Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor by Freeland Charles

Author:Freeland, Charles [Freeland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438446509
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

THE ETHIC OF ANTIGONE'S ACT: DO NOT GIVE WAY ON YOUR DESIRE

Lacan's anti-philosophical gesture with regard to the philosophical tradition of desire and the beautiful thus overlaps with his anti-philosophical gesture of “demystifying” the philosophical-ethical traditions of the good and the beautiful, a tradition that always addressed and yet missed the paradox of desire and the law. The link between beauty and desire is placed on the same grounds as the link between pleasure and the good. Both are essential to Lacan's determination of the ethical subject. The important point is that Lacan places the beautiful within “the field of the beyond-the-good principle” (S7: 238). As such, Antigone is dead to the law and to the city: she is to be excluded, deemed a criminal, and so put to death, submitted to the uncrossable limit of death. And so, anamorphically, we shall have to see the enigma of the beauty of Antigone as the enigma of a woman “between two deaths,” an image essentially linked to Lacan's questioning of the philosophical tradition's conception of pleasure and the good. As a figure of transgression, linked with crime, she thus addresses the ethical dimension at the heart psychoanalysis and of Seminar VII, the question of the Good and the Beautiful, the question of desire and the law, and of the voice of the law that speaks through the Other.

The ethic communicated in her act, summarized as we shall hear in the voiced command “do not give way on one's desire” can never play a role in a Platonic dialogue intent on seeking the universal essence of Justice and the good for a human being, for Antigone embodies the irreducible singularity of desire, a desire—as Kant said of beauty—without a unifying, grasping concept (ohne Begriff), a desire for an impossible object of desire. The tradition that commences with Plato, a tradition that Nietzsche might have called “nihilistic,” commanded us precisely to give way on desire. It thus maintained a morbid relation between desire and the law, one in which desire was denied, jouissance obliterated, and where the death drive, seemingly excluded, was actually put to work building the walls of the city and the systems of knowledge precisely in and by its exclusion. What emerges from this tradition, especially through its incarnations in and as the Christian confessional traditions, is a morbid relation between desire and the law such that desire is always taxed and audited by guilt.

Can one thus see—again, as though “anamorphically”—in the heroic splendor of Antigone's act Lacan's own attempt to articulate an ethic—an ethic of the tragedy of psychoanalysis, as Lacoue-Labarthe calls it, an ésthethique (both “aesthetic” and “ethic”)3—on the other side, so to speak, of the great Western tradition in ethics and its “morbid” entanglement of moral law and desire?

If so, wouldn't this ethic, whose imperative is “do not give way on your desire,” perhaps be best configured not only in the character of Antigone, but also in Creon? Isn't he the one who in fact gives way

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.