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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1.The distinction between the French terms for knowledge active in Lacan’s seminars, savoir and connaissance, with its correlate méconnaissance (misrecognition ), is discussed in the seventh essay in this collection. Savoir pertains to the symbolic order. It is the ultimate target of psychoanalysis, the unconscious knowledge of the truth of desire, a knowledge that is blocked, obscured, or covered over by the work of connaissance (the register of philosophical self-knowledge), which obtains at the level of the imaginary and the conscious ego. 2. This is an oblique reference to Hölderlin’s “The Meaning of Tragedies,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, edited and translated with an introduction by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 316, and to interpretations of this famous passage by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, in his “Hölderlin’s Theater,” in Philosophy and Tragedy, edited by Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 119. The reference to the “double death” stems from Lacan’s seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.), the session dated June 8, 1960 and entitled “Antigone between Two Deaths,” 270ff. 3. In order “to withstand the test of commentary,” the question with regard to the task Lacan’s reading of Freud sets for itself is, paraphrasing Lacan, “not simply to situate, but to gauge whether the answer (the text) gives to the questions he raises has or has not been superseded by the answer one finds in his work to current questions.” My own modification of this is to seek the questions, not the answers, Lacan’s texts suggests for contemporary concerns. See Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” Écrits, 336/404. ESSAY 1. Toward an Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1. Marcelle Marini, Jacques Lacan: The French Context, translated by Anne Tomiche (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 20ff., where one will 281 282 Notes to Essay 2 find an informative account of the complicated context surrounding the publication of Lacan’s seminars. 2. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1952 [1925]), 57. On page 67 of that work, Freud says that the only philosophers he read were Schopenhauer, whom he credits with anticipating some of the discoveries of psychoanalysis, such as the dominance of the emotions, the “supreme importance of sexuality, and the mechanisms of repression, and Nietzsche, who, likewise, was prescient of psychoanalysis. 3. Again, I refer the reader to Marcelle Marini’s Jacques Lacan: The French Context, 230–231. 4. Anonymous, “l’Infinie et la castration,” Scilicet 5 (1975), 75–77. Scilicet is a review journal published by the École Freudienne. It was a collection under the direction of Jacques Lacan. 5. Ibid., 76. 6. Ibid., 78–79. 7. Ibid., 75. 8. Ibid., 85–86. See also Lacan’s remarks in l’Étourdit, also published in Scilicet 4 (1973), 5–31. The concluding essay in this collection returns to this theme of the in-finite. 9. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 269/324. 10. Ibid., 270/324. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Jacques Lacan, “l’Étourdit,” Scilicet 4 (1973), 5–52, also quoted in Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (East Sussex: Routledge, 1996), 208. For the distinction between continuous and discontinuous transformation, see Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 208. 14. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), 127. 15. Lacan, Écrits, 270/325. 16. Ibid., 275/331. 17. Ibid., 274/330. Essay 2. Philosophy’s Preparation for Death 1. Lacan, Écrits, 536/642. 2. Alain Badiou, “Lacan and the Presocratics,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, edited by Slavoj Žižek (New York and London: Verso: 2006), 7. 3. Badiou, “Lacan and the Presocratics,” 13. 4. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 154. 283 Notes to Essay 3 5. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 38. 6. Jean-Claude Milner, “Lacan et la science moderne,” in Lacan avec les philosophes, 344. (The author has added the dash in the word “infinite” for emphasis.) 7. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, edited by Alan Bloom, translated by H...