{"id":13129,"date":"2014-09-09T12:37:57","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T16:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13129"},"modified":"2014-09-09T13:49:24","modified_gmt":"2014-09-09T17:49:24","slug":"shepherson-anitgone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/09\/09\/shepherson-anitgone\/","title":{"rendered":"shepherdson antigone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shepherdson, C. (2009).\u00a0Antigone<\/strong><\/em>: The Work of Literature and the History of Subjectivity<\/strong>. In: Bound by the City: Greek tragedy, sexual difference, and the formation of the polis<\/em> edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey and Emily Zakin, pp. 47-80.<\/p>\n

Lacan insists that Creon’s fault is not a “personal” or “psychological” one, a failure of judgement, or a vaguely Christianized “sing of pride,” or a “fear of femininity” (which is not to say that ancient Greece was not a misogynistic culture or that such psychological issues are entirely irrelevant to tragic drama).<\/p>\n

Rather than emphasizing Creon’s individual psychology and his conspicuous egotism (“I won’t be beaten by a woman,” etc.), as one might expect the psychoanalyst to do, Lacan insists that Creon’s mistake is to impose a law at the level of univerality<\/span><\/strong>, what Lacan calls a “good that would rule over all,” legislating over “friends and enemies,”<\/p>\n

in contrast to Antigone’s radical adherence to a form of singularity<\/span><\/strong>, her “irrational attachment to the “unsubstitutable” Polyneices, who (unlike a husband or children, as she says) is singular and “irreplaceable,” which is to say, outside any general law<\/strong>, outside “writing” and the discourse of universals, detached from the level of the “concept” that governs so many Hegelian and post-Hegelian readings, dominated as they are by “family” and “state,” “man” and “woman.”<\/p>\n

Lacan thus claims, rightly in my view, that Antigone cannot be positioned in the usual Hegelian way as representing a principle or law that is dialectically opposed to Creon’s law<\/strong>, but rather that<\/p>\n

her desire <\/span>is of another order from the level of the concept and universality that captures Creon’s position.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This critique of the Hegelian frame is extremely useful, especially insofar as it detaches Antigone from the position of “protest” commonly ascribed to her, in which one law (family or blood) is opposed to another law (that of the state and universality), as I have argued elsewhere,<\/p>\n

but the opposition between “universality”<\/span><\/strong> and “singularity,”<\/span><\/strong> which has been central to Lacanian readings of the play (largely guided by Lacan’s account of sexual difference in Encore<\/em>, where the universal law of masculinity is contrasted with a feminine refusal<\/span><\/strong> of totality<\/span><\/strong>), in that it construes Creon’s position from the standpoint of the Kantian universal<\/span><\/strong>, is also dubious.<\/p>\n

Lacan is much too quick in appplying an explicitly Kantian formula to Creon’s position on the “moral law,” for it is quite clear, as Stephen Gill has pointed out in convincing detail, that the Kantian notion of a moral will determined by a universal law is simply nowhere on the horizon of Greek culture.<\/p>\n

Such an emphasis on moral universality obscures not only Creon’s self-aggrandizement but also the entire horizon of ethical thought that distinguishes the ancient world from that of Kantianism.<\/p>\n

See Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis<\/em>. For the critique of Kantianism as inappropriately imposed on ancient thought, see Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy, …<\/em> For Lacanian readings of Antigone<\/em>, see Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>(2000), Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation<\/em> (2003). See also Charles Shepherson, “Of Love and Beauty in Lacan’s Antigone,” in Lacan and the Limits of Language (2008). <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shepherdson, C. (2009).\u00a0Antigone: The Work of Literature and the History of Subjectivity. In: Bound by the City: Greek tragedy, sexual difference, and the formation of the polis edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey and Emily Zakin, pp. 47-80. Lacan insists that Creon’s fault is not a “personal” or “psychological” one, a failure of judgement, or a … Continue reading “shepherdson antigone”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lacan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13129"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13140,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13129\/revisions\/13140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}