency. Those limits are made manifest by the distinction between political action and act or between subversion, understood as a transgression of the norm which gives place to the reconfiguration of the socio-symbolic order, and interruption, understood as a transgression of the norm which constitutes an event of a radically different order.