{"id":6613,"date":"2011-02-13T14:11:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T19:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=6613"},"modified":"2011-02-13T14:22:25","modified_gmt":"2011-02-13T19:22:25","slug":"antigone-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/02\/13\/antigone-3\/","title":{"rendered":"antigone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Zeuxis wanted to look behind the veil of the paint that constituted his rival\u2019s picture. The psychoanalytic subject longs to look behind the veil of the signifier, but what it seeks there is not so much the forgotten, repressed real<\/strong>, not that part of itself, or its continuity with the world, cut off by the symbolic and lost. Instead, it looks for the object and cause of its own desire, an identifiable something that would fill the gap created by the loss of the real<\/strong>. This object that motivates and perpetuates desire took on increasing importance for Lacan. In Seminar 7 in 1959\u2013 60, he named it the Thing (das Ding); later, the Thing<\/strong> disappeared, to be remodelled as the objet a<\/em><\/strong>. 45<\/p>\n

We need to go back a bit. For much of his life Freud insisted that the unconscious motor force of all human life was sexual. But during and after the First World War, his work begins to demonstrate a mounting conviction that there must be another drive that presses towards death<\/strong>. How else to account for the sustained carnage of that extraordinary and unheralded episode of history? Beyond the Pleasure Principle<\/em>, published in 1920, begins by proposing an antithesis between the life-affirming sexual drive towards pleasure and, in contrast, the death drive that seeks inertia for the organism, but may equally be projected outwards by the subject as aggression against others.<\/strong> As Freud\u2019s argument here unfolds, however, the two principles refuse to stay apart. On the one hand, there often seems to be an element of aggression in the sexual act; on the other, the pleasure principle too seeks release from tension, and so shares the aim of the death drive. Do they, then, support rather than oppose each other? Jacques Derrida has brilliantly deconstructed the opposition between the two (1987a), in this instance ably supported by Freud himself, who concluded his book with disarming honesty by admitting that he was not satisfied with a theory that remained purely speculative. 45<\/p>\n

Beginning where Freud had left off, but going back to take account of a passage from \u2018Instincts and their Vicissitudes\u2019, published five years earlier (Freud 1984: 136\u2013 8), Lacan condensed the two drives into one. His rereading of Freud acknowledges only one drive, and it is both life-giving and deadly. Seminar 7 <\/em>attends primarily to the quest for pleasure, which Lacan locates on the side of the signifier. Love is allied with pleasure, a form of sublimation, separable from desire itself. But Lacan also brings pleasure together with death here in his account of tragedy.<\/strong> Where Freud roots his theory in the story of Oedipus, Lacan (as a child of Freud?), defies his phallocentric reputation and takes as his heroic protagonist Antigone, daughter of Oedipus<\/strong> and offspring, therefore, of an incestuous marriage. On the basis of the organic bond with her brother, Antigone is impelled to bury him against Creon\u2019s law, and to confront death as the inevitable punishment for her deed. Lacan sees Antigone as heroic because, like Marvell\u2019s lovers, she assumes her fate, her At\u00e9, \u2018atrocious\u2019 though it is. For Lacan, she represents human sovereignty in the face of death<\/strong>: 46<\/p>\n

“Antigone appears as autonomos, as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him.” (1992: 282)<\/p>\n

Rather than languish as the victims of incompleteness that the signifier makes us, we are enabled by the same signifier to desire not to remain at its mercy. We can, in other words, want not to be<\/strong>. …\u00a0 Antigone, in Lacan\u2019s account, just as defiantly precipitates her own deat<\/strong>h. It is because she loves her brother that she \u2018pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire<\/strong>\u2019 (1992: 282).<\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s death drive bears very little resemblance to Freud\u2019s, which depends on the thesis that the organism prefers stasis, or inertia. 46 We do not seek annihilation, Lacan says, for the sake of restoring equilibrium. But he does draw on Freud\u2019s proposal that the organism is driven to die at its own time and in its own way (Freud 1984: 311\u2013 12). In Lacan the death drive operates in the speaking being, at the level of the signifier, and seeks what he calls \u2018the second death\u2019. <\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not just physical extinction (the first death), which might take place at any time, by accident. Instead, the second death entails the full recognition of what we are, which is to say, of course, what we are not: not complete, not knowing, not immortal. The tragic hero acts on this understanding, assumes the destiny of a being-for-death and, when the time comes, willingly accedes to the state of non-being that is the outcome of the human condition.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this stage of Lacan\u2019s work the object of the drive is identified as the Thing. An archaic, maternal, forbidden and impossible object of desire, the Thing is \u2018both living and dead\u2019<\/strong> (1992: 300), at once life-giving and deadly. Lacan\u2019s name for it is partly ironic, since no such object exists in the real<\/strong>; at the same time, there is the suggestion of a pun in French on la Chose and the cause of desire that we attribute to the Thing. The Thing is \u2018that which in the real, the primordial real, I will say, suffers from the signifier\u2019 and \u2018presents itself\u2019 to the analyst in the gap produced by the signifying cut (1992: 118). Constructed retroactively to occupy the space of pure loss that is left by the erasure of the real, the Thing marks the place where the real was, constitutes itself as filling the emptiness that resides there for the speaking being. Subsequently the object of the drive is renamed by the even more evasive term, objet a<\/strong>, and located more firmly at the level of demand. Lacan also calls it the petit a<\/strong>, to differentiate the little \u2018a\u2019 from the Autre, the big Other, which is language itself. Little Ernst\u2019s wooden reel offers an example of the objet a.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. Zeuxis wanted to look behind the veil of the paint that constituted his rival\u2019s picture. The psychoanalytic subject longs to look behind the veil of the signifier, but what it seeks there is not so much the forgotten, repressed real, not that part of itself, … Continue reading “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":[111,125,38,21,24,40,72,106,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-ethics","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-lack","category-objet-a","category-the-act","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613","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=6613"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6615,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613\/revisions\/6615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}