Ethics of Psychoanalysis - Lacan’s Antigone and the Ethics of Interpretation :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

ethical motive of Psychoanalysis - Lacans Antigone and the Ethics of InterpretationMy paper examines Lacans reading of the Antigone as an entirelyegory of our protest textual and ethical obligations as readers and critics. This paper addresses both the ethics and the esthetics of our encounter with the text.In 1959, Lacan presented Sophocles Antigone as a model of pure swear for his seminar on The Ethics of PsychoanalysisAntigone presents herself as autonomos, the pure and simple descent of a human being to that which it miraculously finds itself carrying, that is the rupture of signification, that which grants a mortal the insuperable power of beingin spite of and against everythingwhat he sic is. . . . Antigone all but fulfills what can be called pure bank, 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 Antigones close to defy Creon consciously seeks death. She mak es no effort to defend Polynices actions (Lacan 1986 290, 323-25). Her choice takes her beyond the body politic of quick of scent 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 well-disposed 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 forward Creons decree against the burial of Polynices, and she defines herself to Ismene as one already belong to the realm of the dead (ll. 559-60 Lacan 1986 315, 326). Creon is not a tyrant who forces Antigone to make an unsufferable choice between life and freedom rather, he embodies the civic norms that her following of a desire beyon d the bounds of those desires articulated within the realm of common life both requires as defining foil, and transcends. Her choice thereof represents a pure ethical act shaped neither by a self-interested selection among communally recognized goods nor the self-loathing of conforming to a enrol 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 nub cannot be generalized into a universal ethical maxim (Lacan 1986 68, 365-66).