This essay brings Lacan into conversation with Marcuse to investigate the link between “deviant” desires and the inclination for personal and collective acts of resistance. Offering a Lacanian-Marcusian counterpoint to the Foucauldian-Butlerian notion that resistance is a matter of negotiating with disciplinary power, the essay explains the political stakes of the so-called Lacanian “act” – of following the “truth” of one’s desire even at the risk of one’s symbolic intelligibility. In a culture that fetishizes intersubjectivity, such an act of severing social bonds may seem like the very antithesis of ethics, yet – from a specifically Lacanian perspective – it is the culmination of ethics as well as (potentially at least) an opening to radical social change.