Ethics of Psychoanalysis - Lacan’s Antigone and the Ethics of Interpretation :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Ethics of psychoanalysis - Lacans Antigone and the Ethics of InterpretationMy paper examines Lacans reading of the Antigone as an allegory of our own textual and good obligations as readers and critics. This paper addresses both(prenominal) the ethics and the aesthetics of our encounter with the text.In 1959, Lacan presented Sophocles Antigone as a model of smooth desire for his seminar on The Ethics of PsychoanalysisAntigone presents herself as autonomos, the pure and simple relationship of a human existence to that which it miraculously finds itself carrying, that is the rupture of signification, that which grants a person the insuperable power of beingin spite of and against everythingwhat he sic is. . . . Antigone all but fulfills what can be called pure desire, the pure and simple desire of death as such i.e., of that which is beyond the pleasure principle. She incarnates this desire. (1986 328-29)Lacan notes that Antigones decision to defy Creon consciously seeks death . She makes no effort to defend Polynices actions (Lacan 1986 290, 323-25). Her choice takes her beyond the realm of rational talk of and the collective norms of human satisfaction it implies (Lacan 1986 78, 281 Zizek 1991 25). Hers is a position that transcends the comfortable binary star oppositions that structure our daily ethical and social lives. Because her choice of death cannot be understood according to strictly rational norms, she cannot be read as representing some simple antithesis of freedom to tyranny, or the individual to the state (Lacan 1986 281 Zizek 1992 77-78). In fact, as she acknowledges, she had chosen death before Creons decree against the burying of Polynices, and she defines herself to Ismene as one already belonging to the realm of the dead (ll. 559-60 Lacan 1986 315, 326). Creon is not a tyrant who forces Antigone to make an impossible choice between bread and butter and freedom rather, he embodies the civic norms that her pursuit of a desire bey ond the bounds of those desires articulated within the realm of common life both requires as defining foil, and transcends. Her choice thus represents a pure ethical act shaped neither by a self-interested selection among communally recognized goods nor the self-loathing of conforming to a code that is recognized and despised (Zizek 1992 77). much(prenominal) an ethical choice, as Lacan acknowledges, is Kantian in its devotion to a pure concept of duty, but psychoanalytic in its predication on a highly individualized desire whose content cannot be generalized into a universal ethical maxim (Lacan 1986 68, 365-66).