Her Mother Her Self: The Ethics of the Antigone Family Romance*

Abstract

This essay discusses the implications of Irigaray’s readings of the Antigone in the construction of a feminist ethics. By focusing on the gaps and intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology as formulative of Irigaray’s eventual call for an ethics of sexual difference, I emphasize the inevitability of rethinking the functions of historicity, femininity, and maternity in the formation of new models of intersubjectivity.

A quelques ajouts ou réductions près, notre imaginaire fonctionne toujours selon le schéma qui se met en place à travers les mythologies et tragédies grecques.

Luce Irigaray

Despite its chronologic circumstance, Jacques Lacan’s reading of Sophocles’s Antigone (1984a) as an enactment of an ethics of psychoanalysis, a magnificent, if at times maddeningly obtuse, staging of the fundamental structure of the relation of self and Other, situates itself both between and beyond G. W. F. Hegel and Sigmund Freud in its attempt to recreate the Sophoclean drama as the expression of the uniquely human. In this comparative context, the Lacanian take on Greek tragedy might be read as a failed effort to transcend its situation at this somewhat anachronistic point of convergence of the psychoanalytic and the (Hegelian) phenomenological, both of which strive to analyze tragedy’s symbolic structure, grounded in the dramas of myth, as eternally and essentially Human and more or less disconnected from any sort of historical, material, or ideological reality. Also working within and between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, though she does not engage directly with Lacan in addressing these questions, Luce Irigaray’s psychoanalytically inspired engagements with Hegelian ethics attempt to reinstitute a connection with material, and in particular, sexual reality, to call into question not only the truth value of a thoroughly masculinized ethics but also that of the tragic drama informing it. Though her reading would certainly not be labeled historical in the traditional, positivist sense of the term, her capacity to regard the text with a sense of the physicality that undoubtedly suffuses the tragic scene establishes a previously lacking continuity of form and matter, a continuity that should prove quite helpful in deciphering this curious intersection of multiple discourses of ethicity, and allows Irigaray to move beyond the humanistic approach that Lacan quite rightly critiques but somehow fails to surpass.

In this essay, I revisit the Lacanian, Hegelian, and Irigarayan analyses of the ethical implications of Sophocles’s Antigone (1984a) to explore the radical shift in perspective introduced by the element of a historicized femininity in the construction of an ethical model of intersubjectivity. Though Irigaray most explicitly disputes Hegel’s reading of the Antigone, I have chosen to begin at what I see as the beginning: the psychoanalytic family of origin. For while Irigaray refutes the traditional psychoanalytic refusal of femininity, and perhaps even more importantly, maternity, the Lacanian model of subjectivity infuses her vision of Antigone’s plight and provides a significant point of departure for a feminist understanding of the ethical. Lacan’s rather hermetic engagement with the Sophoclean text introduces the vital thread that, to my mind, allows Irigaray to move beyond the phenomenological destruction of the feminine as a necessary defining moment in the pursuit of ethical subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, despite its obvious pitfalls with regard to feminism, returns us to an acute awareness of the emergence of the subject as always already psychically determined in relation to others and belies the masculine, phenomenological myth of an autonomous, disembodied subjectivity.

Lacan’s Antigone, despite its odd refusal of sexual difference, provides not only an incisive, introductory counterpoint to the more familiar Hegelian approach but also situates us within an understanding of subjectivity, and of maternity, that is conducive to a productive reading of a historically and socially contextualized interpretation of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference. By examining the ways in which Irigaray’s psychoanalytically inspired refutation of Hegel might illumine our thinking of a model of subjectivity incorporative of femininity, recognitive of the maternal debt, I seek to contribute to the rich ongoing dialogue in the domain of feminist ethics. I propose to approach the question of a feminist understanding of the self/other relation from the vantage point of a psychoanalytically inspired understanding of “individual” subjectivity as modified by Irigaray through a reaffirmation of sexual difference as constitutive of the human psyche. A historicized, psychoanalytic recognition of the function of maternity in establishing an inevitable ethical origin at the very core of the subject announces provocative new possibilities for exploring the symptoms of a terribly destructive denial of the maternal function—a function both beyond and before the violence and tragedy of attempts and tendencies to negate the other as a means to affirming the self. Having traversed Antigone’s contentious relations to the ethical, via the maternal, we might begin to consider the ramifications of an originary intersubjective connection—an inherently ethical subject—in our navigation of the fluid intricacies of the self/other “divide.”

From an aesthetic point of view, tragedy, for Hegel, represents the most evolved of ancient literary genres because it has transcended the subjective immediacy of the lyric as well as the external objectivity of the epic. The author of tragedy has managed to exteriorize or mediate poetically his immediate individual experience and to contextualize it properly with regards to objective reality. As a result of this dialectical mediacy, then, tragedy acquires unique aesthetic access to universal human truth. For Hegel: “. . . the dramatic poet must in the profoundest sense make himself master of the essential significance of human action and the divine order of the world, and along with this of a power to unfold this eternal and essential foundation of all human characters, passions, and destinies in its clarity as also in its vital truth” (Hegel 1962, 28). Though he characterizes Hegel’s reading of the Antigone as a “misinterpretation” (as do most literary critics), Albin Lesky concludes similarly as to the function of the tragic as fundamental dramatization of the uniquely and forever human: “. . . Sophocles drew his characters from the pre-existing realm of myth, characters not in the psychological sense, but great personal figures whose traits are attached to one central feature. Free of all purely accidental and individual elements, they stand before us in their great essential qualities, an imperishable heritage” (Lesky 1966, 287). What these readings of the tragic as universally explanatory of the essence of the human condition fail to explore and recognize is the importance of the interactive relationship between the play as literary text and the historical context in which it was created and received. While the limited scope of this discussion cannot pretend to a thorough historical analysis of the Antigone, even the most rudimentary comprehension of the material reality in question on the tragic stage presents a convincing counterpoint to the Hegelian myth of tragic transcendence, a myth in large part conditioned by the theory of history outlined in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977) wherein Attic tragedy, or more specifically the Antigone, enacts the realization of the ethical moment in the diachronic, teleological process of the actualization of Spirit.

In her introduction to History, Tragedy, Theory, Barbara Goff (1995) discusses recent relations between critical theory, in particular deconstruction, and historical inquiry in contemporary readings of Greek tragedy. For Goff, poststructuralist theory has provided a productive challenge to purely contextual readings claiming to access historical or authorial truths via the literary work as historical document. As a result, “positivist historicism,” in which “‘History’ is invoked to ground and therefore control the possibilities of interpretation,” has made way for a “new historicism”: “. . . a mode of inquiry which in its most productive moments seeks to take account of the history within texts as well as the textuality within history” (Goff 1995, 7). In other words, this “new historicism” rejects the so-called “integrity of the text” as indisputable “bearer of meaning” neither on the deconstructive grounds that language is incapable of imparting (a) meaning, nor on the positivist grounds that the meaning of any given text is easily delimited through historical investigation, but rather on the grounds that “the object of historical inquiry is itself textual, and that its meaning has never been self-evident” (Goff 1995, 8). This new historical approach obviously problematizes the Hegelian construction of history and his insertion of tragedy as an always already negated moment therein. More interestingly, however, it calls into question Lacan’s assumption of the tragic model in his theorization of an ethics of psychoanalysis. For while both the phenomenologist and the psychoanalyst find their footing in the supposed stability of the family structure, each turns a blind eye to the obviously historical construction of the family in question and in particular, as Irigaray will argue, to the role of sexual difference in constituting the role of family in the life of the state as well as in the identity of the individual.

For Lacan, as for Freud, tragedy can be read by psychoanalysis as an externalized acting out of the most basic processes of the human psyche. While Lacan takes up Freud’s reading of the Oedipus without substantial revision, he interprets the child’s necessary and altogether natural movement from the immediate, material connection with the mother into the social, intersubjective arena of the father as contingent largely upon language acquisition. And, for Lacan, as for “deconstructionists,” the discourse conditioned by the subject’s entry into the Symbolic takes on a hidden, or unconscious, life of its own, and in effect remains substantively meaningless (in the traditional sense of the term) and beyond the individual control of the speaking subject. ¹ It is not surprising, then, that Lacan does not seek historical recourse in taking up, albeit in a radically different form, Hegel’s positioning of the Antigone as psycho-ethical paradigm. Lacan provides an erudite, meticulous reading of the Antigone in its original language, along with an equally impressive historical account (and dismissal) of both philosophers’ and literary critics’ reception of the text. Lacan never, however, explicitly addresses the fact that this literary work—an act of language and the Sophoclean unconscious (which according to his theorization of the Symbolic cannot possibly be held as a stable, immutable source of rational “meaning”)—has been set up, on his interpretation, as a virtually flawless pre-enactment of his own “discovery” of the human subject’s uneasy relation to the absolute limit imposed by being constituted as an intersubjective speaking being. For Lacan, myth is precisely about the universal, individual subject’s tortured relation to signification. In Ethique de la psychanalyse (Lacan 1986), he defines myth as: “. . . a signifying structure, a sketch if you will, which is articulated in order to support the antinomies of certain psychic relations—and which, at a level which is not simply one of individual anguish, nor is exhausted in any construction supposing the collectivity, but rather, takes on its complete dimension. We suppose that it is a question of the individual, and also the collectivity, but at this level there is no such opposition. For it is a question of the subject insofar as he suffers from the signifier” (Lacan 1986, 172; italics added). ² Myth and by extension tragedy metaphorically enact the limit of what Julia Kristeva terms le thétique, the psycho-material rupture announcing the subject’s entry into language, an entry associated with a shift from a maternal to a paternal frame of reference. ³

In a revision of Freud’s theories of sublimation, Lacan replaces the lost maternal body with the unconscious field of the Thing (das Ding), which through its vacuous absence diverts the libidinal drives, renders their satisfaction impossible, and assures the continuity of unconscious structures, and consequently, of signification. Sublimation allows the subject to articulate indirectly the object of his desire in the unconscious terms of the Thing through art, religion, and science (or philosophy) and constructs the subject as a mediating conduit between reality and the signifier, and the human as “. . . that part of the real which suffers from the signifier” (Lacan 1986, 150). ⁴ Accordingly then, the work of art, in this instance tragedy or myth, necessarily finds itself in search of the Thing, the unimaginable pre-object—the empty space around which the text articulates the object of desire as veiled, voilée. In a more general sense, the ethical order makes the real present in symbolically structured social activities. Or in more traditionally psychoanalytic terms, the ethical mediates between the conscious and the unconscious, the reality principle and the pleasure principle. The unconscious, eternal search for an extreme goodness held out as the subject’s safely mediated desire for the Thing becomes ethical when it is posed as a socially relevant question: “It [ethics] begins at the moment when the subject poses the question of this good which he had been unconsciously searching for in social structures—and when, through the same movement, he is led to discover the profound connection whereby what is presented to him as law is tightly linked to the very structure of desire” (Lacan 1986, 92).

Following Lacan’s reading, then, this relation becomes ethical in the Antigone (1984a) when Antigone resolutely situates herself at this universal limit that the curse of discursivity imposes. Her blinding “beauty” and inescapable attraction with regard to “nous” (we), the spectators or, more aptly, the listeners (Lacan argues, in accord with Aristotle, that it is the auditory rather than the visual that produces the primary effect on the theatrical “spectator,” in particular as regards his engagement with the real), ⁵ derives from her self-imposed, self-willed positioning at what Lacan calls the “second limit of death” or “l’entre deux morts.” Her status as object of “our” desire hinges on the ineluctability of the object of her own desire, an object that surpasses the bounds of signification and is therefore posited by Lacan as “inhuman.” Analogous to the crucifixion image in the Christian tradition, Antigone’s liminal status between life and death, her figuration as interminably suffering victim, places her beyond both life and death, in the champs des dieux (fields of the gods), to which, as inheritors of the Christian tradition, “we” no longer maintain access. For Antigone is not merely possessed of the Freudian death drive or a feminine masochistic impulse, she seeks to inhabit the realm in between the imaginary and the symbolic, the “ex nihilo” at the very limits of language, at the site of the hinge between self and Other (l’Autre).

So, how does Antigone accomplish this theoretical project? Well, for Lacan, her actions, or the tragic plot, quite literally express the trajectory of the presence of the heroine’s desire through time—if our reading is to stick to the human “truth” of the matter that is. For Lacan: “The signifier introduces two orders into the world, truth and event. But if one wishes to maintain the signifier at the level of the relations between man and the dimension of truth, one cannot at the same time have it serve as the punctuation of event. There is not, in tragedy in general, any sort of true event. The hero and his surroundings are situated in relation to the discrete objective of desire. What occurs: these are collapses, the settling of diverse strata of the presence of the hero in time” (1986, 308). In interpreting Antigone’s story, it is important if we are to access the truth dimension of the signifier to read the non-events of her life as the incidental, inconsequential fallout of her unfortunate desire.

Lacan, like the Sophoclean chorus, defines the object of her desire as the Greek concept of “Atè,” loosely translatable as suffering or unhappiness. In the context of the Antigone, the familial Atè comes to haunt Antigone as a necessary torment to be visited upon the descendants of Oedipus. More precisely, and indicative of the radicality of Antigone’s desire, she seeks to move beyond this Atè, which Lacan interprets as the suffering instantiated as a natural human limit by the horizon of signification, the inevitable trauma of the thetic break. As a result, the Atè as obscure object of desire, arises from the domain of the Other (le champ de l’Autre), and Antigone’s situation at the borders of signification, between the human of the conscious said and the inhuman (or divine) of the unconscious saying, positions her, for Lacan, as paradigmatic ethical agent.

In more practical terms, as a speaking, or human being, Antigone articulates and draws into symbolic existence the pure being (outside historic or material contingency) of her slain brother Polynices. She moves beyond the laws of the “earth” (which Hegel, as we will see, defines as the laws of society or the polis), and determines her brother as uniquely human: she names him as what he is above and beyond what he has done. Again, we witness the power of the signifier to present the truth as opposed to the event. Antigone, for Lacan, embodies (so to speak) this ethical potential of the speaking subject: “Antigone is presented as . . . pure and simple relation between the human being and that of which he miraculously finds himself the bearer, that is, the signifying break, which confers upon him the unbreachable power of being, in the face of everything and anything, what he is” (Lacan 1986, 328). Antigone’s ethical existence turns on her intimate, unshakable embrace of her potentially liminal position as a human, being within the symbolic order: “. . . as a result of her position, Antigone represents this radical limit which, beyond all contents, all good and evil that Polynices might have done, all that might be inflicted upon him, maintains the unique value of his being” (Lacan 1986, 325). In other words, from the (Lacanian) psychoanalytic point of view, Antigone’s capacity to lift her brother out of the lived reality of human contingency hinges on her function as representative of the thetic break: “This purity, this separation of being from all of the characteristics of the historic drama which he [Polynices] has passed through, it is precisely here that we find the limit, the ex nihilo around which Antigone maintains her position. It is nothing other than the break instantiated in the life of man by the presence of language” (1986, 325). It is through the mediate relation to the Other of language rather than the immediate, familial blood connection that Lacan constitutes an ethics of psychoanalysis via tragedy. As a result, Lacan more than restores the textuality in tragedy, for tragedy enacts and reenacts the universal hero’s entry into the Symbolic and secures his (or her) being in relation to the Other. And while this may have a certain historic relevance for “us,” as bewildered witnesses to the twentieth century “death of man,” ⁶ or in more psychoanalytic terms, the splitting of the subject, we learn as a result that this relation to being, and the consequent ethical relation to the Other, maintains a necessary detachment from the contingencies of history. For Antigone, as tragic ethical heroine, remains by her very nature (or function) suspended in synchronicity. ⁷

Though the family might have introduced a certain diachronic element to Lacan’s reading of the Antigone, it takes up an interesting yet still ahistorical role in the constitution of the hero(ine)’s object of desire, the focal point, as we recall, of the tragic spectacle. In an ethics of psychoanalysis, family organizes the tragedy in textuality. Lacan asserts that Antigone’s desire is a “pure and simple” desire for death or Atè; she is this desire. And this desire for death signals the relationship between desire and the unconscious law of the Thing. He questions, however, her lack of desire of the Other, a desire necessarily grounded in the mother’s desire (for the father). In the case of Antigone’s dysfunctional family drama, unfortunately, the mother’s desire was incestuous and therefore destructive of any and all who were innocently or otherwise tainted by it. It leads to a structural impasse, evidenced by the deaths of Jocasta’s two sons, which can be mediated only through the extremity—the inhumanity—of Antigone’s desire (poor Ismene is consistently read as somehow nonexistent). ⁸ In discussing Antigone’s single-minded desire for death, or more precisely, for the space between life and death, Lacan writes: “—what about her desire? Shouldn’t it be the desire of the Other, and connect with the mother’s desire? The mother’s desire, the text alludes to it, is the origin of everything. The mother’s desire is at once the founding desire of the entire structure . . . but at the same time it is a criminal desire” (1986, 329).

One might argue that Antigone’s desire is remarkably similar to her mother’s. After all, they both act out their despair through suicide by hanging; both must seek death as a result of their refusal of the fundamental interdiction the law of the unconscious imposes. ⁹ But what Lacan seems to be getting at here is that Antigone cannot ethically or legally establish identity with her mother’s criminal desire for her son (Antigone’s father/brother). Nor, as a result, will her inhuman desire to transcend the family Atè correspond to her mother’s more humanly motivated desire to end her earthly existence. Though again, one might argue that Jocasta’s incestuous desire also contains an inhuman element in that this desire makes possible her son’s acting out of his unlawful (if unknowing) desire to create an immediate connection to the Thing. And so, although Antigone repeatedly describes her desire as a desire to love (“‘I was born to join in love, not hate—that is my nature’” [Sophocles 1984a, ll. 1306–10]) and not a desire to die, in an act of social defiance, she sacrifices her human being to uphold some sort of family integrity, above and against le Dire des dieux: “It is inasmuch as the community refuses sacrifice that Antigone must make the sacrifice of her being to the maintenance of this essential being which is the familial Atè—motive and true axis around which this entire tragedy turns. Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes, immortalizes this Atè” (Lacan 1986, 329). What the community is refusing here, through the voice of the chorus, is the primacy of the criminality involved in the incestuous mother/son relation, the dangerous blindness to the fundamental law constitutive of any and all human societies, the limit that bounds us as intersubjective, culturally determined beings.

Lacan isolates two distinct laws, or “dimensions” at play in the battle between Creon and Antigone for moral justification: the laws of the earth and the commandments of the gods. What is at play, however, is not the choice of the right one over the wrong one but the capacity to recognize and respect the limit between the two (Lacan 1986, 322). For Lacan, as well as the chorus, Creon’s downfall quite clearly lies in his confusion of earthly laws and the Dire of the gods. Antigone’s situation, however, is far more ambiguous. Does she, like Creon, fail to respect this fundamental limit in affirming the earthly ties of sisterhood and thereby attributing a divine dimension to a material relation? For Lacan, the answer is a resounding no, for not only does Antigone respect this boundary, she personifies it in situating herself at the very borders of signification, in this case represented by her desire to uphold and move beyond the familial Atè, the thetic break, the zone between life and death (1986, 326). Antigone, in upholding her traitorous brother’s right to a proper burial vindicates not her feminine, familial obligations to tend to the bodies of her kin, as Hegel would argue, but rather the incontestable humanity of a being who exists in the domain of the Symbolic, one who has been thus consecrated in having been given a name: ¹⁰ “Antigone evokes no other right than this, which suddenly arises in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is—ineffaceable from the moment when the signifier, arising suddenly, arrests it as something fixed across any flux of possible transformations. What is is, and it is to this, to this surface, that Antigone’s unshakable, unbreachable position is fixed” (Lacan 1986, 324–25). Antigone, Lacan argues, disassociates her stance from the saying of the gods, the unwritten, asymbolic laws, in her affirmation of the signifying chain of being. This is not to say that she denies the existence of the divine, a legal order constructed on the basis of nothingness, around the unthinkable absence of the Thing (Lacan 1986, 324). Rather, she asserts—as witnessed by her desire for death, her self-positioning at the horizon constituted by the thetic break—that the divine is in fact divine and as such belongs to a law other than the symbolic one assuring our synchronic existence as humans being across time and history. In assuming the inheritance of her mother’s desire, choosing a criminal act in support of her criminal brother, Antigone upholds the tradition of the familial Atè, moves beyond its horizon, beyond the chain of signification, and is buried alive. And in so doing, she becomes the ethical actor par excellence. For she, like Lacan’s ethical order, expresses the human relation to the real, the oppositional mechanics operating between the unconscious pleasure principle and the conscious reality principle to regulate the interhuman experience as such and to render the real present therein.

Antigone, whom Lacan compares to a Sadean heroine, achieves this unenviable status of exemplarity in the ethics of psychoanalysis, as we have seen, because of her unique relation to the pure being of her brother, her necessarily inhuman lack of desire of the Other. ¹¹ She finds her natural home at the borders of the Symbolic, between life and death. She is beautiful; she is the object of “our” desire. Here, Hegel and Lacan find common ground, for it is woman who somehow occupies the space of that which does not move forward in the historical progression of the social, who acts as the necessary, though untouchable, unspeakable, unthinkable support of the Other, as well as the pure being of her brother (though as we will see, for Hegel, unlike Lacan, Antigone’s sex identity is crucial to this positioning). Lacan writes in the afterword to his essays on the Antigone: “This relation to being suspends everything related to transformation, to the cycle of generations and corruptions, to history itself, and carries us to the most radical level of all insofar as it is suspended from language” (1986, 331). Our ability to achieve this radical new ahistoric, asymbolic level (of ?) is easily traced back to the mother’s desire. “We” desire Antigone because she is beautiful, because she desires the “second limit of death,” because her mother desired her own son. The mother and her desire would appear to remain, like Creon, in the realm of the diachronic. She certainly has a temporal precedence with regard to the drama in question here. Yet she is also written/read (neither seen nor heard) as originary moment in her incestuous desire, the atemporal event, implied but unwritten, unspoken, unheard within the text, which ultimately forces the tragic narrative off the linear tracks of historical continuity. Yet Lacan does not elaborate on the more fundamental relationship between this incestuous desire on the part of the mother and the ethical martyrdom of the daughter. He constructs Jocasta’s “radically destructive” desire for her son Oedipus as the mediating force in the resultant struggle between the two male offspring of their union, and it is Antigone who takes up the side of criminality in choosing the side of Polynices rather than that of her just brother. And it is because the community refuses to pardon this criminality that Antigone must sacrifice herself to the pure being of this familial suffering and madness (Lacan 1986, 329). Perhaps the connection between this particular version of maternal desire and ethicity is simply all too clear and is not deemed worthy of explanation. Or perhaps psychoanalysis, statically situated in the mind’s eye of the son, cannot contain the mother’s desire.

Lacan has identified maternal desire as the “founding desire” in the ethical allegory he has just unraveled, and he concludes his analysis with a return to this so-called origin. From his earlier positioning of the mother in the place of the Thing, his situation of incestual desire as the essential human desire, a desire whose repression constitutes our ability as subjects to speak, to exist as intersubjective, ethical beings, it would seem that the satisfaction of incestual desire on the part of Oedipus would constitute the ultimate crime against humanity, a pat refusal to accept the human condition. For the unconscious only acquires its signifying structure, its law, in its repression of the maternal Thing and the resultant diversions of the energies of the drives. If the subject attempts to force access to the maternal Thing (Lacan gives the Sadean hero as an example), he can only self-destruct. Lacan argues that the intimate distance from the Thing is the “lie” at the heart of the unconscious. This lie is our most fundamental desire and only through this act of untruth do we maintain our status as subjects. The story of Oedipus the King (Sophocles 1984b) would appear to play this theory out quite nicely, for as long as Oedipus and Jocasta are able to give the lie to their blood connection, they manage to live as husband and wife in relative peace. It is not until Oedipus’s stubborn decision to seek the truth at all costs that tragedy befalls the couple, and of course, their offspring. In at last learning the truth of his crime, Oedipus cries: “O god—all come true, all burst to light! / O light—now let me look my last on you! / I stand revealed at last— / cursed in my birth, cursed in marriage, cursed in the lives I cut down with these hands!” (Sophocles 1984b, ll. 1306–10).

The revelation of the truth of the I is utterly unbearable and leads to Oedipus’s self-inflicted blindness; he can no longer bear to see the metaphoric light. Curiously though, Jocasta is only concerned with Oedipus’s recognition of the truth of his identity; it appears that she (and the weight of structural coherence) might have been able to bear her own incestual desire, but not Oedipus’s recognition of the truth of his desire. After begging Oedipus to cease his mindless search for this truth, a truth of which she is evidently all too aware, she warns: “You’re doomed—may you never fathom who you are” (Sophocles 1984b, ll. 1172–73). So while Oedipus’s relation to the truth of who he is, the truth of the lie that is his most fundamental desire, contains a necessary element of criminality according to Lacan’s analysis, a breaching of the unconscious, and by extension the conscious law, the role of the mother’s desire in this ethical drama remains far more problematic.

With regards to the mother/son incest drama, it appears that the directionality of the mother’s desire remains decidedly undetermined in the psychoanalytic reading. For though Lacan dubs this desire criminal, he implies that her desire is “le désir de l’Autre,” a desire constitutive of the human condition and by no means related inherently to either incest or maternity (unless we wish to stretch our reading a bit and equate this desire of the Other to the mother’s desire for her child as a desire for the phallus). ¹² Furthermore, as we have seen, what is at stake in terms of a determination of criminality appears to be the son’s recognition of the truth of his desire, both for himself and for his mother. Jocasta kills herself not because she has recognized the reality of her desire but because Oedipus will recognize the reality of his. And on the Lacanian reading (as well as the Freudian one), incestual desire and taboo is theorized as unidirectional—and unisexual; the mother’s desire does not come into play. She is merely a (pre-)object in the early psychic drama of the male subject, a repressed object whose unconscious space will come to regulate the law of the unconscious under the guise of the purely theoretical, vacuous Thing. Perhaps then, what is being implied here is that maternal desire is criminal in its very essence. The mother’s desire might be read as the only nonpathological expression of human desire that serves to subvert rather than to uphold the intersubjective bonds of the social. For while desire necessarily participates in the social as a function of its object, another’s desire, the mother’s desire is figured as a static desire of the phallus that cannot and does not respond to the child’s demand for her love. ¹³ According to the Lacanian scenario, then, the child’s demand for his mother’s love necessarily finds itself alienated by her desire of the phallus. He therefore finds himself in the feminine position of wishing to be the phallus to fulfill his mother’s desire and thereby to attain her love. It is only through the mediation of his desire, through the process of becoming a paternally identified, symbolic subject, that the male child might move into the social wherein he establishes relations of desire with the opposite sex in which he has the phallus in the material form of the penis. For Lacan, then, within the structure of the mother/child dyad, the mother’s desire can only be figured in the negative. As Kristeva argues in Histoires d’amour: “Let us remark now that the most archaic unity[ . . . ]—an identity autonomous to the point of attracting displacements—is that of the Phallus desired by the mother. It is the unity of the imaginary father, a coagulation of the mother and her desire. The imaginary father would thus be the indication that the mother is not all, but that she wants . . . Whom? What?—The question has no response other than the one uncovered by the narcissistic void: ‘In any case, not me’” (Kristeva 1983, 45). The mother’s indeterminate desire creates the site at which the child begins to constitute himself as a subject. Realizing that his mother is “not-all,” or lacking (the phallus), and that furthermore what she wants is “not-me,” the child’s first intimations of subjectivity take form within this space of what Kristeva terms the imaginary father, the object of the mother’s desire. On my reading, Kristeva, following Lacan, strikes the mother’s desire with the mark of paternity as the only means of signaling a pre-symbolic function within the mother/child psyche, to be superseded by the father of the Law with the onset of the Oedipal complex. ¹⁴ Through the affirmative particularity of her enactment of sexual desire from the position of the maternal function, Jocasta commits the ultimate crime; her desire confuses the moment of the thetic break. And without this theoretical limit, the psychic structure cannot hold. ¹⁵ The law-abiding mother, on the contrary, remains trapped inside her maternity, outside desire and signification—an inhuman, prehistoric, nonsubject. For within the psychoanalytic framework, the mother’s desire is inevitably criminal in its expression, and her only potential access to the Symbolic is appropriated efficiently through the apparition of the imaginary father. The mother qua mother is the enigmatic knot at the objectal center of the son’s psyche, a knot that simultaneously constructs and defies the intersubjective connection between desire and communication. And if, from this confined position of maternity, she attempts to vindicate either her desire or her subjectivity, the ethical structure crumbles, madness ensues.

Antigone’s criminality, however, though precipitated by her parents’, serves to reify and purify their fatal trespass and raises it to the level of symbolic universality. Through her willingness to sacrifice her self as a martyr to the eternity of the familial Atè, Antigone assures the recognition of the limit, the “validity of the crime,” which must be neither breached nor disturbed. Antigone acts out on stage the intimate, morbid connection between desire and the law and maintains the perpetuity of this liminal space through the pursuit of her own desire to sustain the authenticity of the inescapably painful human condition as instantiated by the thetic break. We are left guessing, however, as to the role of femininity in Lacan’s choice of Antigone as ethical paradigm. Could a son have performed the same function, or does self-sacrifice to the primacy of the phallus fall under the sign of the feminine? Though Lacan fails to answer, or even to pose, the question, it appears that Antigone’s feminine identification might play a substantial part in the sustenance of her position as symbolic support. For just as the mother’s desire is figured only in negative terms, so too is the acting out of woman’s desire. Her jouissance, in particular as regards the realm of signification, is figured under the sign of negation: she is “not-all.” Significantly, Lacan argues that the “not-all” of feminine desire does not set itself up as complementary to a masculine “all,” but as a supplementary en plus “beyond the phallus.” In Encore, Lacan explains woman’s exclusion from “the nature of words”: “. . . if she is excluded by the nature of things, it is precisely insofar as being not-all, she has, in relation to what is designated as phallic jouissance, a supplementary jouissance” (Lacan 1975, 68). If Antigone has chosen to situate herself at the borders of signification, and if her desire seeks a space beyond the suffering instantiated through the moment of the thetic break, her consequent function as ethical stay would appear then to correspond quite nicely to femininity’s role as support of the Other. ¹⁶

Is Antigone alone of her sex? What allows her to step out of her femininity and to stand in for an arguably neuter human being in all its ethical purity? Perhaps it is her staunch refusal of wifehood and maternity, the “natural” fulfillment of the feminine condition. This refusal, moreover, finds its cause in a self-conscious choice to follow her desire despite the consequences. In fact, Antigone is able to transcend her womanhood while constituting herself as a martyr to a markedly feminine desire because she is fully aware of what she is doing and why. She, unlike the other members of her sex, knows her desire and speaks it. For Lacan: “There is no woman except as excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words. And it must be said that if there is one thing that women themselves complain of at the moment, it is this—simply, they don’t know what they are saying. This is all of the difference between them and me” (1975, 68). Like Lacan, as we will see, Hegel constitutes women as somehow lacking in self-consciousness, as unknowing, and linked, albeit circuitously, to the unconscious. But while Lacan seeks to ignore Antigone’s femininity in writing her as quintessentially human, again perhaps because her unusual cognizance has allowed her to transcend her sexed condition, Hegel argues that Antigone is all woman—unknowing, unconscious— and therefore a moment in the movement of ethicity that must be superseded.

Hegel’s Reading of the Antigone

Though Hegel’s reading of the Antigone also shares with Lacan’s a certain element of familial ahistoricity (though for quite different reasons), it differs substantially from Lacan’s in its methods, its conclusions, and perhaps most interestingly, in its treatment of the principal players’ sexual identities. In his treatment of the Antigone as a tragic, dialectic enactment of the ethical moment in the history of consciousness, Hegel situates the decisive battle between divine and human law in Attic Greece. But unlike Lacan, he believes that human law, as enforced by Creon (representative of the masculine polis) and his harsh repression of Antigone (representative of the feminine oikos), has rightfully supplanted divine law and thereby ushered in a higher level of moral consciousness. Refuting an accusation that the Hegelian dialectic has seduced him, Lacan critiques Hegel’s reading of the Antigone as follows: “According to him [Hegel], there is a conflict of discourses, in the sense that discourses involve the essential stakes, and, what is more, they move toward some sort of conciliation. I might ask what could possibly be the conciliation at the end of the Antigone. And also, one is stunned to read that this conciliation is subjective in the bargain” (Lacan 1986, 292). The stupefaction induced here by the Hegelian interpretation fails to consider the far from arbitrary function it is made to serve within his larger project. But then again, Lacan appears to be responding more to the “irresponsable” who has criticized his supposed adherence to the dialectic than to Hegel in this instance.

In this larger project, a descriptive analysis of Spirit as History, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit supplies a narrative account of the development of human consciousness through the incessant disillusionment of self-consciousness. The teleological process of substance becoming subject, however, does not proceed according to a linear notion of historical development as signaled by the diachronic metonymy of the Lacanian signified or “said,” but rather through the progressive circularity of perpetual negativity. The progress of Spirit, alienated from the continuous, contiguous, material processes of life, marks an epochal temporality that further and further distantiates it from its supposed “terrestrial truth.” ¹⁷ In a discussion of the Hegelian dialectic, Irigaray discusses the discontinuity of natural life and philosophical systematicity: “The epochs signify a schism with nature. This schism is manifested as the opposition of another temporality, a double temporality where the continuity and communication between vegetative growth and social temporality is lacking” (Irigaray 1987, 147). In other words, philosophic discourse does not enter into the life history of the gendered material world; it simply replaces it with a bloodless, sexless surrogate, hence the periodic, sacrificial bloodlettings that punctuate the closed circuit of the instant-eternity continuum of modern philosophical historicity. Hegel encodes this historicity, as first played out on the tragic stage, within the oppositional, triadic geometry of the dialectic: the one comes into conflict with the always adversarial other or mirror image, bloodshed occurs, a higher state of consciousness is achieved, blood ceases to flow, and the process whereby “nature is humanized and history constituted” begins anew (Benhabib 1991, 134). With the onset of negativity, materiality momentarily reasserts its inevitable presence in the Hegelian movement toward immaterial Spirit. In other words, the Dialectic must incorporate these periodic purges if it is to maintain the conceptual elimination of the material from each successive, sublative stage in the progression of human consciousness.

This logic of stark oppositionality comes to an uneasy and eerie sort of rest at the level of the Ethical Order, at precisely the moment when tragedy and, not coincidentally, sexual “difference” conspicuously enter the scene. At the site of the Greek polis occurs the historical moment when human and divine, male and female, brother and sister, reach a fragile and somewhat utopic state of equilibrium. The Ethical Order of the family reigns; blood pools. Sophocles’s Antigone (1984a) serves as the structuring paradigm for the ethical moment not only as a result of its chronologic situation and contextual conformity but also, among other reasons to be sure, through tragic drama’s unique capacity to externalize a universal and eternal notion of human subjectivity. Recycling the Sophoclean drama, then, Hegel proposes a “natural” division of ethicity whereby women represent the divine and men the human law, a binary structure whose ultimate sublation will result in the expulsion of the feminine and the erection of an obviously superior political moral system.

The Ethical Order finds its home in the natural immediacy of the Family, the transitional site between nature and culture. The familial bonds that form the basis of divine, or natural ethicity lie not in the love or desire that family members share but in shared blood. Indeed, emotional attachment renders the connection inherently unethical through the addition of an element of abstract contiguity. Woman, as active agent of the Family, takes on as positive ethical act the burial of the dead, the bloodless: “The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and weds the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality” (Hegel 1977, 271). As Lacan contends, the outcome of familial burial, in the instance of the Antigone (which is the only context in which Hegel’s argument really makes sense), is the affirmation of the unique, eternal being of the deceased, an affirmation of the symbolic or the social. As Kelly Oliver writes: “Through the actions of the family on the unconscious and abstract processes of nature, man is transformed through the mixture of his universality and the individuality of the action taken into a particular individual. At death, the man is freed from his individual reality, his sensuous body, and becomes a universal” (Oliver 1997, 37). Ironically then, while Woman, for Hegel, intuits divine law at an unconscious level and remains connected figuratively to the earthy darkness of the nether world, she is nevertheless entrusted to protect her family members from the very “unconscious appetites” that she, as “alien to the particularity of desire,” embodies and ever threatens to enact (Hegel 1977, 275). ¹⁸ As Jacques Derrida argues, feminine desire in the Hegelian household takes on a rather peculiar logic: “If desire and pleasure are, for the woman or for the mother, singular, it remains that, in the ethical household, in the ‘house of ethicity’ . . . this singularity offers itself up to substitution. Without which, there is perhaps family, but not ethical family. The latter wishes that the woman no longer have relations with this particular husband or that particular child but rather with ‘a husband or children in general’” (Derrida 1974, 184). For Hegel, Antigone in her role as Polynices’s sister represents the sole possible instance of what Derrida calls “une singularité singulière”: the brother/sister dyad stands at the very limits of familial ethicity as enacted in this interpretation of the ethical oikos, and will eventually exceed those limits. For as Antigone (and Hegel) will argue (albeit contentiously), the heterosexual family relation in question here is not open to substitution. Polynices is not “a brother in general”; he is uniquely irreplaceable.

Antigone is nevertheless capable of acting ethically, perhaps a little too ethically, as a result of her lack of desire. For despite Lacan’s reliance on a distinctly Hegelian notion of desire in his dialectic of need, demand, and desire, Hegel and Lacan differ significantly as to the status of Antigone as a desiring subject. As we have seen, Lacan reads Antigone’s desire to uphold the authenticity of her brother’s being as the motor of her ethical agency, the focal point of the auditor’s captivated response. ¹⁹ Hegel, however, argues that in her ethical relation to her brother, Antigone experiences no desire, despite the added element of sexual difference so conspicuously absent in Lacan’s account. Based on an implied assertion of the universality of the incest taboo (an odd stance considering the family in question), a sister simply cannot and does not desire her brother. Consenting to forego forever the substitutively singular feminine roles of mother and wife, she simultaneously fulfills and surpasses the boundaries of family duty in a dubious exchange of her life, and indeed the continuation of the Oedipal family line, for the preservation of her brother’s irreplaceable individuality. Based on the Sophoclean model, Hegel accordingly designates the brother’s sister as the ultimate ethical agent because, he argues, her duty toward her brother remains absolutely untainted by desire and therefore lacks contingency: “They [brother/sister] are the same blood which has, however, in them reached a state of rest and equilibrium” (Hegel 1977, 274). ²⁰ So, though the male/female, public/private opposition necessary to the dialectic is maintained, the material unrest that might be brought into play through the element of feminine desire (and, as we recall, the tragedy might never have occurred had it not been for Jocasta’s none too ethical desire—a desire that remains unspoken in Hegel’s account) is entirely eliminated, and the particularity of the blood relation is thereby universalized. In other words, Lacan’s Antigone is able to neutralize and thereby to universalize the unspoken feminine particularity of her desire through transcendence, while Hegel’s feminized Antigone is divested of any desire, or self-consciousness, whatsoever—she is female by default.

Antigone, then, serves as Hegel’s evidentiary model of the universally divine potential of the brother’s sister as instigator of familial ethicity. Though Hegel represents woman as incapable of human reasoning, he not only accepts but also adopts Antigone’s somewhat twisted formulation of her willful refusal of human law. ²¹ Having twice buried Polynices against Creon’s orders, thus explicitly flouting the laws of the public sphere to affirm those of the private, Antigone explains herself as follows: “A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again” (Sophocles 1984a, l. 1000). Despite the introduction of this not terribly convincing logic of substitution into the nuclear family structure (explicable only perhaps by the fact that Antigone is theoretically abandoning a husband and children who she knows will never exist), the erotically tinged corporality of the mother and wife relationships nonetheless renders them incompatible with the universal purity of ethical action. Feminine logic, then, assuming universal orphanhood, constructs the nostalgic ethical paradigm of a gendered, familial link forever unmixed by the restlessness of blood and sexual desire that, as a result of its supersession, ultimately sustains the logic of Hegelian ethical order. ²²

As man and woman follow their naturally predestined paths, however, Hegel’s shakily devised gender dialectic breaks down when the actors’ ethical trajectories cease to mirror each other, and inevitably the feminine must be sacrificed at the altar of the masculine law of the father. Ethical action should move theoretically from either conscious or unconscious adherence to human or divine law to the commission of an ethical deed, the consequent recognition of the correspondent oppositional law (or negation), and finally to the sublatory state of a self-consciousness able to comprehend simultaneously both laws: “the deed is brought out into the light of day, as something in which the conscious is bound up with the unconscious, what is one’s own with what is alien to it, as an entity divided within itself, whose other aspect consciousness experiences and also finds to be its own, but as the power it has violated and roused to hostility” (Hegel 1977, 283–84). The equation works quite nicely on the male side: Creon, conscious uniquely of human law, acts morally to punish Antigone when she breaks it. The divine law of which he was unconscious then avenges itself through the suicidal agency of his wife and son (Antigone’s husband to be). Again, blood has been shed, synthesis achieved. On the female side, however, the moment of recognition is a bit more problematic. Antigone, the ethical actor, is quite conscious of the human law she disobeys (despite her womanhood, which, for Hegel, places her squarely on the side of the unconscious) and therefore does not undergo the moment of recognitive negation that would allow her to raise herself to the level of sublated self-consciousness. ²³ Furthermore, her lack of desire assures that she cannot attain self-consciousness through her relation with an independent other. ²⁴ She does not achieve the “ethical individuality” that would stand above the pathos of the ethical substance and allow her to withstand the wrath of the hostile power of the Other law. In the end, only human law might rightly persist, leaving the guardian of Familial blood to a bloodless entombment well outside the confines of the polis. For both Lacan and Hegel, despite their substantial differences—and similarities—Antigone most valiantly performs the ethical resurrection of her brother’s eternal symbolic individuality through the sacrifice of her own being to the reign of the symbolic or social order.

Materializing Hegel

Irigaray’s first essay on Hegelian ethics begins with an epigraph from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (1970):

This effusion of blood in man corresponds with woman’s menstrual losses. In this way, what is received by the uterus (as mere receptacle or container), is in man split into productive cerebral substance and into the heart which externalizes it. As a result of this differentiation, man is the active principle while woman is the passive principle, because she remains in her undeveloped unity. Generation should not be reduced to the ovary and the male semen, as if the product were merely a reunion of their forms or parts. But rather, the material element is in the woman and subjectivity in the man. Conception is the concentration of the entire individual into simple unity, which abandons itself there, in its representation: the semen is this simple representation itself—a point like the name and the self in its totality.

(Irigaray 1974, 266) ²⁵

Irigaray penetrates the Hegelian dialectic, not surprisingly, via the mythic semblant (sang blanc) of the traditionally gendered body and the red blood (sang rouge) that flows out of or through it. Once again recycling the production of femininity as undeveloped immediacy, Hegel in this epigraphic instance maintains a nominal connection to the fluid materiality of the human body, distorted though it may be. Through an incessant replaying of this connection with its obvious contradictions and structural repetitions throughout the dialectic (as) process, Irigaray unearths the bloodless corpse of the Hegelian ethical order and attempts a transfusional resurrection of Antigone’s cadaver. As a matter of strategy, in refusing the traditional position of the philosopher, Irigaray attempts to avoid recapture in the metaphysical systems that define and limit discourse by engaging in an openly amorous, pathos-laden exchange with her philosophic object of inquiry. In the course of this dialogic interchange, she also calls into question the supposed coherence of the historico-material identity of the family, in particular as relates to the recognition of sexual difference therein. In taking up the designated feminine role of mimetic reflection (le semblant) and reasserting the “elsewhere of matter” (ailleurs de la matière), of sang rouge—of feminine desire: “It is to submit oneself—from the side of the ‘sensory,’ of matter . . . —to ‘ideas,’ notably of her [woman], elaborated in/through a masculine logic [ . . . ]. It is also to ‘unveil’ the fact that, if women imitate so well, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They remain elsewhere: another insistence of ‘matter,’ but also of ‘jouissance’” (Irigaray 1977, 74). By entering into the tragic structure, by replaying the scenes of the crime(s), Irigaray seeks to uncover the distortions of Hegelian ahistoricity and its artificial grounding in the exclusion of femininity and the perversion of nature. She seeks to disrupt the inner workings of a dialectic fueled by violence and destruction and ultimately to refigure it, both materially and spiritually, from a time-space of sexual differentiation.

Though Hegel explicitly figures sexual difference as essential to the ethical stage of substance becoming subject, Irigaray argues that, to the contrary, the Hegelian dialectic reduces the two sexes to the unity of the (male) one and imposes a violent schism at the very core of the nature-spirit continuum, thereby condemning the evolution of Spirit to lifeless finitude and empty abstraction. According to the logic of the dialectic, the two sexes necessarily stand in direct opposition to each other. The one is the negation of the other and cannot truly affirm itself without this negating force. In the struggle for ethical predominance, masculinity comes into direct conflict with femininity. The masculine prevails, of course, and through the negation of the feminine attains to a sublated moral phase in its evolution. The resultant absence of a sexed dialogue creates an arterial clot at the very heart of the dialectic, which, though periodically cleansed by purgative blood baths, obstructs the material flow of life, the potential spiritualization of the (almost) silenced elsewhere of matter. For Irigaray, the Ethical Order, as chiasmic union of particular and universal, public and private, self and other—masculine and feminine—represents the historical site at which patriarchy subsumes matriarchy. Maternal genealogy and its respective divinities are subsumed under the name of the Father, epochal temporality and its history supplant previous forms of ancestral continuity, and the erotics of necrophilia replace the now enshrouded unconscious jouissance of a mutually conceived desire. At the ill-fated site of familial hemostasis between the tragic sibling couple, mutual self-recognition, and therefore the development of two individual self-consciousnesses, becomes unthinkable, not only because according to Hegel “self-consciousness is Desire” and this couple is devoid of desire, but also because the relationship cannot realize reciprocity. The unconscious sister cannot fulfill the role of self-conscious other with regards to her brother (or anyone else for that matter); and in Antigone’s case, the brother is dead and her desire therefore seeks the tomb. Irigaray explains Antigone’s sepulchral attraction as an indication of her rejection of the socially sanctioned erotic options open to her under Attic law: “. . . her attraction to the gods below or her jouissance is, no doubt, recognized even more so because through this adherence it escapes the inventions of men” (Irigaray 1974, 271).

Antigone also defines her ethical obligation as driven by eros: “I was born to join in love, not hate—that is my nature” (Sophocles 1984a, l. 590). Creon, forced by the dialogic discourse of tragedy to acknowledge, at least at some level, this stated motivation, replies: “Go down below and love, if love you must—love the dead! While I’m alive, no woman is going to lord it over me” (1984a, l. 592). He suggests similarly to Haemon, his son and Antigone’s fiancé, who not incidentally is also driven by eros to defy the law of his father and eventually to avenge Antigone’s death by committing suicide: “Let her find a husband down among the dead” (1984a, l. 730). In the end, Antigone accepts the inevitably bloodless consummation of her desire: “O tomb, my bridal-bed—my house, my prison cut in the hollow rock, my everlasting watch! I’ll soon be there, soon embrace my own . . .” (1984a, l. 978). Thus even if, as Irigaray wishes, Antigone is attempting to affirm an alternative to her designated position in the Athenian family, she, like Creon, remains nonetheless unable to figure this alternative as other than that which she might seek to escape. Metaphorically at least, Antigone becomes a bride. Eternally sexless, childless, forever devoid of the realization of erotic, maternal pleasure, Antigone, the Hegelian paragon of divine sisterhood, joins the ranks of those unconscious desires from whose threat she so selflessly protected her brother. A curious model for the blissful moment of gender equilibrium, but, as Irigaray argues, “. . . this moment, of course, is mythical, and this Hegelian dream is already the effect of a dialectic produced by patriarchal discourse” (Irigaray 1974, 269).

For Irigaray, within the utopic “substantial unity” (unité substantielle) of the Ethical Family, the discursive semblance of the Hegelian dialectic precludes a vital, harmonious intermingling of brother-sister, masculine-feminine eros. An oppositional bifurcation of the natural and the spiritual is artificially induced through the mediacy of a sexually indifferent philosophical myth wherein the feminine is merely a moment to be negated and subsequently forgotten. If the ethical woman is fortunate enough to escape entombment and thereby remains physically alive within the walls of the polis, drained of blood, amputated from her maternal ancestors and her own gods, confined to the unspiritualized immediacy of the oikos, her ethical individuality can connect neither materially nor spiritually with that of an other, and vice versa. For Irigaray, a truly ethical relation between the two sexes, what she terms a “dialectic of the couple,” is necessarily predicated upon a heretofore impossible “spiritualization of nature.” Without two distinct sexes (as opposed to one sex and its negative/affirmative mirror image) and their respective genealogies and divinities, the resultant sterility merely reproduces this repetitive finitude of a bloody past, a bloodless future: “That natural immediacy is almost always sexed, this remains unthought as moment of spiritual supersession. Nature’s sexed immediacy falls back into the natural realm of reproduction and is not elaborated as a spirituality of body, of flesh. The natural immediacy of the couple is thus not spiritualized” (Irigaray 1987, 149–50). The truly ethical relation emerges only from a space of irreducible alterity, a recognition of the fundamental difference of the two sexes. For even in their original unity, each sex always already contains a materially motivated element of distinction: “They have, in them, a duality which would already permit them to apply a new method. Each man and woman is physiologically his/her sex and the production of this sex” (Irigaray 1987, 153). ²⁶ The sexed body, from the very moment of conception, simultaneously (and diachronically) should incorporate the particularity of ever-shifting loci of intensely physical pleasure via inter/intracorporeal exchange, as well as the universality of a transcendent access to the unbounded sphere of its own gods. As mediation between the natural and the spiritual, the material and the divine, sexual difference, “the site of the universal particular,” allows for the spontaneous recirculation of blood and lymph, the reintroduction of continuous, infinite time, the recollection of ancestral and sacred connections, and the consequent revolution of a sexually charged notion of ethics. The individual, collective, historical becoming of gender would be the site, the penetrating link of spirit into human nature, the moment of passage of the infinite into the finite, insofar as each gendered individual is finite and potentially infinite in his/her relation to gender (Irigaray 1987, 154). Irigaray thus rewrites Hegel’s abstract individual, a formal concretization of Spirit, as mediation between particularity and universality, and proposes in its place the potentially infinite materiality of the “universal as mediation”: the divinization of sexual difference.

This spiritualization of the sexed body accesses the multidirectional horizons of genealogical pasts and deific futures, and engages gendered individuals in the process of a corporeally infinite becoming. Poetically surpassing the silent exhaustion of epochal history, the violent semi-solidity of the dialectic, the forced identity of man and woman, man and God, love and hate, the Irigarayan dialectic of the couple thaws the hemostatic waters of the bounded and isolated self and effuses the natural flow of blood and lymph within and between differentiated, though permeable, desiring bodies. These living, breathing bodies and their fluid exchange and interchange depose the culture of death, “la culte du mort et la culture de la mort,” as foundational moment of the ethical order: “. . . the pleasure of an endless exchange with the other in a touching that no privileged identification might hinder in its resorbtion. Neither one nor the other being taken as terms, any more than is this excess of their passage into each other—which is nothing: what is lacking in the circularity of a movement turning back on itself, the gap which always already refers back to another” (Irigaray 1974, 291). Temporality, no longer subject to the bloody temporality of the dialectical progress of Spirit, now permits a sensually inspired means of transcendence: “. . . a temporalization which passes neither through destruction nor the aufhebung, but rather through an attention, a knowledge, a culture of the sensible as such and through an access to levels of intensity and a contemplation of nature in the self, of the self, of the self and the other . . .” (Irigaray 1987, 159). This undammable constancy of a newly conceived historical flow renews the possibility of individual, ethical, copulative growth from within the material spaces of palpable carnality. Forward movement need not take the form of intergenerational annihilation and substitution. Celestial metonymy lends a logic of circulation between sexually differentiated gods and their ancestral incarnation; the mucous permeability of the vital, substantial divinity, “a god carried by the breath of the cosmos, the song of poets, the respiration of lovers” creates “the opening to a transcendental sensible coming to pass through us, and of which we would be the mediators and the bridges” (Irigaray 1982, 124). As “site and link in perpetual becoming between the two halves of the natural and spiritual world” (1982, 124), Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference supersedes the congealed positionality of its oppositional predecessor and opens into a fearless, never-ending process of mutual questioning within and between the two sexes.

Irigaray’s notion of the transcendental sensible returns us to the underlying problem of historicity as proposed in the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology. Both Hegel and Lacan fail to take into account the material, gendered nature of the universe in constructing their histories of the ethical subject and therefore remain mired in a thoroughly masculinized history of a theoretically neuter socio-symbolic order. For Hegel, the realm of Spirit transcends the contingencies of the progressive cyclical movement of human history whose end might be seen as some sort of consciousness of divine purity. For Lacan, on the other hand, it is the metaphoric synchronicity of the symbolic saying, the space of a pseudo-divinized Other, which provides humanity a certain level of transcendence with regard to the metonymic diachronicity of the more material said. While Irigaray appears to be calling for a solution grounded in the logics of both the dialectic and the psychoanalytic, neither of these theoretical frameworks might attain the mark of “divine” transcendence without a prior recognition and incorporation of the fundamental, material distinction between the two sexes—let alone the as yet unthinkable revolution in consciousness this remembrance implies.

As we have seen, the Hegelian dialectic fails on this count in its positioning of the feminine as mere negative affirmation of the masculine and its consequent burial of woman, and the material world of the body that comes to be associated with her, as a moment whose supercession lies on the path to the self-actualization of the masculine subject. For Irigaray, this refusal of feminine subjectivity betrays the very logic of dialectical progression toward absolute purity: “The absolute knowledge of a subject, a gender, is really a sign that the work of the negative has not been accomplished. An incarnated, sexed god more completely speaks the acceptance of the work of the negative, the necessity of embodiment in becoming divine, acceding to perfection. A god as couple speaks it, or would speak it, even more completely?” (Irigaray 1987, 124). In other words, by making the feminine disappear at the moment of the Ethical Order (and, incidentally, refusing Antigone her maternal genealogy), Hegel establishes a sexual unity that according to his theory would necessarily be inferior because it is less complex, underdeveloped. With her notion of the transcendental sensible Irigaray proposes a dialectic more dialectical than the Dialectic—a dialectic whereby thoroughly sexed subjects act as mediating movement between their respective masculine and feminine materialities and divinities. Only through the constitution of feminine alterity can the truly ethical encounter between self and other (as opposed to self and its specular negation) occur. Woman must negotiate the spaces of her own ethicity, the spaces between the specificity of her body and the horizon of her gods, before an ethics of sexual difference might become thinkable.

And just as divinity and materiality necessarily take on a new face in this process of sexuation, so too does the human psyche as well as its relation to the symbolic Other at the heart of the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis. If the nascent subject is figured as boy or girl, rather than child, whose occupancy of his or her sex entails material and spiritual connections as grounding moments in the construction of the imaginary and the symbolic, the Oedipal shift into the symbolic becomes completely nonsensical, as does its obsession with castration and incest. Primary repression, erasure of the mother—her consequent figuration as the absent presence of the Thing—erection of the Other under the sign of the Phallus, gives way to the admission of maternal desire and maternal debt as other than criminal disaster and, not insignificantly, reestablishes intergenerational bonds that might constitute the beginnings of a historicity grounded in genealogy and its connective potential. For in his refusal of Antigone’s femininity, his criminalization of maternal desire, all in the name of an absolute sacrifice (of femininity?) to the synchronic eternity of a being engendered through the moment of the thetic break—a moment through which the mediation of the specter of incest coincides with a supposed installation of sexual difference—Lacan positions the sphere of the Other as the vertical dimension whereby the events of the positive, contingent historicity of the horizontal dimension might be understood as subordinate to the transcendent axis of the divine. Lacan might be seen to be heeding the call of the new historicists avant la lettre by taking into account the “textuality within history,” by according the vertical dimensionality of the symbolic order to the horizontal movements of a text, as well as a text within a text, and elevating this process to the status of mythic universal. He does so, however, through the necessary excision of femininity, and perhaps more tellingly, the criminalization of the maternal (as) origin.

The question remains, then, as to exactly what Irigaray’s dialectic of the transcendental sensible might look like, how it might occasion a less flawed ethical framework. But to approach the question of ethics, the problem of historicity, on both the psychic individual and the social collective levels, first must be rethought in terms of sexual difference, in terms of genealogy—genealogy as that which most visibly, vocally evokes the inevitable connection between the material, the psychic, the social, and the divine (most succinctly defined, in Irigaray, as a transcendent, sexed horizon, the objective at the end of and beyond the passage of our individual becoming). ²⁷

The determination of history on the basis of genealogies requires first and foremost a reconnection to, a recognition of the maternal, a heretofore repressed acceptance of maternal debt and maternal desire, most significantly in the case of the mother-daughter relation. If, as Antigone, girls (following the masculine paradigm) reject or sacrifice their maternal origin as such to gain entry into the masculine, social order, they alienate their own sex, their own past, their own divinity, their own history, and as a result are never allowed the possibility of truly becoming themselves. Though Irigaray fails to discuss the effects this acceptance of maternity might have on men, it would appear that a masculine relation to a feminine genealogy, as instantiated through the initial connection with the maternal body—and later the mother herself—would set into play a dialectic rapport between the burgeoning masculine self and a full continuum of otherness that would similarly allow men to become themselves in a more authentic and multi-dimensional manner. This genealogical connection to the mother’s mother, and so on as historical configuration instates the horizontal dimension of diachronic temporality yet also contains within it—though no longer as geometrically perpendicular to it—the transcendent dimension of divinity, both of which necessarily maintain their fundamental grounding in the materiality of the human body and the natural world. Within this historical context, the development of the individual/collective psyche (the distinction cannot maintain its former structural differentiation) no longer claims as its necessary outcome the erection of a transcendent symbolic, paternal order—an ill-disguised, post-Christian replacement of God-the-Father.

The ethical implications of this revised historical landscape lie far beyond notions of traditional, positivist history, and even beyond those of “new history,” for both temporality and textuality are called into question by the instantiation of sexual difference. With the dethroning of the symbolic comes not only the unbalance of the synchronic element of Lacanian historicity but also the defining rubric of poststructuralist notions of textuality. Irigaray often argues that a symbolic engendered of sexual difference is impossible to conceptualize, above all because the only available tools of conceptualization are determined in and by a masculine symbolic. It might, however, be argued that this admittance of a present untenability of feminine, and of course maternal, expression implies a tacit acceptance of the reality of the Lacanian model of the human psyche and the transcendent nature of the Symbolic order that inescapably bounds our conscious and unconscious experience. This implicit assent to the truth-value of the Lacanian model seems not only unnecessary and insufficiently explained but potentially dangerous in terms of an attempt to think through a feminist revision of psychoanalysis. For if we are to concede the supremacy of the Symbolic and a consequent inability to express ourselves authentically from our inevitable positioning therein—except though hysterical outbreaks that only our analysts might understand—we negate existent feminine and maternal discourses and relegate genuine, untainted femininity and maternity to an abstract, “unthinkable” future.

Ethicity, in turn, is relegated to the realm of angelic abstraction potentially accessed through a presently nonexistent communication among and between the sexes. For until self and other, masculine and feminine, are constructed as such, an ongoing dialectic (in the Irigarayan sense), dialogic, respectful exchange cannot begin to take place. And while Irigaray certainly does advocate practical political action within the current masculinist system, her inability to envision a way out of the Lacanian psychic model poses certain ethical limits that her genealogical divinization of the maternal connection would not seem to allow us to surpass.

And if, for all this, we were to begin at the beginning. With the mother. Her uniqueness and her femininity. Her womanhood and her desire. And the enormity of our debt to her. If we were to refuse the Lacanian supposition that the mother qua mother exists only in the psyche of her (male) child, as the criminal origin of his interminable suffering, and instead were to assume that she is and always has been a much richer presence to herself, to her son or daughter, and to the many others in her life, her unique role as forbidden Thing would cease to function as an unconscious black hole and would render the supremacy of the Phallus theoretically invalid.

The psychic drama of ethicity sheds its tragic proportions once the mother-daughter/mother-son relation is recognized as a truly intersubjective connection between two desiring, social beings as well as a thoroughly material and sensual exchange between two animal bodies. And while the mother might now be read as our common point of entry into a more broadly conceived realm of ethicity, she does not do so as a conceptual space or time emptied of human subjectivity; she is neither pure body nor divine abstraction. This understanding of mothers as women, as historically, socially implicated beings, implies that we, “of woman born,” are always already ethically situated in this world. And in acknowledging our very first experiences as intersubjectively mediated in some sense, mightn’t it be more fruitful to ask what happens to this original connection, how does it shift and transform across time and subjective space? Must it be severed in a violent process of socialization, the so-called movement into the paternal order? In recognizing our mothers as selves, ethicity no longer depends upon the strength of our adherence to a lie that refuses maternal desire as criminal, but rather upon our acceptance of maternal love as beautiful, flawed, ambiguous, and human. We may manage to discover, or recover, through this initial amorous exchange a powerful antidote to the violent, suffering, isolated self forced upon us in the psychoanalytic, philosophical mirror.