Antigone by Efimia D. Karakantza;

Author:Efimia D. Karakantza;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2022-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

But what is this “effect of beauty on desire”, as Lacan puts it? Which beauty, and which desire? The beauty of Antigone, despite its ‘physicality’, derives “from the relation of the heroine to the limit”; this relation is, in the case of Antigone, the transgression of her atê.40 Atê in classical thought is the mental blindness or delusion that gods send to mortals when they wish to destroy them – often as a punishment for their hybris (recklessness). This blindness makes them incapable of ‘seeing’ the consequences of an action they are about to perform. In some cases, atê means simply a ‘calamity’, ‘ruin’, ‘doom’. For Lacan, however, it “designates the limit that human life can only briefly cross”.41 This is an idiosyncratic understanding of a controversial passage (Antigone 614), where the chorus gnomically states that “no human life can escape its measure of calamities”.42 The ektos atas (= without calamities) is explained by Lacan as “beyond this atê”, denoting a place where Antigone wants to go, for she “literally cannot stand it anymore” living in the house of Creon and subjected to his law; “her life is not worth living”.43 Thus Antigone goes beyond the limits of the human since her desire aims at the ‘beyond/outside the atê’ which marks the “crossing over”, the “going out” to a certain place.44 This place, however, is not death yet, for her life is “suspended in the zone between life and death”,45 while her desire for death is a marked sign of femininity.46 Her beauty glows as she is situated in a world between worlds, a place where life crosses over to death, and death to life. Antigone claims from the very beginning of the play: “I am already there”. Death in Antigone’s words is a “fate of a life which is about to turn into a certain death”.47 Symbolically, this is pictured poignantly in the way of her death: she is led and confined to a tomb while still alive, thus being neither dead nor alive.

And now, we should turn to whom this desire is addressed: we all know it is the brother. The brother as an absolute individual despite his treason of the city: ‘my brother is my brother’ Antigone seems to say. Polynices is ascribed a unique value such as is ascribed to a being without “reference to any content, to whatever good or evil [he] may have done, or he may be subjected to”. It marks a break in the language when “the emergent signifier freezes like a fixed object in spite of the flood of possible transformations”.48 This “ineffaceable character of the language”49 is crystallized in the name of Polynices: whoever is identified by a name should be given funeral rites. One can discern here the other known Lacanian postulates, the Name of the Father or the Order of the Symbolic and how language introduces us into this order. The linguistic dimension of the Symbolic is constituted not by language at large, but by linguistic signifiers acquiring their meaning by virtue of their mutual differences.

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