Antigone's Claim Kinship Between Life and Death
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B0092ITXYU
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
historical drama she has lived through returns her not only to this persistent ineffaceability of what is but the certain prospect of effaceability. By separating the historical drama she lives through from the metaphysical truth she exemplifies for us, Lacan fails to ask how certain kinds of lives, precisely by virtue of the historical drama that is theirs, are relegated to the limits of the ineffaceable. Like other Sophoclean characters, those in Antigone are for Lacan, “at a limit that is not
that, seems to consist in this refusal to grieve that is accomplished through the very public terms by which she insists on her right to grieve. Her claim to entitlement may well be the sign of a melancholia at work in her speech. Her loud proclamations of grief presuppose a domain of the ungrievable. The insistence on public grieving is what moves her away from feminine gender into hubris, into that distinctively manly excess that makes the guards, the chorus, and Creon wonder: Who is the man
power of what they are fighting.” Unlike the largely elliptical discussion of Antigone in The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Antigone is superseded by Creon, here they are positioned in a relationship of reciprocal tragedy: “There is immanent in both Antigone and Creon something that in their own way they attack, so that they are gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own actual being.” Hegel concludes this discussion with extreme praise for the play: “The Antigone seems to me
and kinship; at its limits, passim; of authority; normative principles of. See also Performatives, Symbolic Law; and perversion; and representability; as divine; as symbolic; at its limits; of the Father Lévi-Strauss, Claude Loraux, Nicole Masculinity; and sovereignty; as “manliness,” Masochism Melancholia, passim. See also Grief, Mourning Miller, Jacques-Alain Mills, Patricia Mimesis. See also Repetition Mitchell, Juliet Motherhood; and the symbolic Mourning. See also Grief,
pursues a desire that can only lead to death precisely because it seeks to defy symbolic norms. But is this the right way to interpret her desire? Or has the symbolic itself produced a crisis for its own intelligibility? Can we assume that Antigone has no confusion about who is her brother, and who is her father, that Antigone is not, as it were, living the equivocations that unravel the purity and universality of those structuralist rules? Lacanian theorists for the most part insist that