Beyond Atè: Lacan, Ethics, and the Real

Let us now attempt to wash our brains clean of all we have heard about Antigone and look in detail at what goes on there.

The tragic is the expression of the absolute position.

Because tragedy, and more specifically Sophoclean tragedy, is the genre privileged above all others by both speculative philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, it should come as no surprise that the tragic ethos permeates the dialectical structures of both discourses, particularly in their ethical modes. Famously, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit bases its analysis of the dialectic of ethical substance in the Ancient world on the Antigone of Sophocles.1 Less famously outside French analytic circles, Jacques Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (1959-1960) culminates in a difficult but spellbinding reading of that exemplary tragedy. As Suzanne Gearhart has argued, speculative philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis “are modeled after and elaborated to an important extent in terms of a particular view of tragedy” (1). One of Lacan's main intentions, however, in revisiting Sophocles was to draw a line of demarcation between his own interpretation and Hegel's. The object of this essay will be to perform a close reading of Lacan's interpretation of Antigone in the view of distinguishing it from its Hegelian predecessor, elucidating the stakes involved in the Lacanian articulation of psychoanalytic ethics, and exploring the concept of tragedy through which Lacan's argument takes shape. Though Lacan's reading of Antigone forms the coda of his attempt to outline a psychoanalytic ethics, this element of the seminar has yet to find the sustained discussion it deserves.2 What follows will begin to spell out the nature of the politically radical challenge Lacanian ethics mounts against the identitarian, conformist, and market-driven ethic of liberal tolerance and multiculturalism—what Lacan calls in the seminar the “