ANTIGONE AS FIGURE

Abstract

Drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe's deconstruction of Oedipus as a figure of both desire and work in his tragic pursuit of knowledge, this paper maps Lacan's radical reorientation of the philosophical categories of desire, work, and knowledge in his theory of the four discourses. While all four discourses constitute libidinal and political economies, only the hysteric's discourse entails both the desire for and the production of knowledge – particularly mythical knowledge with its impossible truth of sexual difference. Returning to Sophocles' Antigone in light of Seminar XVII, I argue that if Antigone has all but replaced Oedipus as a figure for modern subjectivity it is because she, like the hysteric, is a figure of not only desire but work under capitalism.

Keywords:

• Antigone
• Lacan
• four discourses
• work
• desire
• knowledge
• myth

Notes

I am tremendously grateful to Tracy McNulty, Shanna Carlson, and Alexis Briley for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, presented at “Possibilities of the New: The Subject of Truth in Psychoanalysis,” a conference organized by the Psychoanalysis Reading Group at Cornell University (22–23 April 2011).

1 In the Rectorship Address, Heidegger cites Aeschylus's Prometheus as saying “knowing [τέχνη], however, is far weaker than necessity” (“Self-Assertion” 472). Such attunement to the limits of knowledge is the “essence of knowing” (ibid.).

2 The first two lines of the choral ode are translated: “Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing / more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being” (Hölderlin's Hymn 58).

3 Heidegger furthermore implies that the “priority of τέχνη” characterizes modernity, which is dominated by “the machine and its destructive essence”: “It is this, whether we like it or not, that is the ‘lived experience’ of modern human beings, indeed their sole lived experience” (Hölderlin's Hymn 114). Heidegger also disparagingly alludes to our modern conception of the political in “a ‘technical’ manner” as merely “the state” in contrast to a Greek conception of the polis as “the open site of all beings, which are here gathered into their unity” (see 94–95).

4 Arguing against the Freudian move of taking the Oedipus complex as a model for masculine and feminine development, Sjöholm introduces the concept of an “Antigone complex.” Rather than a formulaic structure or narrative of desire, the Antigone complex corresponds to the “complexity introduced in any discussion of desire where the feminine is concerned” (xii). This complexity is then manifested – the Antigone complex, we might say, is symptomatized – in the wide range of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and feminist interpretations of Antigone. In the course of these interpretations, Antigone emerges as a representative of modern subjects in general and not simply female subjects insofar as feminine desire comes to correspond to an irreducible excess, what Sjöholm calls “the pressure of an unfathomable alterity in our daily lives” (xxi).

5 Françoise Meltzer suggests that Sophocles' Antigone is “a mystery, a supplement refusing the bounds of any economy” (185; emphasis added). For Meltzer, the question of gender, in Sophocles' play and in its criticism, in effect conceals what is really at stake – namely, a paradox whereby “the concept of subjectivity in itself” depends on the notion of a boundary between the subject and death and yet “something of death” inheres in subjectivity (ibid.). The feminization of alterity “helps to veil” the internality of death to the subject (ibid.). Antigone's “shocking agency” is not only tied to her femininity, then, but to her foreignness and religiosity so that something of her significance – her readiness to be a figure, perhaps? – is lost if we overlook these elements of her characterization (ibid.).

6 See Sjöholm 99–110, Žižek, especially 666–70, and Chiesa 176–82. Chiesa treads with admirable care here: while he agrees with Marc De Kesel that Antigone is foremost an image in Lacan's reading, he concludes that, “at this stage, Lacan cannot find a better ‘image’ for his ethics, one which would, after representing the representation of lack, represent the moment of symbolic reinscription instead of an irrevocable disappearance into the unrepresentable lack itself” (177). Eleanor Kaufman also takes Antigone as a kind of ethical model for Lacan, but her stress on Antigone's “adherence to the perverted family” and the “extreme political disruption” caused by Antigone's death allows her to steer clear of this internal debate among Lacanians (149). The ethics that emerges from Kaufman's reading is an ethics not of the real but of “a sort of gritty realism (to be sure, not the way Lacan would put it) where one has no choice but to confront those things that are otherwise too horrifying or painful to address” (143).

7 Restuccia suggests that “[the Ethics seminar] continues to be misread as championing Antigone's defiance and self-destruction (her jouissance) as a model of ethical behavior” (xii). At the same time, desire is not strictly opposed to jouissance as a basis for ethics: “although ethical acts in Lacan are not finally self-annihilating (desubjectifying), they cannot transpire without exposure to annihilation” (xiii). See also Restuccia 1–27.

8 See Shepherdson 50–80.

9 For Lacoue-Labarthe, Lacan elides the distinction between ethics and aesthetics in his reading of Antigone but, because Lacoue-Labarthe's framework is foremost philosophical and intellectual historical rather than psychoanalytic, the stakes of this elision are somewhat different. The question for Lacoue-Labarthe is why ethics must take recourse to aesthetics and its potentially more nefarious kin, mythology, even as aesthetics is “wrenched from that which since Plato has constituted it as such: namely, mimetology.” What troubles him in Lacan, as in Heidegger, is the “aestheticizing of ethics”: “why, in Lacan who was so irritated by Heidegger's political attitudes, is there an attachment to the romantic program of a new mythology? Of a myth for our time?” It is a question that no doubt is bound to haunt my own discussion below of the value of myth for Lacan. See Lacoue-Labarthe, “On Ethics: A propos of Antigone,” initially published in French in Lacan et les philosophes.

10 The experimental Université de Paris VIII, founded in 1969, included a Department of Psychoanalysis, “overtly Lacanian in orientation” and the “first of its kind in France” (see Clemens and Grigg, Introduction 1–2).

11 In earlier accounts of the case the father's creative power is linked to love – that is to say, the gift of what one does not have, the gift of nothing – rather than knowledge. In his reading of Lacan's return to the Dora case in Seminar IV, Jean-Michel Rabaté argues that Dora's “love for her maimed father was proportional to the diminution of his status. This can be generalized: there is no greater gift than the gift that one does not have [ … ] Thus, Dora loved her father for what he did not give her” (87–88). This loving exchange of “nothing for nothing” sufficed for Dora until Herr K. introduced “another type of ‘nothing’” in his notorious proclamation, my wife means nothing to me, thereby prompting her to realize that “she had merely occupied the position of an object” (92). Lacan echoes this account in Seminar XVII when he suggests that Freud gave Dora “satisfactions of being interested in what he felt as her demand, her demand for love” (99). Certainly Lacan is critical of Freud's reduction of this demand along with everything else to penisneid. But I think it would be a mistake to suggest that the question of knowledge necessarily eclipses the question of love or that the thoroughly justified critique of penis envy means that the phallus, if I may put it so crudely, does not come into play in the hysteric's discourse. As the case of Dora aptly demonstrates, beyond the Oedipal preoccupation with (not) having the phallus there is still the issue of being (mistaken for) the phallus, an object of exchange.

12 Lacan makes this point in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” when he writes: “Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has shaped him in its image” (264).

13 In “The Structural Study of Myth” these bundles are arranged in vertical columns and spaced to account for the fact that “[r]elations pertaining to the same bundle may appear diachronically at remote intervals” (Lévi-Strauss 211). In this way, the narrative of the myth can be reconstructed from its structural arrangement: “Were we to tell the myth, we would disregard the columns and read the rows from left to right and from top to bottom” (214). See Lévi-Strauss 213–16.

14 Of course, this split also redoubles an even more primordial one inasmuch as the infant is already implicated in the symbolic, far though he may be from assuming a place in it that is peculiarly his.

15 Leader notes that “Lacan did not go on to elaborate his ideas about myth as a set of permutations in any systematic way” after Seminar IV (43). What we increasingly find in Lacan's work is a “tension between the use of fictional models and logical or mathematical ones” (47). This tension, for Leader, is itself exemplary of the ongoing impact of the structural study of myth insofar as these two models correspond to two treatments of impossibility: “for Lacan, there is a real involved which can only emerge in between these two modes of presentation” (ibid.).

16 Žižek, for example, argues that in the moment of her decision to give Polynices funeral rites, “Antigone does not merely relate to the Other-Thing, she [ … ] directly is the Thing, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations” (669).

17 Y a d’ l'Un – “There's such a thing as One” or “the One” – is a refrain that runs throughout Seminar XX. The One exists but we cannot be so certain about the Other – particularly the Other Sex, Woman. What “the One” is made to name in the course of the Seminar varies, but especially resonant here is its identification with the (phallic) signifier and (phallic) libido. To ask what lies beyond the One, to inquire into the possibility of the Two, is, among other things, to question (the existence of) what lies beyond the phallus.

18 On the hysteric's question, see Lacan, Seminar III, The Psychoses 161–82.

19 This translation of lines 1–3 is Miller's (“Lacan's Antigone” 3). All further citations, however, are drawn from Fagles's English translation and are followed by line numbers in parentheses.

20 Miller gives the opposition between sameness and difference a Lacanian twist, associating the feminine principle of unification represented by Antigone with the Imaginary and the masculine principle of division represented by Creon with the Symbolic. It bears noting the contrast between this reading and Hegel's interpretation of Antigone in Phenomenology of Spirit. While Hegel's claim that “the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the family” would seem to resonate with Miller's and Segal's identification of Creon with difference, it is womankind that ultimately poses a threat of difference as the eternal irony of the community for Hegel. As he famously writes: “Womankind [ … ] changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of some particular individual” (288).

21 And not just Antigone! Creon is similarly characterized by duality at the end of the play, rendered feminine by his wailing, and yet the tragedy, as well as the justice, of his fate hinges on his being a man, a failed patriarch who has destroyed the household – the familial and feminine goods – over which he is supposed to rule: “Wailing wreck of a man, / whom to look to? where to lean for support?” (1462–63). His loss can be measured in terms of the patriarchal economy that he figures throughout the play and by which he aims “to produce good sons – / a household full of them, dutiful and attentive, / so they can pay his enemy back with interest / and match the respect their father shows his friend” (715–18). Within this economy, Creon has lost not only a son but also, as Carol Jacobs notes, “the most important property of the state, the patrilineal heir” (907). At the same time, this loss marks his absorption into the strange economy orchestrated by or through Antigone – an economy which Jacobs argues is a far cry from the matriarchal function ascribed to her by both Hegel and Irigaray, who in effect appropriates a Hegelian division of labor in order to cast Antigone as a figure of “revolution against patriarchy” (Jacobs 911). While Antigone is figured in maternal terms (and her name means, among other things, “in place of the mother”), she “does not give birth precisely, but rather death – and if not quite death then the dispersal of the corpse's (Hegelian) claim to completeness of shape, to universality, and to what Irigaray calls its ‘final figuration’” (909). Jacobs thus follows Hegel's identification of womankind via the figure of Antigone as the eternal irony of the community to its (il)logical conclusion: as a disseminator of death, Antigone forecloses closure. Her sprinkling of a “light cover of road-dust” on the body of Polynices (line 290) also registers her figuration of an other economy for Jacobs, one that is neither patriarchal nor matriarchal but which “shocks us into re-imagining maternity and, therefore, mankind” (909) – an economy that I have tried to align with the hysteric's discourse.

22 The confusion of such norms is also central to Judith Butler's reading of the play and especially her critique of Hegel and Lacan. For Butler, Antigone, “transgresses both gender and kinship norms,” thereby “expos[ing] the socially contingent character of kinship, only to become the repeated occasion in the critical literature for a rewriting of that contingency as immutable necessity” (6). I tend to agree with Sjöholm that Lacan allows more space to rethink kinship than Butler's interpretation of the relationship between the symbolic and the social admits; see Butler 15–25 and Sjöholm 115–25.

23 See, for example, Fumagalli's “Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism,” especially “Thesis #6: in cognitive biocapitalism, the division of labor takes on itself cognitive characteristics, and therefore is based on the differential access and use of different forms of knowledge” (10).