Žižek. Traversing the Fantasy eds. Boucher, Glynos, Sharpe. 2005
So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon of our existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any resort to spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petite a as the ”undead” (“noncastrated”) remainder which persists in its obscene immortality. No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself.
Back to the texts in ‘ the present volume: the main thing that I find problematic in Grigg’s contribution is precisely what appears the most natural thing for a psychoanalyst to do-his “clinical” reading of Antigone’s act as a gesture of hysterical provocation. Lacan, surprisingly, avoided this direction completely: there is, in his detailed reading of Antigone, no mention of repression, of the formations of the unconscious, of incestuous desires (although we are dealing here the Oedipus family, the incestuous family !) . . . And I think Lacan was right here: the dimension he is focusing on-that of the ethical act-cannot be rendered (and also not “demystifled”) in clinical terms. Furthermore, I think Grigg is wrong when he claims that Antigone “defies the law of her city in the name of her (Oedipal) law”: it is her brother’s proper burial that she insists on (as the theatre piece informs as in the lines which are often dismissed as problematic, but on whose key importance Lacan insists, it is only apropos her brother that she is ready to go to the end), and it is not clear what this has to do with the Oedipal Law.
Furthermore, we should not forget the obvious fact that we are not dealing here with just any case of the Oedipus complex, but with Oedipus himself-and, as Lacan liked to point out, the Oedipus family, precisely, was not Oedipal, and Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex.
Grigg’s other counterargument concerns the problematic status of what I call the “act of absolute freedom” which “derives its essential features (its freedom, its gratuitousness, its criminality, its unaccountability and unpredictability) from the fact that it lies outside all possible symbolic dimensions. It strikes me that not only does Antigone not conform to this requirement but also that this requirement makes an act indistinguishable from mere whimsicality. There is no objective criterion and there can clearly be no appeal to any subjective features to distinguish an act of absolute freedom from a gratuitous act.”
As I abundantly developed elsewhere (among other places in my (Ticklish Subject), such a reading of the act is wrong: what makes a certain move an act proper are not its inherent qualities but its structural place within a given symbolic network — to put it in Badiou’ s terms. an act intervenes at the point of the “symptomal torsion” of this network. This is what distinguishes an act from a mere whimsicality, and this is also why, of course, the externality of the act is absolutely internal to the symbolic order-an act is ex-timate, to use Lacan’s pun.