{"id":9186,"date":"2012-07-31T18:17:49","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T23:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9186"},"modified":"2012-09-21T16:35:49","modified_gmt":"2012-09-21T21:35:49","slug":"sygne-de-coufontaine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/07\/31\/sygne-de-coufontaine\/","title":{"rendered":"Sygne de Coufontaine"},"content":{"rendered":"

In pure love, I freely consent to my own damnation or disappearance, I ecstatically assume it, while in tragedy<\/strong>, I (also) accept my Fate, but I accept it as an external force without consenting to it \u2014 the tragic hero rejects it absolutely, protesting against it to the end (Oedipus at Colonus \u2014 the case of Antigone is here more ambiguous). In other words, in contrast to the notion of amor fati<\/em>, there is no love in the tragic hero’s acceptance of his damnation by Fate.<\/p>\n

Therein resides the tragic hero’s uncompromising fidelity to his desire: not in the acceptance of Fate, but in holding on to his desire against Fate, in a situation where everything is lost.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is there, then, no properly Christian tragedy? Here, Antigone is to be\u00a0opposed to Sygne<\/span> de Coufontaine from Paul Claudel’s Otage: if Oedipus and Antigone are the exemplary cases of Ancient tragedy, Sygne<\/span> stands for the\u00a0Christian tragedy. 81<\/p>\n

Sygne<\/span> lives in the modern world where God is dead: there is no objective Fate, our fate is our own choice, we are fully responsible for it.<\/strong> Sygne<\/span> first follows the path of ecstatic love to the end, sacrificing her good, her ethical substance for God, for his pure Otherness; and she does it not on account of some external pressure, but out of the innermost freedom of her being \u2014 hence she cannot blame Fate when she finds herself totally humiliated, deprived of all ethical substance<\/strong>. This, however, is why her tragedy is much more radical than that of either Oedipus or Antigone<\/strong>: when, mortally wounded after taking the bullet meant for her despicable and hated husband, she refuses to confer any deeper sacrificial meaning on her suicidal intervention, there is no tragic beauty in this refusal \u2014 her “No” is signaled merely by a repellent grimace, a compulsive facial tic.<\/p>\n

There is no tragic beauty because her total sacrifice has deprived her of all inner beauty and ethical grandeur, so that all that remains is a disgusting excremental stain, a living shell deprived of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no love here either, all her love was consumed in her previous renunciations. In a way, Sygne<\/span> is here crucified, her “No” akin to Christ’s “Father, why have you forsaken me?” \u2014 which is also a gesture of defiance, a kind of “Up yours! ” directed at the God-Father.\u00a0 Balmes is right to point out that this properly Christian “No” in all its forms is the “unthinkable” traumatic core of pure love, a scandal which undermines it from within. …<\/p>\n

The problem with Antigone <\/span>is not the suicidal purity of her death drive but, quite the opposite, that the monstrosity of her act is covered up by its aestheticization: the moment she is excluded from the community of humans, she turns into a sublime apparition evoking our sympathy by complaining about her plight. This is one of the key dimensions of Lacan’s move from Antigone<\/span> to Sygne<\/span> de Coufontaine: there is no sublime beauty in Sygne<\/span> at the play’s end-all that marks her as different from common mortals is the tic that momentarily disfigures her face. This feature which spoils the harmony of her beautiful face, the detail that sticks out and renders it ugly, is the material trace of her resistance to being co-opted into the universe of symbolic debt and guilt<\/span>. This, then, should be the first step in a consistent reading of Christianity:\u00a0 the dying Christ is on the side of Sygne<\/span>, not of Antigone<\/span>; Christ on the Cross is not a sublime apparition but an embarrassing monstrosity<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In pure love, I freely consent to my own damnation or disappearance, I ecstatically assume it, while in tragedy, I (also) accept my Fate, but I accept it as an external force without consenting to it \u2014 the tragic hero rejects it absolutely, protesting against it to the end (Oedipus at Colonus \u2014 the case … Continue reading “Sygne de Coufontaine”<\/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":[38,106,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-the-act","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9186","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=9186"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9191,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9186\/revisions\/9191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}