{"id":2941,"date":"2009-04-22T14:11:24","date_gmt":"2009-04-22T19:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=2941"},"modified":"2009-12-02T13:36:54","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T17:36:54","slug":"copjec-antigone-gives-herself-own-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/04\/22\/copjec-antigone-gives-herself-own-law\/","title":{"rendered":"copjec antigone gives herself own law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>31: Hegel &#8211; Polynices is forever entombed in his own <strong>&#8220;imperishable individuality,&#8221; <\/strong>his own <strong>imperishable finitude. In this way bare, bestial life has been dignified, rendered sacred.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>32: Lacan&#8217;s interpretation turns on his recognition that the body\u00a0 is the site of a different obscenity, a <strong>jouissance<\/strong> that opens a new dimension of infinity, immortality.\u00a0 Thus will Lacan be led to describe Antigone&#8217;s deed not as a bestowal of &#8220;imperishable individuality&#8221; on her brother, but as an <strong>&#8220;immortalization of the family At\u00e9.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>But what does this difference signify in regard to Antigone&#8217;s relation to the dead, to her familial past, or to the city?<\/li>\n<li>And what does it signify &#8230; in regard to the relation between the &#8220;<em><strong>individual organism,<\/strong>&#8221; <\/em>which may be looked at, as Freud put it, &#8220;as a transitory and perishable appendage to the quasi-immortal germ plasm bequeathed to him by his race,&#8221; and the <strong><em>species<\/em>?<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>How can our argument \u2014that <strong>Lacan reconnects body and act<\/strong>, the very terms Hegel&#8217;s analysis sunders\u2014 be reconciled with Freud&#8217;s contention that sublimation pries the act, whether it be a physical act or the act of thinking, from the body&#8217;s grip?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Death and only death is the aim of every drive<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n<p>32: There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others &#8230; we must then definitively reject the &#8220;benevolent illusion&#8221; that there is among men a drive toward perfection or progress.\u00a0 Drive pushes away from or against the stabilization of unities or the dumb progress of developments.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; <span style=\"background-color:#ffff00;\">death drives<\/span> are described by Freud as &#8230; working instead toward winning for the subject what we can only regard as <strong>potential immortality. How so?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>33: Directed not outward toward the constituted world, but away from it, the death drive aims at the past, at a time <strong>before<\/strong> the subject found itself where it is now, embedded in time and moving toward death. What if anything does this backward trajectory, this flight from the constituted world and biological death discover?\u00a0 &#8230; drive discovers along its path something positive, certain &#8220;necessary forms of thought&#8217; &#8230; that time does not change &#8230; in any way and [to which] the idea of time cannot be applied&#8221;\u00a0 Freud does conceive his notion of drive as an intervention in Kant&#8217;s philosophy, but the drive does not lend credence to the &#8220;Kantian theorem that time and space are &#8230; &#8216;necessary forms of thought'&#8221; &#8230; rather it significantly revises that theorem.\u00a0 &#8230; Freud replaces the transcendental forms with <strong>empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of drive.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The <strong>aim of the drive is death, &#8220;the restoration to an earlier state of things&#8221; <\/strong>a stat of inanimation or inertia. Now this state exists only as an illusion &#8230; Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the <span style=\"background-color:#ffff00;\">primordial mother-child dyad,<\/span> which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the subject strives throughout his life to return.<\/p>\n<p>34: the drive inhibits as part of its very activity, the achievement of its aim, s<strong>ome inherent obstacle \u2014the OBJECT of the drive\u2014 simultaneously BRAKES the drive and BREAKS IT UP<\/strong>, curbs it, thus preventing it from reaching its aim, and <strong>divides it into partial drives<\/strong> &#8230; the now partial drives content themselves with these small nothings, these objects that satisfy them. Lacan gives to them the name <em><strong>objects a<\/strong><\/em>: they are, as it were,<strong> simulacra of the lost (maternal) object<\/strong>, or as Freud and Lacan both refer to it, of <em><strong>das Ding<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 <em><strong>Object a<\/strong><\/em> is, however, the general term, Lacan designates several specific objects: <strong>gaze, voice, breast, phallus. <\/strong>In other words he gives them the names of bodily organs.\u00a0 Why are the objects given these names? How do they displace Kant&#8217;s &#8220;necessary forms of thought&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>35-36:\u00a0 The various aspects of the mother, what she was like, will be captured by <strong><em>Vorstellungen<\/em><\/strong>, the system of representations or signifiers that form the relatively stable and familiar wold we share in common with our &#8220;fellow human-beings&#8221; or neighbors.\u00a0 But some aspects of the primoridial mother cannot be translated into these representations, since they are, Freud says, &#8220;new and non-comparable&#8221; to any experience the child has of himself.&#8221;\u00a0 <strong>A hole thus opens in the system of signifiers<\/strong> since those that would enable us to recall these new and noncomparable or singular aspects of the mother are simply unavailable, they simply do not exist.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; At the core of this matter of the unforgettable but forever lost Thing, we find <strong>not just <em>an impossibility of thought, <\/em>but of <em>a void of Being.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>The problems is not simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being<\/strong>.\u00a0 Or, it is not that the mother escapes representation or thought, but that the <strong>jouissance <\/strong><\/span>that attached me to her <strong>has been lost<\/strong> and this loss <span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>depletes the whole of my being.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>31: Hegel &#8211; Polynices is forever entombed in his own &#8220;imperishable individuality,&#8221; his own imperishable finitude. In this way bare, bestial life has been dignified, rendered sacred. 32: Lacan&#8217;s interpretation turns on his recognition that the body\u00a0 is the site of a different obscenity, a jouissance that opens a new dimension of infinity, immortality.\u00a0 Thus &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/04\/22\/copjec-antigone-gives-herself-own-law\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;copjec antigone gives herself own law&#8221;<\/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":[84,78,38,24,72,97,15,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abject","category-butler","category-ethics","category-lacan","category-objet-a","category-psyche","category-subjectivity","category-the-act"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941","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=2941"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4577,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions\/4577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}