Absolute Antigone
Between Sophocles, Hegel, and Lacan
Sophocles’s Antigone captivates the topic of the end and collapse as well as the contending views of whether this is good or not. Sophocles’s play introduces us to Antigone and her sister Ismene shortly after their two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, killed each other in military conflict — Eteocles was given a proper burial and funerary rites because he fought in accordance with the will and interests of the city of Thebes, which is represented by King Creon; whereas Polynices was refused such proceedings. In short, their relationship to any ethical substance is being determined by whether they are being honoured or shamed by the laws of Thebes. Thus, the play starts with a dispute between Antigone and Ismene, as Antigone is deeply disturbed by this predicament and Ismene sees no problem with it as it is in accordance with the substantial, orderly rule of Thebes. And while Antigone plots to bury Polynices, Ismeme wants nothing to do with the affair.
Antigone carries out the funerary rites and a symbolic burial by covering Polynices with a light filament of Earth, which then gets reported to Creon. Antigone does not deny what she has done, and confronts Creon about the moral value that he gives to an all-too-human and worldly sense of importance to the order of Thebes — Antigone, on her end, is acting in accordance with the laws of the gods. Creon becomes furious and suspects that Ismene is complicit by virtue of knowing of Antigone’s intentions, then calls for the incarceration of both women.
Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiance, Heamon tries to reassure Creon of his allegiance, but he also tries to convince him of the grief in the city that surrounds Antigone’s predicament Creon refuses to engage, and he escalates the tension to the point of threatening to execute Antigone in front of Haemon. And though Creon decides to spare Ismene, he also decided to bury Antigone alive in a cave in the hopes that by doing so he is able to maintain a moral distance from her fate — as a minimal gesture towards the gods as it were. However, Tiresias the blind prophet promptly warns that Creon should bury Polynices, as the gods are displeased and they have turned away from Thebes. Tiresias stresses that Creon will face his own losses for leaving a living body beneath the earth. But Creon is perpetually suspicious of the corruption of the city and its order by Tiresias, and he insists that Thebes is already good itself and that he will not bend that to any whims.
By the time Creon changed his mind, it was already too late. We learn through a messenger that Antigone has killed herself as the leader of the chorus and Eurydice (Creon’s wife and Haemon’s mother) are being informed of the matter. Creon saw to the burial of Polynices, but by the time that he arrived to Antigone’s cave, he only found Haemon lamenting Antigone’s hanging suicide. Haemon accidentally stabs himself when he tries to fight Creon, and then dies.
Creon’s fate begins to unfold, for as he returns to the palace with Haemon’s body, Creon is informed that Eurydice killed herself and cursed him with her last breath. At each time that Creon realized the ongoing catastrophe, he was already too late as fate was set in motion — he remains the King of Thebes, of a kingdom that has undone itself and that has de-substantiated itself from what the worldly and human order was supposed to conserve. Creon is left with only himself to condemn for having protected an order that he deemed to be the Good itself over and above the singular irreplaceable things that order was supposed to look after.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel explores the play of Antigone as he explores the topic of the Ethical Order. I will give a short preamble of earlier movements in the Phenomenology to unpack what we can draw out from Antigone in Hegel’s philosophy — even better, I will do this via memes!
Now, just to oil up the good ol’ dialectic machine, I will introduce the first meme that expresses a key point to be taken in understanding the structure of the Phenomenology and why the text initially inspects different grounds over which we could claim to philosophize — albeit, Hegel cautions us about taking our grounding foundation for a philosophy for granted. This warning pertains Hegel point that Philosophy as a system is a science and it entails a knowing rather than a lack thereof or distance from knowing — namely, the difference between “love of knowing” and “[being] actual knowing” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 3). Hegel’s phenomenology notes that: “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 3). The true shape of truth is what we need to hold on to, especially as the Phenomenology entails moving from different moments of truth over to the next in an organic unity (Phenomenology of Spirit, 2). Perhaps more poetically, Hegel’s phenomenology is the coming-to-be of this Science like the blossoming of a blossom:
The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter ; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead . These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other ; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (Phenomenology of Spirit, 2)
The meme, in this case, amounts to a playful formal, algorithmic vehicle to shortcut through some of the early movements in the Phenomenology that will help us flesh out Hegel’s reading of Antigone. With this meme alone, we have already made a claim to the Absolute that Hegel wants us to hold as the focus of philosophical knowing — so reassure yourself so far of this much, “Because of this necessity, the way to Science is itself already Science…”, as this Science is a Science of the experience of consciousness and passing moments of truth (Phenomenology of Spirit, 56). Here, the immediacy of the meme is optimal because, even though it is very formal and algorithmic in the end, it is familiar in the cultural context of Spongebob Squarepants — and this allows us to follow Hegel’s movements closely in that the Phenomenology starts by inspecting what is immediate, and due to its concrete content, it is favored by the certainty over which we make sense of things.
However, it is by turning to the immediate and the concrete that end up in a reversal over to mediation and the abstract:
What happens in the Phenomenology is that Hegel provisionally takes sense-certainty as a starting-point that we can turn to in the “Here and Now,” any immediate prop or prompt should suffice. But the certainty of this sense that we have is only given as a perception — the difference here is that in sense-certainty I can turn to this and that object, but at the level of perception I can that this and that object were apples with “apples” being a rather universal and abstract claim over the thisness of this object. Already here, we can observe a form of the dialectical tension setting in where we are trying to systematize oppositions into a unity. The experience of consciousness is pretty concrete and immediately given, but the certainty over how those experiences make sense is only possible through abstract mediations like the understanding of that experience helps me determine what an apple is. At the level of consciousness, we have moved from sense-certainty to perceptions; and lastly, we move over to the Understanding which regulates sense-certainty and its perceptions.
The moment of the Understanding is key in understanding where Hegel differs from Immanuel Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Kant’s Critical Philosophy is a response to both David Hume’s empirical skepticism and the metaphysical dogmatism of early modern philosophy which would posit claims that, according to Kant, breach what Reason could possibly say about them — some examples include, the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, or just generally the world and things as they are in themselves. Kant’s position amounts to identifying the conditions and mediations that make experience intelligible, and from these conditions, he develops a schematism of categories applied by the Understanding over the perceptions and sense-immediacies that it is trying to understand — for instance, that a thing exists, or that it has qualities or comes in quantities, that it holds relations, and that it may be a possibility or a necessity. In short, Kant sets up a filter over the kinds of claims we can make, since we cannot go on making unfounded and unrestricted claims without risking dogmatism.
The difference between Kant and Hegel amounts to this — even in claiming some access to the Absolute, as Kant’s later Critical Philosophy does through sublime aesthetic experiences, Kant never questions the categories of the Understanding and remains in a position where the Absolute and things as such remained restricted to the Understanding. Hegel’s claim is that Reason actually can go a step further by glitching out the determinations and limits of experience. The Understanding sets up a filter for us to make sense of our experiences within the bounds of its categories; however, and this is Hegel’s point, the categories can be questioned at the level of Reason, not mere Understanding.
Hegel’s point is that the gap that Kant identifies as a problem of knowledge of things as such is in fact a problem of being — for things to appear in such a way that we entered this problem means that things as such are what make this problem possible, it is not just a problem delegated over to subjectivity which accompanies each of our perceptions (Logic, 66). Hegel thinks that we can still make a claim to the Absolute without it having to amount to dogmatism or a mere suspenseful, negative skepticism.
So, let us summarize what Hegel has shifted us through so far. The beginning of the Phenomenology has moved us from three perspectives, all of which fall under Consciousness of experience. The first is the most immediate and concrete experience of sense-certainty. But then it turns out that the immediate was only given through determinate mediations of perception. And the Understanding tries to apprehend and categorize these mediations into a schematic filter of experience and sense-making activities.
But, by the end of the sections on Consciousness, Hegel flips us around one more time in highlighting that we can question the Understanding and its categorical schema via Reason. Thus, we move from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness:
At the point at which we can endeavor to question the Understanding and its categories, the Hegelian question would be: from where can we inspect Consciousness? And the next reversal would the movement from consciousness to self-consciousness — or to phrase it in a few other ways, from inspecting mediations to mediating mediations, from inspecting determinations to determining determinations. The Hegelian irony to Kant is that in order to determine a schematic of categories that filter consciousness, Kant must have assumed the position of self-consciousness and thus transgressed the very limits he himself set (Phenomenology of Spirit, 101 and 102).
Furthermore, at the level of Self-Consciousness, Hegel stresses that we are navigating a different form of knowing that cannot be collapsed over to just Consciousness (Phenomenology of Spirit, 104 and 105). Consciousness does not hold the root of itself. We are not just dealing with the knowing of itself as consciousness, but also dealing with the other that preceded consciousness determining it as self-consciousness — the level of self-consciousness is dealing with the knowing of this other that has been a vanishing point for us to be conscious. We can think of this as examining the remnants and traces of life that have set the stage for our own life, for example, as life confronted by life. And for Hegel, life is a process as well as the living thing, life is the universal fluid medium of the Absolute and the different alternate, altering forms the Absolute takes along the way (Phenomenology of Spirit, 107) — I stress the wording “alternate” and “altering” insofar as they pertain alterity and otherness.
The section on Self-Consciousness introduces the problem of otherness that is central to much of the Phenomenology. Hegel’s point amounts to this: at the level of Self-Consciousness, we are tarrying with life, life-forms, and the desires that coincide which each these life-forms who themselves are self-consciousness. Furthermore, as a desiring life-form, self-consciousness looks for security, satisfaction, and certainty of itself in contending with its own desire. And here we find the bud that will blossom over to the Lord and Bondsman dialectic: “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another consciousness” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 110). And we can refer to this satisfaction as recognition of a living self-consciousness, that it is significant to the other self-consciousness.
The desire for recognition characterizes what then becomes a struggle for recognition, with the stakes at hand being the independence and dependence of self-consciousness — or in other words, whether self-consciousness finds satisfaction and security in itself or by means of another self-consciousness. Thus, here we are engaging a twofold activity of two simultaneous self-consciousnesses — for instance, let us suppose that the struggle for recognition has taken place (and in a properly Hegelian sense, it has always already taken place by the time we are inspecting it), then we are left with a slanted inequality of the two: “one being only recognized, the other only recognizing” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 113). Or in the terms of independence and dependence: “ This presentation is a twofold action: action on the part of the other, and action on its own part”. And lastly, in terms of the Lord and the Bondsman, Hegel writes:
The lord relates himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is independent, for it is just this which holds the bondsman in bondage ; it is his chain from which he could not break free in the struggle, thus proving himself to be dependent, to possess his independence in thinghood. (Phenomenology of Spirit, 115).
At this stage, Hegel has set the stage for the blossoming of the blossom. Though the Lord has set itself in a position of domination over the Bondsman, it does not hold any self-conscious certainty of itself and it is only dependent in the products of the Bondsman’s labourings. And though the Bondsman is subservient to the Lord, “It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 118).
By the end of the Lord and Bondsman dialectic, we are moved over to the question of freedom which was always the problem at hand — albeit, unconsciously. Here, Hegel explores different attitudes towards freedom and their inability to resolve the issue by themselves. He turns to Stoicism as “the freedom which always comes directly out of bondage and returns into the pure universality of thought” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 121) — furthermore, Stoicism is an expression of a time of fear and bondage raised to the level of the universal, where to be free is to be one-with/dependent to the whims of the universe like, for example, the abstractions of Fate. However, Hegel moves from Stoicism to Skepticism in highlighting that the former’s form of inner freedom is dependent on the non-I and vulnerable to the outside world, whereas the latter tries to actualize the experience of freedom of thought by countering the outside world and tearing it apart through analytic skepticism. But in carrying out the skeptical activity, Skepticism sustains a negative suspension of the world, it looks at work and desire with suspicion without setting this attitude to rest — in short, the other side of Skepticism is the Unhappy Consciousness as self-consciousness contends with its internal contradictions, as rather than concretizing its freedom in the external world, Skepticism has made this world all the more distant.
This is only a repetition of the Kantian Critical Philosophy at the level of Self-Consciousness, and it will serve as a prop to highlight the leap over to Reason. Skepticism has landed us at a mere negative activity characterized by Unhappy Consciousness; however, its foil is Speculative Reason as an affirmative science and how these different, tense moments we have just shifted through still amount to a positive knowing of the System of Philosophy itself by supplementing it with the History of Philosophy as the material through which we observe Reason getting a sense of itself (Logic, 19).
At the point where are navigating Reason, we can carry out a couple of processes called the observation of Reason and the actualization of self-consciousness — if we go back to the an earlier point in the Phenomenology, at the end of the section on Consciousness to be precise, we saw this in Hegel’s interaction with Kant’s Critical Philosophy where we moved from inspecting determinations to determining determinations. And what will start tying this over to Antigone is that Reason sets the laws for itself and it also tests them.
In the section on Culture, we explore the question of the Ethical Order where Reason is observing itself as Spirit. Hegel elaborates of Spirit that:
Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it. They result from Spirit analysing itself, distinguishing its moments, and dwelling for a while with each. This isolating of those moments presupposes Spirit itself and subsists therein ; in other words, the isolation exists only in Spirit which is a concrete existence. (Phenomenology of Spirit, 264).
And moving into the discussion of Antigone, we will remember that: “The living ethical world is Spirit in its truth” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 265).
In Antigone, we are presented to Creon who insists in the goodness of the Earth as an orderly state, and that he will protect that orderly state only for the sake of itself — the Earth is good because it is good, it is a good order even though we have just buried Antigone alive for expressing a different spirit of ethics in trying to pay her respects to Polynices; even further, Creon sets up Antigone in a situation where her only way to assume her fate was much like Justine’s attitude at the end of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, assuming the inevitable. By the end of Antigone, Creon too sees to his fate as by insisting on the inflexible goodness of the earthly order for so long that he could only see the depressive optimism in hindsight. Antigone acts as a vanishing of the ethical substance that Creon, on the other hand, took for granted; moreso, she was the ethical subject of the substance that Creon could only understand too late and in hindsight, that the substance of ethics had to establish itself as subject for him to get it. Or as Hegel writes: “Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred” (Phenomenology of Spirit 284).
This circumstance can be explored, rather than in the phenomenological moment of Antigone, as part of the Logic where Hegel elaborates on the negation of the negation.
The first negation can be thought about as the limits set out by Kantian critical philosophy, where we are overstepping in claiming that thought can talk about things as they are in-themselves and independently from the categorical-schematism that makes things intelligible to our understanding — the implication being that the result of Kantian critical philosophy is merely negative and we are left in suspense over how Reason could proceed next. However, and as the second negation as the negation of the negation, thought itself is the leap beyond this negative suspense (Skepticism) over to a positive affirmation of the Absolute (dialectics towards Speculative Reason). Or as Hegel writes in towards the end of section 24 of the Logic: “The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand which heals it.” Reason is not seeking for conditions for the unconditioned Absolute, as “the genuine nature of essential thought… cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating.” In this case, thought is an activity; it is not just determined by negations of the first kind, but as a negation of the negation, it is determining itself. The question at hand amounts to: how can thought move beyond mere appearances and sense? What is the leap that allows proper philosophical speculative science to speak of the Absolute with this qualified sense of thought as its vehicle? How do we move from the determining negation that bounds us to definite limitations, conditions, and mediations over to the negation of the negation that only realizes that the yet-to-come of the Absolute is there in the already?
Hegel’s response amounts to an “elevation in thought in the first instance” (Logic, 83).
As Hegel writes in section 50 of the Logic:
The rise of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the supersensible which it takes when it snaps asunder the chain of sense, all this transition is thought and nothing but thought. Say there must be no such passage, and you say there is no thinking… …In this case [of the merely syllogistic thinker], the bearing of the beginning upon the conclusion to which it leads has a purely affirmative aspect, as if we were only reasoning from one thing which is and continues to be, to another thing which in like manner is. But the great error is to restrict our notions of the nature of thought to its form in understanding alone. To think the phenomenal world rather means to recast its form, and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once loses its first and phenomenal shape. By the removal and negation of the shell, the kernel within the sense-percept is brought to light… In this way the apparent means vanishes, and the process of derivation is cancelled in the very act in which proceeds… But that elevation, as it takes place in the mind, serves to correct this semblance: in fact, it has no other meaning than to correct that semblance… (Logic, 81 and 82).
The particular link here between the vanishing point of Antigone in the substance of ethics becoming subject, only for Creon to retroactively realize the actuality of the reason of ethics beyond the mere understanding he held for it both in practice and in theory. The vanishing point is exactly this correction of the semblance which is also at the core of the essence of the substance of ethics — it just had to become subject as Antigone for Creon to get it, the dialectic moves along.
The perception of the ethical substance that Creon holds gets challenged at the level of the understanding and aperceptional categories that structure experience. Creon holds on to the determinate mediating understanding, but he can hardly see past it — and though Antigone has a more intuitive unmediated relationship to the Absolute (jouissance to add a Lacanian hint), Hegel’s point is that even the intuitive immediacy is still a form of cognition claimed by the Absolute, which itself presumes mediations (consciousness) and mediations of mediations (self-consciousness) — and this is the very reason why, even though Creon held fast to his understanding, by the end even in his understanding, he got a vignette into the reason observed in Antigone’s intuition. The critique by Antigone meant an exceptional, excessive challenge to the apperceptional structuring of the understanding, which means that as a vanishing point for Creon, and by substance becoming subject, Creon could see more than he could have bared to have seen before.
The change over what Creon can see is excellently captivated by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan by deploying the term “anamorphosis.” Anamorphosis is the perceptional detour concerning corrective imagery and distortion playing on the logic of concealment and revealing as a means of trapping the object by making it cross the field of vision indirectly — Lacan’s famous example being Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 88–89).
In the anamorphic play, one can encounter a symptom in perception, the symptom being the point of cross-section between the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 71–73). Like Holbein’s skull, we can say of the object-cause of desire / objet petit a that it is marked by the symptomatic trans-structure in being “painted over each other” on the different registers. (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 139). The object a is always already part of the narcissistic structure as “I” (a), thus also complicit with the exo-skeleton of the Symbolic Other (A) that enables the possibility of a phallic jouissance. Nevertheless, the Real of the object a, das Ding, disturbs the object as the stain of the Real, when it does not perform up to speed to the imagination, produces something where nothing was expected.
Anamorphosis is the process or means by which the stain of the Real can be brought to perception as the Imaginary gaze — only the “I” feels whereas the object-cause of desire is (always absent or bent from) the gaze (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 272). Indeed, one is met by non-sense when the repressed object a returns, namely the anamorphic stain of the Real, or the stain of the subject of desire’s own mutilated reality.
So, what role does Antigone play as a vanishing point and an anamorphic play over Creon’s field of sense?
In the Lacanian reading of Creon’s gaze following Goethe’s, Lacan notes that:
Creon is driven by his desire and manifestly deviates from the straight path; he seeks to break through a barrier in striking at his enemy Polynices beyond limits within which he has the right to strike him. He, in fact, wants to inflict on him that second death that he has no right to inflict on him (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 254).
This distinction between two deaths can be further exemplified by the type of punishment that Creon sets upon Antigone: namely, he places her in a state between life and death, at a symbolic death from the life of the living, which then she claims for herself in the form of her real death as suicide which is in accordance and uncompromising of her own desire. As philosopher Alenka Zupančič notes in her book Ethics of the Real in reading Oedipus the King: “the sublime image of Antigone ‘between two deaths’ attracts our desire and has the effect, at the same time, of arresting it: fascinated with this image, we hesitate, saying to ourselves: ‘we won’t go any further’, ‘we have seen enough’” (Ethics of the Real, 179 and 180).
Lacan states that “Antigone is borne along by a passion” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 254). And as a vanishing point for the anamorphosis of Creon’s perception of the ethical substance, what Antigone helps show is that where at first we saw law, now we see desire (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 268)— namely, the truth of the ethical substance having to become subject. The sphere of the good as a category gets posed by Lacan as a barrier to desire, and in this respect, Lacan poses Creon as a good Kantian playing out his desire as if it were in accordance with the imperatives set out by categories like the good. Thus, in exploring Creon’s function in the play, Lacan turns our attention to his error in judgment:
His error of judgment (and we come closer to it here than that thought which is fond of wisdom ever has) is to want to promote the good of all — and I don’t mean the Supreme Good, for let us not forget that 441 B.C. is very early, and our friend Plato hadn’t yet created the mirage of that Supreme Good — to promote the good of all as the law without limits, the sovereign law, the law that goes beyond or crosses the limit. He doesn’t even notice that he has crossed that famous limit about which one assumes enough has been said when one says that Antigone defends it and that it takes the form of the unwritten laws of the [divine]). One thinks one has said enough when one interprets it as the Justice or the Doctrine of the gods, but one hasn’t, in fact, said very much. And there is no doubt that Creon in his innocence crosses over into another sphere… The good cannot reign over all without an excess emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 259).
We will note that the critique leveled against Creon here by Lacan is much the same as that which Hegel draws upon Kant — namely, that in claiming that there are determinate laws or a determinate sense of the good, we have simultaneously set a limit and transgressed insofar as in positing determinate laws we have also occupied a position of determining the determination. According to Lacan, it is this position that goes over Creon’s mere understanding. We can inspect here a commonplace phrase that “the exception proves the rule,” which is normally deployed as a way to reassure the categories in their understanding or that the presence of an exception means that rule must be all the moreso. However, the reversal we have here is far more subtle in highlighting that the rule requires the exception, that the exception is integral to the constitution of generalized rules insofar as it is an excess to what the rule can contain — in short, the rule is implicated in the production of its exceeding excesses as exceptions. The tragedy in Antigone is simultaneously what gives her a splendor of radical jouissance, namely that Antigone is this exceeding excess of the law and order of Thebes. Indeed, Antigone is driven by an unmediated, passionate imperative that resists the mere understanding of the categories (Ethics of the Real, 57). Antigone’s uncompromised desire is situated at this threshold as feminine jouissance, as she does not cede ground relative to her desire, and furthermore, she realizes it in her death insofar as she one with it — in the radicality of Antigone’s act, there is no divided subject over the categories of the good and the orderly. Or as Zupančič writes: “To sum up: ‘wanting jouissance’ maintains us on the side of desire, whereas ‘realizing desire’ transposes us to the side of jouissance” (Ethics of the Real, 255).
I conclude with one last quotation from Hegel’s Logic that captivates the critical movement of Antigone’s act as it pertains the question of freedom, bearing in mind that Ideality (Hegel) and the Real (Lacan) is the truth of reality, in that the Ideal — or the elevation in thought as an affirmation of the infinite in the first instance — is explicitly what is implicit in reality just the same way that the Real brings to light the implicit non-relation that frailly holds reality: “The supreme form of Nought as a separate principle would be Freedom: but Freedom is negativity in that stage, when it sinks self-absorbed to supreme intensity, and is, itself an affirmation, and even absolute affirmation… the genuine infinity, the truth, must be defined and enunciated as the unity of the finite and the infinite… The negation of negation is not a neutralization: the infinite is the affirmative, and it is only the finite which is absorbed…” (Logic, 128 and 140). If we take Antigone’s undivided subjective act of realizing her desire in light of the Hegelian aufheben (or sublimation), the clearing-away of the vanishing point as a negative activity is in congruence with the positive affirmation of what what is been preserved as a result — the splendor of Antigone rests in the undividedness of her act in that the realization of her desire, albeit finitely understood, rippled infinitely as Reason. As an anamorphic motion pertaining Creon’s gaze and desire, Antigone’s act and claim to the Absolute is the Real that shatters the realism upheld by Creon, who can only tragically find a restless resolve in this dramatic session of psychoanalysis. As an analytic act itself, Antigone overcomes the divideness in herself, that she is split into an alienated state by virtue of the desire of the Other, or King Creon — Antigone is hysteriziced by a symbolic death, but her analytic act takes place at the level of her real death which she claims as her ownmost realization of her freedom/desire. The Unhappy Consciousness of Creon is the restless resolve that he can only recognize the freedom and desire of Antigone, but by virtue of the undivideness of Antigone in realizing her desire, Creon is restless that no one can recognize what he came to recognize in the end — Creon is rendered incapable and impotent from realizing his desire in any chance of taking this radicality away from Antigone; Creon is as good as dead in life. On the other hand, Antigone’s resolve is Absolutely and Infinitely Real.
On the Hegelian end of Antigone’s act, we see the opening up of a split in Spirit itself; and on the Lacanian end of Antigone’s act, we have the overcoming of the dividedness in Antigone herself through an undivided, radical act where she realizes her desire for death in being at one with it. Therefore, on the one hand, we have the analytic act where Antigone moves from her own internal split over to her undivided realization of desire; and, on the other hand, this undividedness of Antigone ripples infinitely in Reason and Spirit as restless dividedness in Spirit itself which challenges the pretext Creon held over the undividedness in order of the Ethical Substance.
P.S. At the end of Ethics of the Real, Zupančič notes that Antigone’s realization of her desire and the infinite is negative as it is only accomplished in her sacrificial absence, which stands-in for classical ethics. This is contrasted with her reading of Paul Claudel’s Sygne de Coûfontaine as the stand-in for modern ethics. Both Antigone and Sygne stand in relationship to Lacan’s dictum ne pas céder sur son désir, and that they realize their desire in two different ways.
…the ‘do not give up on your desire’ is not simply foreign to what the expression ‘to give up on’ implies. Rather it implies that in order to preserve one thing, one ready to give up on everything else. In the case of Antigone this implies that she gives (away) everything in order to preserve some final ‘having’. In the end, she realizes herself in this final ‘having’; she merges with it, becomes herself the signifier of the desire which runs through her, she incarnates this desire. In the case of Sygne, this goes even further. She does not give up on her desire either, but she finds herself in a situation where this demands that she also gives up on this final ‘having’, the signifier of her being, and realizes herself in the ‘not-having’. In the case of Sygne de Coûfontaine, ‘not to give up on her desire’ implies precisely that she ‘gives away’ everything. (Ethics of the Real, 258 and 259).
While Antigone’s resolve is Absolutely and Infinitely Real; Sygne’s act and realization of desire gives away her “having” as realizes as “not-having,” of which we can most properly say the Absolutely and Infinitely Real is no one’s, without a name or rather bound by no name, emptied of nominality leading to a nemonology, “to an ethics and aesthetics of no one” (What is Power?, 96, 121 and 122). The modern ethics is unpacking the consequences of this fundamental infinite decision without any one to claim “having.” Or as Daniel Heller-Roazen writes in No One’s Ways:
After this exploration of the philosophies of infinite naming, it will therefore be necessary to turn to other fields. A new task will be proposed, which belongs to the next part of the investigation that begins with this book. In literature and law, in anthropology and mythology, psychoanalysis and linguistic, non-man has also been sighted. Outis — “No One,” “Not-one,” “No Man,” and “Non-man” — has visited all these domains. “His” ways have been charted in fables and in fictions, in customs and in gestures, in symptoms and in deeds. Now No One’s masks demand to be examined, one by one, in their disquieting force and functions. It is our voice that sounds, each time, through them. (No One’s Ways, 258).
References and Citations
Han, Byung-Chul. (2019). What is Power? Trans. Daniel Steuer. United Kingdom: Polity. Print.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1987). Hegel’s Logic: being part one of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Trans. William Wallace. Great Britain: Oxford University Press. Print.
— —(1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. United States of America: Oxford University Press. Print.
Heller-Roazen, Daniel. (2017). No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming. New York: Zone Books.
Kant, Immanuel. (2003). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. J.M.D. Mieklejohn. New York: Dover Publications Inc. Print.
Lacan, Jacques. (1992). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. U.S.A.: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. Print.
— — (1998). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. U.S.A.: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. Print.
Zupančič, Alenka. (2011). Ethics of the real: Kant andLacan. New York: Verso. Print.
