Paul Allen
Miller Lacan's Antigone: The Sublime Object and
the Ethics of Interpretation
My paper examines Lacan's reading of
the Antigone as an allegory of our own textual and
ethical obligations as readers and critics. This paper
addresses both the ethics and the aesthetics of our
encounter with the text.
In 1959, Lacan presented Sophocles'
Antigone as a model of pure desire for his seminar
on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
Antigone presents herself as
autonomos, the pure and simple relationship of a
human being to that which it miraculously finds itself
carrying, that is the rupture of signification, that
which grants a person the insuperable power of
being&emdash;in spite of and against
everything&emdash;what he [sic] is. . . .
Antigone all but fulfills what can be called pure desire,
the pure and simple desire of death as such [i.e., of
that which is beyond the pleasure principle]. She
incarnates this desire. (1986: 328-29)
Lacan
notes that Antigone's decision to defy Creon consciously
seeks death. She makes no effort to defend Polynices'
actions (Lacan 1986: 290, 323-25). Her choice takes her
beyond the realm of rational discourse and the collective
norms of human satisfaction it implies (Lacan 1986: 78,
281; Zizek 1991: 25). Hers is a position that transcends
the comfortable binary oppositions that structure our
daily ethical and social lives. Because her choice of
death cannot be understood according to strictly rational
norms, she cannot be read as representing some simple
antithesis of freedom to tyranny, or the individual to
the state (Lacan 1986: 281; Zizek 1992: 77-78). In fact,
as she acknowledges, she had chosen death before Creon's
decree against the burial of Polynices, and she defines
herself to Ismene as one already belonging to the realm
of the dead (ll. 559-60; Lacan 1986: 315, 326). Creon is
not a tyrant who forces Antigone to make an impossible
choice between life and freedom; rather, he embodies the
civic norms that her pursuit of a desire beyond the
bounds of those desires articulated within the realm of
common life both requires as defining foil, and
transcends. Her choice thus represents a pure ethical act
shaped neither by a self-interested selection among
communally recognized goods nor the self-loathing of
conforming to a code that is recognized and despised
(Zizek 1992: 77).
Such an ethical choice, as Lacan
acknowledges, is Kantian in its devotion to a pure
concept of duty, but psychoanalytic in its predication on
a highly individualized desire whose content cannot be
generalized into a universal ethical maxim (Lacan 1986:
68, 365-66). Antigone's choice, her desire, is pure
precisely to the degree that it rejects the claims of the
Other. For Lacan, it is the beauty of Antigone's choice
of a Good beyond all recognized goods, beyond the
pleasure principle, that gives her character its
monumental status and makes her a model for an ethics of
creation as opposed to conformity. It is for this reason
that he cites Antigone's self-comparison to ever-weeping,
petrified Niobe, another princess enclosed alive in
stone&emdash;as the central axis around which the play
turns (ll. 823-33). In this one image we see brought
together the themes of beauty, monumentality, and
death-in-life in a singular apotheosis of tragic
transgression (Lacan 1986: 311, 315, 327). Beauty for
Lacan represents the perfect moment between life and
death, a moment both articulated by and beyond time and
desire, a moment whose true achievement can only be
imagined as the incarnation of a pure desire beyond any
recognizable object.
In its beauty, Sophocles' Antigone presents what
Lacan defines as a "Sublime Object." Our ethical
obligation as readers and analysts is to be true to this
object to the precise degree that it transcends all
normative categories. As Antigone does not cede on her
desire, neither can we assimilate her tragedy to a
pre-existing set of critical categories, even
psychoanalytic ones. This is an obligation to the text,
but it is simultaneously an obligation to our own desire
as readers, critics, and subjects: for the encounter with
the sublime object is one that must shake us to our very
core if it is not to be a factitious or mechanical
exercise in the application of reassuring truisms. To
meet our obligation to the sublime text we must go beyond
the dictates of the pleasure and reality principles,
beyond good and evil to encounter pure desire: the moment
in which the canons of meaning shudder before their own
beyond.
Works Cited
Lacan, Jacques. 1986. Le
séminaire livre VII: L'éthique de la
psychanalyse. Paris.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry:
An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture. Cambridge.
---. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom:
Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York.