Holderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy by Tambling Jeremy

Author:Tambling, Jeremy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2014-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

III

LACAN: ANTIGONE

If Heidegger’s uncanny constitutes ‘man’, Freud’s unheimlich questions gender and splits identity through differance, Derrida’s word, synomymous perhaps with the ‘uncanny’. Lacan misses the gender-question in discussing this stasimon when reading Antigone, nor does he acknowledge Heidegger’s commentary. He translates the first lines: ‘There are a lot of wonders in the world, but nothing is more wonderful than man’ (EP, 274). With ‘pantoporos aporos’, the first term is annotated as ‘man knows a lot of tricks’; line 360: ‘he advances toward nothing likely to happen, he advances, and is pantoporos, “artful”, but he is aporos, always “screwed”. He knows what he’s doing. He always manages to cause things to come crashing down on his head’ (EP, 275). This uncanniness urges Lacan onwards:

he meets nothing in the future without resource; only from Hades shall he apply no means of flight; and he has contrived escape from desperate maladies. (Loeb, 360–64)

For Lacan: ‘there is only one thing that man can’t come to terms with, and that has to do with Hades’ and says that ‘he has found an escape into impossible sicknesses’ – sickness fabricated, as a symptom put up to prevent the pathway to desire (EP, 275).

Lacan’s analysis runs through three sections.32 ‘The Splendour of Antigone’, refers to Aristotle on catharsis as at the basis of tragedy (tragedy produces catharsis: the purgation of the emotions by pity and fear) and turns it round: tragedy is concerned with purification, or purity, Antigone embodies this in ‘unbearable splendour’ (EP, 247), becoming more intensely beautiful at the very moment of moving into the realm of death. In the second section, ‘The Articulations of the Play’, her ‘beauty’ is associated with pain (EP, 261). While the Chorus says that ‘there is no-one foolish enough to desire death’ (line 220), and, in the second stasimon, sing of those who are ‘without disaster’ (Ate, lines 614, 625), noting that Antigone has gone in search of her Ate, Lacan decides that she has gone ‘beyond the limit of Ate’. He then links the word Ate with ‘atrocious’ (EP, 263), showing how Antigone inverts all forms of desire and beauty that are traditionally sanctioned: she ‘sublimates’ her desire, which, for Lacan, means that ‘she raises an object … to the dignity of the Thing’ (EP 112). Her desire is an outrage to Creon, being invested with the values of finding ‘the lost object’.33 Ate is ‘the limit that human life can only briefly cross’ (EP, 262–63), but she goes beyond everything of the city, the polis, being hypsipolis apolis; her beauty, which is her catharsis, ‘derives from [the] relationship of the hero[ine] to the limit, which is defined on this occasion by a certain Ate’ (EP, 286).

The third section, ‘Antigone Between Two Deaths’, discussing the first stasimon, quotes Reinhardt – who calls Sophoclean tragic characters ‘lone, uprooted, exiled creatures’ (Reinhardt, 2, 3) – on their ‘solitude’. They are ‘always beyond established limits’: as with Ajax, ‘dead in life’. For the Sophoclean hero, ‘the race is run … they are characters who find themselves … in a limit zone … between life and death’ (EP, 272).

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