Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.
More than a “yearning,” the death drive is a drive unbound and immeasurable, a drive that defines human life.
As a work of poetic art, Antigone’s work is thus the work of truth, where gtruth in this case is the truth of desire, the death drive. … a “zeropint” of word and image, a pooint where the word equals zero, where signification stumbles and comes to a halt. 7
his heroically implring his audience against any giving up or “giving way” on desire. and while it may not at first seem to be much, it is also here that he leveraged the only remaining posibilites for human fredom and self-assertion in the face of seemingly impcable necessity 11
il n’y a pas de sujet connaissant there is no such thing as a knowing subject. Beyond the measured articulations of the philosophical subject “who knows,” and who first of all has “self-knowledge,” Lacan approached through the neologism lalangue another dimension of the enoyment of speaking that he calls the jouissance of speech, “an enjoying of speech qua jouissance of speech (parole jouissance en tant que jouissance de parole),” that is quite beyond and inaccessible to the measured articulations of the philosophical subject who knows what he/she wants. But this reference to jouissance requires that not only the enjoyment but also the suffering introduced by language be stressed.
The effects of the introduction of language into the living human being are not always so salutary in Lacan’s view as they may be for the philosophical ethical tradition, where the measured eloquence of truth brings self-mastery and has a healing effect, for language in the Lacanian universe introduces not only mastery an salvation, it also brings subjection.
It can even be seen as a parasite, a disease, virulence, an Other in which the subject from the day it is named, from the day it is a subject, is captured and defined. 19-20
The individual who is affected by the unconscious is the same individual who constitutes what I call the subject of a signifier. It is this subject — and not the subject as one “who knows” (connaissance) — that must also become the ethical subject caught in the knots of desire and moral-ethical law, a subject that is bound by the limits of language and that is inscirbed within the limits of the symbolic order.
Among the affects of the unconscious on the subject, would also include a desire to transgress those limits, a desire, and an unavowed passion to get back behind or beyond the limits of language, to exceed the limits of the law. This is a desire for the “Real,” … With the insciption in to the symbolic order comes order, comes regulations, and the reign of moral. law. The real is whatever disrupts that order and that law; whatever breaks the operation of the symbolic order.
Access to the real is difficult and perhaps danbgerous, but also not without a certain enjoyment, a certain jouissance 23
Todestrieb
Badioiu marks this lmit and present the psychoanalytic rupture with Platonic ontology by way of a resonance he brings into view between Lacan and the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus. deconstructs Plato by going back behind him, or before him, to a pre-Platonic thinking, … that came before the ontological metaphysics of Plato, and that may have in fact conditioned it, but which was subsequently silenced, left in fragments by the tradition of thought that emerged from Plato. … where Plato is the philosopher of the great higher unity of a transcendental Eidos, a true philosopher of the infinite, Hereclitus is a thinker of difference and of the gap, a philosopher of the enigmas of finitude and of the lack of final resolution andclosure in being. 36
It is in tragic drama, not philosophy, according to Lacan, that one encountes the drive and the distress of death. It is by “digging into verse,” as Mallarmé put it, that one encounters the abyss of death and the absence of God, forfeits the sureties of being, and is thereby brought to the limit where one must break with everything, even the traditional horizons of truth and the promise of futurity.