Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Chapter 5: Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor

5 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire. This line of sight focuses on an image that possesses a mystery which up till now has never been articulated. —Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII What we are dealing with is nothing less than the attraction of transgression . . . that obscure and original transgression for which (Freud) found a name at the end of his work, in a word, the death instinct, to the extent that man finds himself anchored deep within . . . its formidable dialectic. —Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII, “The Splendor of Antigone” In his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, one of Lacan’s declared purposes is to prepare the way toward a new “ethics of psychoanalysis ” by first articulating a “demythologization” of the European philosophical ethical tradition. In pursuit of this, he often makes references not only to scientific and clinical observations, but also to literary sources. Why, in this period of his seminars from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the famous “return to Freud” was at its height, why this appeal to literary, dramatic sources? Why, in a seminar devoted to laying out the groundwork for an “ethics of psychoanalysis,” this captivating intersection between psychoanalysis and theater? The following essay takes up this question and shows that Lacan’s ethics is also an aesthetics, that his emphasis is not only on the ethical act, but also on “beauty,” specifically, a pre-Platonic, Sophoclean beauty: the beauty and the splendor of Antigone. This makes his ethics an ethical-aesthetics, something he situates in terms of his threefold topology of the imaginary , the symbolic, and the real. But this aesthetic dimension is not 145 146 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor restricted so much to artistic categories, whereby it might be delimited to the dimensions of the imaginary, nor is it concerned with aesthetic judgment, whereby it might be restricted to the symbolic dimension. Rather, Lacan’s seminar develops an ethics of transgression. Beauty thus becomes the almost seismographic register of a movement of transgression that concerns all three of the interrelated dimensions of his psychoanalytic topology, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The following therefore begins with a discussion of the manifold dimensions of Antigone’s beauty that Lacan brings forward in his seminar and pursues this in its resonance with the Lacanian ethic as an ethicoaesthetic of transgression, of jouissance and “the real.” How does this approach contribute toward his task of transforming and demystifying the tradition of European philosophical ethics, which, especially in the late 1950s, had largely become an existential ethics of finitude, an ethics that was essentially a way of “being toward death”? Antigone’s Parodos In his seventh seminar, Lacan referred to a wide range of literary material extending from the courtly love poetry of the troubadours as well as to the novels of the Marquis de Sade. But it is Sophocles’ classical tragic drama, Antigone, which is most prominent. In the sixth seminar, the reference was to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and in the eighth seminar, to Claudel’s Sygne de Coûfontaine in l’Otage, so tragic drama had a widely important role for Lacan’s work in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Such dramatic and literary characters were essential to the development of his thought because, for him, literature had a way of revealing and articulating what he called a “line of sight that defines desire,” a “line of sight . . . which up till now has never been articulated” (S7: 247). I shall take this “line of sight” as my theme in the following pages, following its intensity to the moment where splendor, Antigone’s transgressive beauty and splendor, coincide with darkness, the darkness of the tomb, the darkness of an impossible, infinite moment “between two deaths.” Antigone, one of Lacan’s most well-known referents, was first brought to light in the context of a drama staged in a theater perched at the heart of the city of Athens. Her implacable, indomitable will brought to light a transgressive jouissance more closely allied with expenditure and death than with sublimation before the law. She must have been a frightening, monstrous spectacle. The play therefore presented both ethi- 147 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor cal and political dimensions that were crucial not only for the emerging democracy of classical Athens, but also for modern-day psychoanalysis. At this stage of Lacan’s work...