{"id":8889,"date":"2012-02-29T16:01:05","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T21:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8889"},"modified":"2012-11-15T22:10:44","modified_gmt":"2012-11-16T03:10:44","slug":"testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/02\/29\/testing\/","title":{"rendered":"butler antigone lacan real"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Act as Feminine: Antigone Between Lacan and Butler<\/em><\/a>
\nAuthor: A. Hugill. Goldsmiths College London.<\/p>\n

Lacan insists throughout his lectures on Antigone <\/em>that the tragic heroine should be taken as exemplary of the beautiful, in the Kantian sense.<\/p>\n

… the relation of the beautiful to death and desire in Lacan \u2013 would gain nuance if the concept of the beautiful from which Lacan is working, namely as it appears in Kant\u2019s Critique of Judgement, were further elaborated.<\/p>\n

Echoing Kant\u2019s own definition of the beautiful, Lacan frames it in terms of the pure \u2018there is\u2019 (il y a); that which is beautiful \u201ccommunicate[s] a sign of understanding that is situated precisely at equal distance from the power of the imagination and that of the signifier.\u201d Similarly, Kant\u2019s crucial insight in the Critique of Judgement<\/em> is to radicalize any exclamation that a thing is beautiful, by pointing to the indeterminate character of the object in question.<\/p>\n

Beauty, rather than being a property of an object, describes a sensation of pleasure arising from an overwhelming feeling of life (Lebensgef\u00fchl<\/em>) engendered by the free play of the cognitive powers, imagination (Einbildungskraft<\/em>) and understanding (Verstand<\/em>), insofar as they are not restricted by any determinate concept.<\/p>\n

Beauty is distinguished from the good and the agreeable inasmuch as it is, for Kant, the only free<\/em> liking. This free liking to which Kant refers is called favour (Gunst<\/em>) and it is marked by a \u201cletting-be\u201d of the object, a disinterested interest.<\/strong> Interest in the Critique of Judgement<\/em> refers to a certain use-value, desire or concern with the existence of the object that, in order for a pure aesthetic judgement to arise, should not be taken into consideration.<\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s own definition of the structure of desire is in fact precisely in tune with this definition of beauty as disinterested interest: the object cause of desire (the objet petit a<\/em>), for Lacan, can never be attained and so too causes desire to function as a means without end. In the same paradoxical manner, one\u2019s desire resists conceptual rationalization and is sustained by the tension of its unfulfillment. Something remains beautiful so long as it resists being fully conceptualized.<\/p>\n

The feeling of the sublime describes those \u201cmoments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it.\u201d\u00a0 In the case of Antigone, we see a subject who identifies entirely with the Thing, the limit, without a protective distance and in so doing meets her demise.<\/p>\n

It is against this backdrop that Antigone\u2019s act<\/span> is radically re-thought by the Lacanian school, as a case of pure means. For Lacan, Antigone is precisely driven by a certain jouissance<\/em> and not \u2013 as is the case with Creon \u2013 by any adherence to a concept of an ethical good (representing family or divine law, as some other commentators suggest). As Butler explains, \u201cAntigone will emerge, then, for Lacan as a problem of beauty, fascination, and death as precisely what intervenes between the desire for the good, the desire to conform to the ethical norm, and thereby derails it, enigmatically, from its path.\u201d Antigone\u2019s act<\/span> could not be judged beautiful in the Kantian sense if it were merely an external embodiment of a moral good. It is precisely the non-conceptual element of her act<\/span> that fascinates Lacan and propels his interpretation forward in his later consideration of feminine sexuality in Seminar XX.<\/p>\n

Zupancic\u2019s description of the sublime as the \u2018jouissance <\/span>of the Other<\/strong>\u2019 in the above-cited passage provides a key to understanding why it is that Antigone\u2019s act<\/span> is formulated as a \u2018feminine act<\/span>.\u2019 In Seminar XX: Encore,<\/em>, feminine<\/strong> jouissance<\/span> is defined precisely as the \u2018jouissance<\/span> of the Other.\u2019 In this lecture, Lacan discusses the particularity of feminine jouissance<\/span> in contrast to phallic<\/strong> jouissance<\/span>. The title of the seminar, meaning \u201cagain\u201d, signifies the manner in which enjoyment (jouissance<\/span>) is never satisfied. There is always a gap or remainder left over and desire is sustained through this impossibility of satisfaction in the sexual relationship. In his lesson \u201cOn jouissance<\/span>,\u201d Lacan famously says that \u201cto man insofar as he is endowed with the organ said to be phallic \u2013 I said, \u2018said to be\u2019 \u2013 the corporal sex or sexual organ of woman \u2013 I said \u2018of woman,\u2019 whereas in fact woman does not exist, woman is not whole \u2013 woman\u2019s sexual organ is of no interest except via the body\u2019s jouissance<\/span>.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is here describing what he calls \u2018phallic\u2019<\/strong> jouissance<\/span> or the jouissance<\/span> of the organ \u2013 which should not be misconstrued as concerning a biological category. There are phallic women and non-phallic men.<\/strong> It rather denotes to what extent a person identifies with the phallic function. Phallic or \u201csexual\u201d<\/strong> jouissance<\/span>, for Lacan, is \u201cthe obstacle owing to which man does not come (n\u2019arrive pas<\/em>)\u2026 to enjoy woman\u2019s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance<\/span> of the organ.\u201d<\/p>\n

Feminine jouissance<\/span>, on the other hand, is \u201cbeyond the phallus\u201d by virtue of its non-subsumption in the phallic order. Impossible to know anything about it other than that some women (and men) experience it, Lacan explains it using an example of mystical ecstasy.\u00a0 In his invocation of God and the mystics, Lacan\u2019s \u2018explanation\u2019 of feminine jouissance<\/span> points to a pure jouissance <\/span>of being, a being that is at the very limit of language. With recourse to (post)-Lacanian thinkers like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, it is possible to conceive of this feminine jouissance<\/span> as relating to the primary relationship with the m(O)ther and the pre- or extra-symbolic inscription of language on the body. In Kristeva, we find a model of this in her concept of the semiotic, the unnamable within the symbolic, what she calls the \u201ctranssymbolic, transpaternal function of poetic language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Returning to Antigone, we find in Lacan\u2019s Ethics<\/em> a clear alignment of Antigone\u2019s act \u2013 her unwavering love for the pure \u2018there is\u2019 of her brother \u2013 with this experience of the limits of language. Antigone\u2019s act is fixed to the singularity of her brother\u2019s being, without reference to any particular content:<\/p>\n

“The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo<\/em> to which Antigone is attached<\/span>. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man. That break is manifested at every moment in the fact that language punctuates everything that occurs in the movement of life.”\u00a0 [Lacan, Ethics, 279]<\/p>\n

The purity of Antigone\u2019s act<\/span> is at the limits of the means-ends logic constituting the symbolic order. The work to which Antigone commits herself, insofar as it can be called a \u2018work,\u2019 is marked by a ceaseless \u2018unworking.\u2019\u00a0 She quite literally goes to the limit – to her own death – and as the multiple and never-ending interpretations of Sophocles\u2019 play suggest, Antigone\u2019s insistence is ultimately ambiguous with regard to any positive conceptualization and offers no determinate program in advance. Though her explicit action is to bestow Polyneices with a proper burial, it is uncertain in which name she insists upon doing so (whether divine or family law, or defiance of the state, or something entirely else).<\/span><\/p>\n

Lacan suggests that Antigone acts in relation to the pure \u2018there is,\u2019 the singularity of her brother independent of any particular content, in the ineffaceable character of what is. Lacan regards this unshakeable yet indeterminate stance as the crucial issue of Sophocles\u2019 text, and the reason for its ceaseless fascination:<\/span><\/p>\n

“What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed. She rejects everything else. The stance of the-race-is-run is nowhere better illustrated than here. And whatever else one relates it to, is only a way of causing uncertainty or disguising the absolutely radical character of the position of the problem in the text.” [Lacan, Ethics, 279]<\/p>\n

In his book Enjoy Your Symptom<\/em>!, Zizek draws on this insight with regard to Antigone<\/strong>, in order to put forward a model of a political subjectivity that might be called \u2018anarcho-communist.\u2019<\/span> He recounts a historical event: Tito\u2019s \u2018No!\u2019 to Stalin in 1948, or the split of Yugoslav Communists from the international communist movement. Zizek argues that the importance of this act<\/span> was to deny Stalin\u2019s hegemony outside of any pre-determined positive ideological project, and to do so from the very situated position of communism itself; to resist Stalin as a communist, to create a rupture in the communist monolith from within<\/span>, and to subject it to renewed critical consideration. Zizek remarks that a typical liberal reproach to this Lacanian ethic is to depict it as incompatible with a notion of community, as a suicidal ecstasy that suspends the social dimension. Instead, Zizek wants to suggest that a \u2018suicidal gesture\u2019 \u2013as Antigone comes to exemplify it \u2013 is at the very foundation of every new social link: \u201cwith an act<\/span>, stricto sensu, we can therefore never fully foresee its consequences, i.e., the way it will transform the existing symbolic space<\/span>: the act<\/span> is a rupture after which \u2018nothing remains the same.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Antigone\u2019s No! to Creon<\/strong> is presented as the real feminine act<\/span>, the real ethical act as such, because it is situated at the limit of being, the very birthplace of the social itself, a place of pure potentiality from which real change can emerge.<\/span><\/p>\n

[…]\u00a0However, at the heart of Mendieta\u2019s artistic action is a commitment to a certain identity, charged with a kind of na\u00efve essentialism. And it is this fixed notion of community that both Butler and Lacan are working against in their writing on Antigone, though from very different poles.\u00a0 On the one hand,<\/p>\n

Butler wants to posit a multiplicity of meaning that is never fixed beyond the performance of a deed.<\/strong> In this sense, Butler\u2019s notion of \u2018performativity\u2019 is not so different from the Lacanian ethical idea; but only to the extent that it puts into question the notion of a \u2018doer behind the deed\u2019 \u2013 a fixed subjecthood \u2013 just as the Lacanian ethical act destabilizes the subject.<\/p>\n

[…] Rather than pursuing the destabilized subject to the point of rupture, extreme danger and risk, the point where new possibilities truly emerge, Butler believes in the possibility to gradually dismantle what already exists by parodically using the tools already given, without the act of destruction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Converging on the body of Antigone, we can see two political stances emerge: death-driven insistence on the singularity of being<\/span> in contrast to a vitalist view of the limitless plasticity or multiplicity of being. In this sense, Antigone\u2019s legacy concerns, fundamentally, no less than the state of our social order itself. Antigone brings to the fore the question of resistance today. Is it any longer possible to resist capitalist-patriarchal heteronormativity by means of parody? Or is it not, rather, that notions of parody and performance have themselves been subsumed within that very order itself and thus exposed to their own impotency?<\/span><\/p>\n

Sophocles\u2019 Antigone<\/em> has been repeatedly resurrected over the last centuries as a result of the fascinating, timeless and unresolved problematics that it presents.\u00a0 In Lacan\u2019s account, mobilized to support his ethics, the radical non-instrumentality of Antigone\u2019s act<\/span> is brought to the fore. In this way, it becomes for Lacan the site of similarly constituted ideas: the beautiful and the sublime in Kant\u2019s aesthetics, and feminine jouissance<\/em>. I have added to this list d\u00e9soeuvrement<\/em> and radical passivity. What each of these thoughts holds in common is a paradoxical active-passivity, an \u2018unworking\u2019 that pursues the limits of experience. In the pursuit of the limit \u2013 the Lacanian Real \u2013 the subject is in a position of extreme risk and death-driven instability without recourse to any pre-determined conceptual aim<\/span>. For Zizek, this is the act<\/span> par excellence, the act<\/span> that puts into crisis the stability of any order. Indeed, Antigone\u2019s act<\/span> \u201cmost forcefully exposes the utter injustice and contingency of the Law, the fact that the Law functions precisely to \u2018actively\u2019\u2026cover over the fact that it is constructed across a void.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Act as Feminine: Antigone Between Lacan and Butler Author: A. Hugill. Goldsmiths College London. Lacan insists throughout his lectures on Antigone that the tragic heroine should be taken as exemplary of the beautiful, in the Kantian sense. … the relation of the beautiful to death and desire in Lacan \u2013 would gain nuance if … Continue reading “butler antigone lacan real”<\/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":[78,138,38,21,24,106,41,20],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-8889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-ethics","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8889","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=8889"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9790,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8889\/revisions\/9790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}