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

Introduction

Introduction There is a yearning (Sehnsucht) that seeks the unbound (Ungebundene). —Hölderlin, “Mnemosyne” Antigone, in her unbearable splendor: My title speaks from the heart of this book. These words, taken from Lacan’s seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, not only comprise the title to one of the central essays in this collection, they are also the words, the image and the enigma, the epiphany, one might say, to which my thoughts kept returning as I attempted to understand the direction and ideals of Lacan’s teachings on ethics. Rather than contemporary clinical case studies, why did Lacan instead place this tragic yet electrifying image, drawn from classical, literary sources, at the climax of his famous seminar? Was Lacan merely emulating Freud’s adaptation of the sufferings of the son of Laius? Or was there some other, perhaps darker, purpose at work in this “splendor”? Is a tragic dimension the key to understanding Lacan’s ethics? Understandably, Lacan does not portray Antigone as darkened by mourning and melancholia over the death of her brother. His Antigone is neither muted nor defeated in the finality of the dark silence of the tomb that awaits her. In his reading of the play’s final scenes, we see instead an Antigone bathed in transgressive and defiant colors. She becomes an unappeasable force crushing the pale of human law. It seems indeed something larger and more explosive is being brought to center stage in this evocation of her “unbearable splendor.” Is there a link between Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis and the sort of transgressive ethics one finds in the writings of Georges Bataille, a latent complicity perhaps with the Bataille who described himself as being not a philosopher, but a mystic or a madman? But such a solar Antigone, eloquent in the grips of an impossible desire, would certainly have darkly and dramatically shaded the project of a psychoanalytic ethics. Would this not end up promoting an unspeakably violent and singularly transgressive act as an ethical paradigm? 1 2 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor Why, indeed, this death-stalked poetic climax to Lacan’s seminar? Would not all that is here “unbearable” also be unspeakable? What would the consequences of this be for an ethics presumably rooted in speech and speaking? What new directions in ethical thought might be heralded by this recourse, elaborated at length in Lacan’s seminar, to the ancient tragedy of Antigone? But what is the upshot of all this? What new ways of thinking emerge from the shadows of this “unbearable splendor”? Such are the questions and perplexities to which the following essays are an attempted response and elaboration. Allow me now to briefly survey four main perspectives that shall be taken up in this regard. The first of these concerns the overall critical relation between Lacan and the classical philosophical tradition. In terms of such great themes as those of “death,” “truth,” and the “good for a human being,” the following essays question and examine the critical relationship between Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis and the classical European traditions of ethical and political philosophy. The term “philosophy” names an essentially classical Greek tradition of ethical and political thought, the tradition that defined itself by posing and sustaining such fundamental questions as: “What is the being of a human being?” “What is True and the Good for a human being?” Regarding this tradition we shall ask, is Lacan an “anti-philosopher”? Lacan makes many efforts and many statements that would seem to support this position. Especially his insistence on the unconscious as a dimension fundamental to human experience would seem quite enough to distance his psychoanalytic ethics from the horizons of the classical European philosophical tradition. Throughout his seminars, he often seems to be searching for a way through philosophy , a way toward its limits, its outside, its “Other,” or its “after.” But Lacan never simply rejects philosophy outright. He seems rather to be attempting something more troublesome and paradoxical: a philosophy of “anti-philosophy,” the effect of which is to enlarge philosophy and to possibly enrich it. What is Lacan’s strategy here? While it is a strategy that looks for moments, angles, questions, dimensions of thought and experience that question and indeed tear at the philosophical canvas, the critical effect of all this is to offer philosophy a new language and new ways of thinking the being and the limits of human language and experience . Lacan thus enlarges philosophy rather than rejects it. His position...