41: the singular truth of Antigone’s love for her brother must have a universal destiny, must be openly declared. The proclamation of love occurs in a passage that has struck several critics as so strange as to provoke the wish that it would one day be found to be an interpolation<\/p>\n
If my husband had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is the sentiment we express when we say of someone, “they broke the mold after they made him.”\u00a0 Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.\u00a0 His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety, none of the laws of the polis to sanction the deed she undertakes on his behalf.<\/p>\n
42: That Antigone does not give reasons for her love does not imply that her brother is unfathomable to her but that she is, as even the Chorus perceives, autonomous. She gives herself her own law and does not seek validation from any other authority.<\/strong> In other words, it is not the otherness but the nonexistence of the Other on which Lacan’s interpretation turns.<\/strong><\/p>\n
42: Antigone’s affirmation of love is, I am arguing, similar to Jasper Johns’s affirmative declaration, “But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.”\u00a0 Johns declines to offer reasons for his fascination with targets or American flags or a particular set of commercial stencils; he, too, attests, in Lacan’s phrase, to the “ineffaceable character of what is.” We are invited once more to taste the tautologism of love, and perhaps now we can say in what it consists, namely the coincidence, or near coincidence, of the drive with its object.<\/strong> This is what Lacan sometimes called the “illusion of love”: one believes the beloved is everything one could hope for without recognizing the role one’s love for him<\/strong> or her plays in one’s satisfaction.\u00a0 … For, love is that which renders what the other is loveable.\u00a0 This is not to say that Antigone overlooks part of what he is, that she fails to see that is a traitor to Thebes or that he has any personal flaws. It means she loves him as he is, the way he comes.<\/p>\n
“I love in you something more than you,” <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
…. Lacan means to say that this “something more” is accessed through love. If one were to receive identical gifts or identical reports of an event one has unfortunately missed both from an acquaintance and from a beloved friend, one would get more, a surplus satisfaction, from the latter.\u00a0 A gift given by a beloved friend ceases to coincide with itself, it becomes itself plus the fact that it was given by the friend.\u00a0 The same is true of everything I get from the beloved, all the qualities, everything he or she is.\u00a0 That is, the “is” of the beloved is split, fractured. The beloved is always slightly different from or more than herself. It is this more, this extra, that makes the beloved more than just an ordinary object of my attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
41: the singular truth of Antigone’s love for her brother must have a universal destiny, must be openly declared. The proclamation of love occurs in a passage that has struck several critics as so strange as to provoke the wish that it would one day be found to be an interpolation If my husband had … Continue reading “copjec obdurate desire to endure”<\/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":[78,24,97,106,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-lacan","category-psyche","category-the-act","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954","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=2954"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4574,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954\/revisions\/4574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}