{"id":4390,"date":"2009-10-30T19:21:52","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T23:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=4390"},"modified":"2014-05-13T13:36:33","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T17:36:33","slug":"stavrakakis-zizek-antigone-the-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/10\/30\/stavrakakis-zizek-antigone-the-act\/","title":{"rendered":"stavrakakis \u017di\u017eek antigone the act"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias<\/em> of an Ethics of the Political” Boucher, Geoff, and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, eds.\u00a0 Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to \u017di\u017eek. <\/em>Great Britain: Ashgate. 2005.\u00a0 Print.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to see, however, how the “inhuman” position of Antigone could point to an alternative formulation of the socio-political structure. … Antigone’s intransigence, her deadly passion, may thus be what creates her tragic appeal, but even by \u017di\u017eek’s 1998 standards, one has to conclude that this makes her unsuitable as a model for transformative ethico-political action (173).<\/p>\n

Unless of course, one reinterprets her in a substantial way. But then a certain paradox emerges: Antigone can only function as a model for radical<\/em> political action on the condition that she is stripped of her radically<\/em> inhuman (anti-social and anti-political) desire.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 Stavrakakis isn’t clear on just exactly what it is in \u017di\u017eek’s argument that he finds disagreeable. He thinks that \u017di\u017eek has to ‘tame’ Antigone first in order to find her suitable for politics, that is ‘give way’ on her radical desire, which means, in this case, retreat or withdraw from her radical desire. For Stavrakakis: Wouldn’t the truly radical act be to traverse the lure of Antigone altogether? <\/strong>(174)<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 Stavrakakis points out that Lacan himself moved from this position on ethics outlined in this Book 7, to a different position in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis<\/em>, where the idea of pure desire is questioned. <\/strong>“This shift needs to be taken into account when discussing the function of Antigone.<\/p>\n

Desire not only loses its value as a pure force of transgression, but is also revealed as the ultimate support of power and the order of goods.<\/span> As soon as jouissance<\/span> <\/strong>acquires its central place in Lacan’s theoretical universe, desire is revealed as a defense against enjoyment, as a compromise formation, while drive emerges as the nodal point of his ethical thought<\/strong> (cites Zupan\u010di\u010d, 2000:235) In that sense, desire can never be a pure transgressive force<\/strong> (175).<\/p>\n

… desire also has precise limits<\/em>. It [desire] is always conditioned by the structures of fantasy<\/strong> sustaining “hegemonic” regimes \u2014regimes of power, consumption, and even resistance and transgression. It is always stimulated by the imaginary lure of attaining jouissance, but it is also sustained by the constitutive inability to realise such a goal. In that sense, desire”succeeds,” reproduces itself, through its own failure. This reproduction is not politically innocent. For example, consumer culture is partly sustained by the continuous displacement of final satisfaction from advertisement to advertisement, from product to product, from fantasy to fantasy <\/strong>(176)<\/p>\n

The important “by-product” of this play is a specific structuration of desire which guarantees, through its cumulative metonymic effect, the reproduction of the market economy within a distinct “promotional culture“<\/span>.<\/p>\n

It is Lacan himself then who points the way to traversing the lure of Antigone by shifting his understanding of desire. This shift needs to be acknowledged as the radical break it truly represents. Any attempt to reconcile the “pure” desire of Antigone with the later conceptualisation and the critique of illusory desire and\/or the ethics of desire with the ethics of drive<\/strong> \u2014what\u00a0Zupan\u010di\u010d seems to attempt in the last pages of her Ethics of the Real<\/em> \u2014 needs to be re-examined and further debated<\/p>\n

*Undoubtedly desire and drive are related, but their relation seems to me to escape any logic of reconciliation <\/em>or supplementation<\/em>, which is how Zupan\u010di\u010d ultimately views their relation. Her aim seems to be to “reconcile” desire with drive (Zupan\u010di\u010d, 2000:238), something attempted through presenting drive as a “supplement” of desire (Zupan\u010di\u010d, 2000:239): at the heart of desire a possible passage opens up towards the drive; one might therefore come to drive if one follows the ‘logic’ of desire to its limit (Zupan\u010di\u010d, 2000: 243).<\/p>\n

What is not given appropriate attention here is that reaching this limit entails a crossing<\/em> which radically transforms our relation to desire. <\/strong>In other words, the limit of desire <\/strong>does not connote the automatic<\/em> passage into a supplementary field of reconciliation; it primarily signifies a rupture,<\/strong> precisely because “desire never goes beyond a certain point” (Miller, 1996: 423).<\/p>\n

Whereas Lacan’s early work and his conceptualisation of desire as something “always in violation, always rebellious and diabolical” \u2014a position informing his reading of Antigone\u2014 leads to “the confusion between the drive and desire,” as soon as desire is reconceptualised as ultimately submissive to a law<\/strong>, a shift of almost “gigantic” proportions is insituted, and this shift needs to be acknowledged thoroughly (Miller, 1996: 422-423)<\/p>\n

Miller, Jacques-Alain <\/strong>(1996). “Commentary on Lacan’s Text.” Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. <\/em>Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Eds). Albany: SUNY Press.<\/p>\n

As \u017di\u017eek himself has pointed out in another text, “[t]here is ethics \u2014that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology\u2014 in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack” (\u017di\u017eek, 1997c:214).<\/p>\n

In order for a truly ethical fidelity to an event ot become possible another fidelity is presupposed, a fidelity that cannot be reduced to the event itself or to particular symbolisations of the event and has to retain a certain distance from them: a fidelity to event-ness<\/em> as distinct from particular events, a “fidelity to the Real qua<\/em> impossible” <\/strong>(\u017di\u017eek, 1997c:215).<\/p>\n

Such a standpoint not only presents the necessary symbolic prepartions for the proper ethical reception of the act\/event, but also offers our best defense against the ever-present risk of being lured by a false event, a satanic miracle, against the ever-present risk of terror and absolutisation<\/em> of an event, to use Badiou’s vocabulary (Badiou, 2001:85).<\/p>\n

Of course, one should be aware that fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a certain betrayal, not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and divine positivity.<\/p>\n

In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity<\/em><\/strong>, only within the framework of another fidelity \u2014 fidelity to the openness of the political space <\/strong>and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social \u2014 within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other<\/strong> (180).<\/p>\n

The transformative potential of a Lacanian ethics of the political is a crucial issue that is far from settled. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias of an Ethics of the Political” Boucher, Geoff, and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, eds.\u00a0 Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to \u017di\u017eek. Great Britain: Ashgate. 2005.\u00a0 Print. It is difficult to see, however, how the “inhuman” position of Antigone could point to an alternative formulation of the socio-political … Continue reading “stavrakakis \u017di\u017eek antigone the act”<\/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":[78,125,38,24,15,106,20],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-4390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-drive","category-ethics","category-lacan","category-subjectivity","category-the-act","category-zizek","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4390","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=4390"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12841,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4390\/revisions\/12841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}