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FOCUS - 1 of 15 DOCUMENTS

Copyright (c) Yeshiva University 1995.

Cardozo Law Review

1995

16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325

LENGTH: 18258 words

LAW AND THE POSTMODERN MIND: LAW'S BIRTH AND ANTIGONE'S DEATH:
ON ONTOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL ETHICS

NAME: Costas Douzinas *

BIO:

* Rudolf Palumbo Senior Lecturer in Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, England. This Article is dedicated to Ronnie
Warrington, my coauthor and dear friend for many years.

LEXISNEXIS SUMMARY:
... The name of the Father refers us back to Freud and Lacan and the primal scene of the horde. ... In Lacan's reading,
Freud's contribution to ethics is twofold: Freud first offers a genealogy or rather a foundational myth for law's genesis;
secondly, Freud discovered the structuring principle of the social bond and was able to understand the reasons why the
efforts of the finest minds and fieriest hearts of over three millennia of philosophers, religious leaders, and mystics
failed to establish a successful moral code, principle, or a generally acceptable ethical practice, and thus left civilization
drowning in its discontent. ... Similarly, if the ethical substance is the union of the opposites, of man and woman, of
consciousness and unconsciousness, of universal and singular, of state and divine law, Antigone shows that the pleasure
of the copulation and of the concept(ion) never fully arrives and that, contra Hegel, the law of reason and man will be
judged in the (nocturnal) light of desire and woman. ... In this reading, destiny imposes an ethical demand that could
even be called the original ethic; but the answer to it cannot take the form of a code or a collection of principles and
rules. ...

TEXT:
[*1325]

Introduction

Where is the site of law's emergence? What opens the field of ethicity? Where does the law come from? Is there a
ground of emergence of ethics and of obligation, rather is there a being obligated that arises before any obligation, a
duty bound that precedes any particular duty? Our inquiry will attempt to trace the "question of law" - of law's origins
and of its value, of law's validity and of its force. Does the law come from the burial ground of the primordial Father?
Or from the places of the double murder of the Son and the Daughter? Or, finally, from the place where the Spirit
advances and shatters? The question is haunted, it is persecuted by ghosts. The name of the Father refers us back to
Freud and Lacan and the primal scene of the horde. The Spirit returns to Hegel and Heidegger, the recorders of the
closure of metaphysics and of the death of jurisprudence. But it is Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, who has guided
the steps of philosophy and psychoanalysis to the primal scene from which jurisprudence emerges, and from which it
never leaves.
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I.

Psychoanalysis has presented the birth of the law as a crime story. Violence and crime lie at the beginning of
humankind. The law and the social bond emerge in the bloody aftermath of murder and catastrophe. It is not so much
that human nature is considered evil, as that law and morality emerge out of evil and derive from what they will
eventually come to condemn and repress. The law is an always belated attempt to fight what led to its own genesis;
violence and crime are launched at the heart of the law. Crime always comes before the law and determines the nature
of the law and its response to the crime. [*1326]

This claim and its consequences for the history of legality are the "novelty of what Freud brings to the domain of
ethics." n1 In Lacan's reading, Freud's contribution to ethics is twofold: Freud first offers a genealogy or rather a
foundational myth for law's genesis; secondly, Freud discovered the structuring principle of the social bond and was
able to understand the reasons why the efforts of the finest minds and fieriest hearts of over three millennia of
philosophers, religious leaders, and mystics failed to establish a successful moral code, principle, or a generally
acceptable ethical practice, and thus left civilization drowning in its discontent. Lacan's seminar, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, n2 draws on Freud and on the insights and shortcomings of traditional moral philosophy to build an
analytical theory of ethics.

Freud's "mythological theory of instincts" n3 and his myth of law's genesis start with the murder by his sons of the
primal Father who had possessed the females of the horde. The murderers are retrospectively overcome by guilt and
remorse, and in legislating against murder, they opened the field of the morality of interdiction. At the basis of morality
lies a heinous crime, a parricide, alongside the first and primordial principle through which "culture begins in opposition
to nature," n4 the prohibition of incest. Incest expresses a fundamental desire: the Mother is the desired and forbidden
object, Lacan's Thing. The Thing gives rise to desire and jouissance and forms the foundation and the telos of the
subject; but at the same time the maternal object, the Other that calls the subject to being, is barred and inaccessible.
This absolute and impossible desire is fatally linked with the death drive, the will for an Other-thing, an urge for
degeneration, destruction, and nonbeing that challenges everything that exists.

The locus of the Thing, which Lacan calls the Real, is not reality. The Real comes before the reality principle of
everyday life, before all our attempts to adjust the pleasure principle to the exigencies of the phenomenal world. Our
subjectivity and our ideal image of ourselves comes into being through our separation, our severance from the Real. The
loss of the original union with the maternal object opens and determines our destinies, but as this event comes before
the ego and before the scene of representation, [*1327] it cannot be represented and remains repressed and forgotten.
The Real stands at the beginning of the signifying chain, at its very heart and at the same time external to it, and stands
as the structuring principle that is itself beyond structure, the nihil from which language and the Other originate. As the
origin of the signifying chain, the Thing must be imagined as the power of creating ex nihilo, and as the power of nihil
to challenge the sovereignty of being and to open the possibility of jouissance and of its sublimated forms. Jouissance is
buried at the center of the Real, barred by a barrier that makes it "inaccessible, obscure, opaque." n5 Jouissance, the
satisfaction of the death drive, must be prohibited and repressed because of its destructive ability. But its return and
repetition creates memory and the memorable, and gives things their historical dimension. The function of the drive and
of jouissance as the (impossible) satisfaction of the drive is to remember and to historicize, to sustain the past through
the trauma of the present, and to create time in the interplay of destruction and pleasure.

The central principle of psychoanalytical ethics is that the social bond, our relationship with ourselves and others,
passes through the locus of the Thing and is determined by our uncanny dependence on jouissance, the enjoyment it
generates. Enjoyment must be distinguished from ordinary pleasure; there is a whole history of ethics that culminates in
utilitarianism which bases itself on the belief that pleasure and pain are the key determinants of psychic life and can be
shaped according to plan, manipulated for use, and put in the service of the wider good. Freud accepted the partial
validity of this ethical theory but went beyond it. For Lacan, this is the great ethical discovery of Freud: the Supreme
Good, favored by Aristotelians and moralists alike, is neither an arrangement of virtues and values in the right order of
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reason, the orthos logos, nor the absolute formal law of the deontologists. Neither substance nor form, neither logos nor
lex, neither inside nor outside, and neither individual nor universal, the Good is the Mother, the Thing, the Other-object
of desire which is at the same time the forbidden object, and no other Good exists. Rather, other goods are to be
arranged in relation to this Supreme but unattainable Good. Civilization and culture start in morality, but this is a
morality of unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire, of the end of desire. Ego is created in the struggle to satisfy this
insatiable and impossible desire that keeps coming back again and again. [*1328]

This constitutive and catastrophic object has generated one of the most persistent campaigns in history. The forces
of civilization have combined over the centuries to beat the Thing back, to ban it, exorcise it, and failing that, to tame,
restrain, and imprison it as its full force threatens the survival of individual and community. The superego is one such
attempt to ban or restrict access to desire and enjoyment. The superego is the introjection, the inward turn, the
importation into the soul, and the turning against the ego of the original, instinctive aggressiveness and destructiveness,
a manifestation of and a derivation from the death drive. Guilt feelings are created in the tension between the ego and
the superego and are expressed in the need and desire for punishment. But the superego has all the characteristics of the
sadist: it has no obvious motive for punishing the ego, but never ceases tormenting it. Indeed, the more the ego follows
the injunctions of the superego's accretion, manifested in the individual's conscience, the greater the torture becomes. It
is the people "who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness." n6 The
development of conscience turns the renunciation of libidinal and destructive drives, originally imposed by external
authority and the fear of loss of love, into a much more tyrannical internal authority and a permanent unhappiness, an
insatiable, all-devouring law which becomes all the more severe and punishing the more it leads the ego to renounce its
instincts.

But if the superego is a cruel creator of pain and suffering, the internalization of destructiveness, it is also the
generator of insatiable desire and marries pain with pleasure. It comes alloyed with eros and connects the voice of
conscience to the necessity of our desire. In the Freudian mythological schema, the remorse and the sense of guilt of the
band of parricidal brothers were the result of their ambivalent feelings towards their father; they both hated and loved
him, admired him, and wanted him destroyed. After their hatred was satisfied in the primordial murder, their love came
forward and founded the superego by giving it the Father's power and endowing it with the feelings of love and
admiration that accompanied the original Father. Eros played an important role in the origin of conscience and the law,
and in the fatal inevitability of guilt. The superego therefore stands both for the gratification that our submission to the
law brings, and for the pain of its inherent and brutal amorality. The cruelty of conscience is like that of the law:
[*1329] the more you feed it the more it wants. We have been subjected to a law which we know only in its
transgression and the attendant sense of guilt, we are bound before any particular obligation, we are asked to obey
before we know what. But at the same time this is the law of our eros which, in its cruel and impossible demands,
becomes like de Sade's executioner, an instrument of our pleasure. Morally, we want to transgress a law that can never
be atoned.

Lacan takes Freud's analysis further. Paternal law, the interdiction upon the primary incestuous desire and the sign
of entrance into the symbolic order, needs for its effective transmission the myth of the primordial parricide. The myth
both strengthens the desire and gives it form and direction. But the myth shows that the removal of the Father does not
admit his sons to unadulterated pleasure. The obstacle is removed, but its replacement, the law, makes pleasure harder
to attain. But at the same time, as sin, the parasite of the law, feeds on conscience and transgression, so too desire needs
the law. Our union with and our eros for the maternal object totally subject us to the primordial Other without any
remainder. Entry to the symbolic order and submission to the law bring to an end this alienating total subjection and
control the desire of the all-powerful Other (or mother).

It is this whim that introduces the phantom of Omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the Other in which his demand is
installed ... and with this phantom the need for it to be checked by the Law... Desire reverses the unconditional nature of
the demand for love, in which the subject remains in subjection to the Other, and raises it to the power of absolute
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condition ... n7

Thus, entry to the law not only checks the absolute power and whim of the Other; it also allows the subject to enter the
realm of pleasure. Our eros makes us obligated before any particular obligation and subjects us to the law before we can
know its demands. But conversely, our love confronts us as a necessity, as a fate pleasurable and painful, structured by
the law. There is a close link between law and desire. The law represses desire, but it also structures it and gives it
direction. Conversely, the law is repressed along with organized desire. And while the law is closely linked with the
prohibition of primary jouissance through the symbolic castration which is necessary for the subject's admission to
pleasure, the superego turns enjoyment into an injunction and duty [*1330] which, in Zizek's pithy phrase, "is the most
effective way to block access to enjoyment." n8

The law of desire is neither regularity nor interdiction, neither form nor substance. The law is known in its effects,
and structures the ego in its traumatic relationship with desire and the superego. We do not repress desire because we
have conscience, we have conscience because we repress desire. But as our desire is so much structured by repression,
the law, too, is desire. We cannot know the law of desire in advance, but we follow the desire of law in its fatal
consequences. The unconscious drives one to act, but this action is not fully willed or intended. Psychoanalytical ethics
introduces a new responsibility for our desire, a love for telling the truth about something we can never fully know and
which is written only in our destinies. All moralistic attempts to achieve the Supreme Good must fail, because the lack,
the gap opened by the symbolic castration can never be filled. The subject will thus always be pursued by his own fate
which will befall him in his own history, although this destiny has been articulated in the forgotten past or beyond
history in the operation of the elementary structures of personhood. Lacan's Real is our moira, our libidinal destiny, the
imperative of our eros which we cannot avoid and which we cannot avoid betraying. n9 If there is no Supreme Good
that can organize the social bond permanently, all ethical thought about the Good is an ongoing consideration of the
relationship between the law and desire. Freud's ethical injunction is to accept responsibility for the necessity of the law
of our desire.

Ethics has always been a search for something that returns to the same place, to the bonding of the social bond.
This place has been variably defined as virtue, duty, the law or utility, and more recently, as the structures of property
exchange and kinship. Ethical theory proper, however, can only begin when the inquiry about the nature of the Good
discovers that the "law is closely tied to the very structure of desire." n10 But the object of desire is always kept at a
certain distance, as it is both proximate and barred, and ethics has failed to confront what should have been its main
subject. While the law is organized from the start in relation to the Real, the great theories of ethics have been circling
its place without ever facing it fully. It is only their asides and slips, their footnotes, sup- [*1331] plementary
additions, and marginal annotations that have alluded to that Real, to that Thing that always returns to the same place.

Ethics is the first of two guards, checkpoints, and border controls appointed by civilization to police the Thing. The
theory of the Good(s), in its various guises from the Platonic identification of the Supreme Good with the knowledge of
the idea to the contemporary versions of the Spirit, the common good, or the aggregate good of the greatest number, has
been the first, peripheral cordon sanitaire. The second barrier, aesthetic experience, comes closer to the locus of absolute
desire and destruction. It too stops our access at the perimeter of the prohibited field, but it points in its direction and
gives a stronger glimpse of it. According to Lacan, this is "the experience of beauty - beauty in all its shining radiance,
beauty that has been called the splendor of truth." n11 Sublime art acts as a substitute for the lost object, not because we
can aesthetically commune with the Thing, but because in art we experience the trauma of the loss and the exhilaration
of a forgotten memory. Sublimation leads us to discover something we were not looking for in art. But, like all
checkpoints and border controls which both bar access and give a glimpse into the promised land, so too the Good and
the Beautiful allow us only a fleeting look into that beyond.

The Good is the starting point of the attempt to come to terms with the subject's destiny. Lacan approaches the
question of the Good as an economic problem, as the question of access, distribution, and enjoyment of goods. Goods,
products of labor, and depositories of value satisfy human needs and increase pleasure. As philosophers have been
unable to distinguish good from bad pleasures, they have concentrated on separating the true from the false goods to
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which pleasure points. The theory of the Good has always been a disguised or explicit attempt to arrange the production
and distribution of goods, and forms a bridge between the pleasure and reality principles. Ethics, in this sense, has
always been a hedonism and the whole Western tradition in ethics found its culmination and telos in Bentham. The
quest for the Good is therefore caught in a profound duplicity captured by the double meaning of the classical
conception of praxis. On the one hand, praxis means ethical action, synergia, practical life in conjunction and
cooperation with others; but secondly, praxis leads to an ergon, an aim or goal in the sense of a product, or a good
produced. [*1332]

Lacan makes the second meaning dominant and interprets theories of the Good in economic terms. Propriation and
control over one's goods deprives others. The Good is therefore not just an answer to a natural need but also a power,
the power to satisfy through the privation of the Other. Our relation to goods is arranged so as to take account of the
basic fact that the Other has the power to deprive me of the Good. Every time the ego chooses to do good, something
beyond the Good, "something completely enigmatic appears and returns to us again and again from our own action -
like the ever-growing threat within us of a powerful demand whose consequences are unknown[.]" n12 The ego ideal
represents the field of the Good and opens/bars the terrifying beyond it, while the ideal ego is the threatening Other. The
Good brings together an economy of satisfaction and privation in the hands of the imaginary Other who acts as the
depriving agent and thus bars entry to the locus of jouissance. Control over goods is also control over people; the Good
is linked with the creation and exercise of power. The theory of the Good(s) is closely linked, if not identical, with one
type of the quest for justice, presented as a political and social arrangement of power based on the (equitable)
distribution of goods.

Undoubtedly, the dominant theoretical tradition of justice from Aristotle to Rawls has a strong economical bias and
has reduced the Good to the division of goods. n13 Lacan's reading of moral philosophy acknowledges this link and
brings together the two meanings of practical life in an interpretation indebted to Hegel and Marx. His complaint is that
while utilitarian ethics correctly emphasizes the key role played by the pleasure principle, it does not go far enough in
acknowledging the privative and destructive element of the theory of the Good. Moreover, much of non-utilitarian
ethics is misconceived and counterproductive. The pleasure-seeking principle can be controlled, exploited, and made
productive for civilization, as the twentieth century has shown. What is uncontrollable and threatening to social stability
is the law that structures desire and calls to the enjoyment that lies beyond pleasure: the obscene inner law of the
superego and the self-tormenting law of conscience which link transgression with intense asocial pleasure, and turn
desire into law by marking the performance of duty with intense jouissance. These negative forces are joined by
[*1333] moral theories and laws, which in their obsession to turn love into law, miss out on the destructive aspects of
love.

One such law that Freud finds strange and incomprehensible, and which Lacan finds totally horrible, is the
pinnacle of Christian morality, the maxim "Love thy neighbor as thyself." For Freud, the instinctive aggressiveness of
the human beast is such that foreigners, strangers, and neighbors, who are not potential helpers or sexual objects, tempt
the subject "to humiliate [them], to cause [them] pain, to torture and to kill [them]." n14 The Christian law flies in the
face of psychic reality and joins many other failed attempts to hold civilization together as an impossible and rather
comical injunction based on a misunderstanding. Lacan goes further: the maxim is horrible because love for self is
destructive and jouissance, the expression of the death drive, is cruel and must be checked by the law before it unleashes
its catastrophic energy. Loving your neighbor like yourself would be to unleash the power of aggression that the
superego has channelled against the ego into an external orgy of destruction. Christian ethics thus becomes an ally to the
obscene inner voice of conscience; the law that suppressed jouissance is also the law that makes the subject recoil in
horror and retreat from following the maxim of love.

Lacan detects a similar structure in Kantianism, the moral theory that stands at the opposite end of utilitarianism.
Kant separated the law from all consideration of passion and emotion, and from all empirical or historical experience.
An action is moral not when it promotes the Good, either as common or individual, but when it is motivated out of
respect for the law, irrespective of rewards or sanctions, calculations, and consequences. Moral law does not ally itself
with the pleasure principle; the law obligates people to apply it freely without any recourse to prudence, love for the
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Good, or passion. Morality is freed from pathology and the nomos from pathos. Good will is divorced from all reference
to beneficial outcome, to agent, or to society; its maxim is found in ourselves and becomes the fountain and foundation
of freedom, but it acts like a law of nature. We find this law analogically, "as if" it were a natural law, "as if" our
freedom in applying it came from within us and were a natural causation, and "as if" obedience to it was motivated by
external fear and internal inclination. But as this "natural" law has no passion and no pathology, it does not touch the
empirical world, has no content, and constructs its object only at the moment of individuation of the formal imperative
in [*1334] relation to concrete conduct. Furthermore, although the law is the a priori determining maxim of the will, it
must not be led or motivated by impure feelings and inclinations. The only feeling that Kant acknowledges is the
intense pain produced by obedience to law's demands.

This law, freed from all empirical content, can only be pure form, that of universal legislation. Form holds the
place of the missing content and the vacated Good. The wiping out of all content is similar to Lacan's symbolic
castration, in which the incestuous maternal object is overthrown from its place as the Supreme Good and the "paternal
law" of the symbolic order emerges in the void created through this wiping out. This pure loss changes the status of all
objects which fill the void created and which must stand and act against the background of radical absence. Similarly,
the emptying of all content from the categorical imperative creates a new kind of object of desire, Lacan's objet petit a,
and the renunciation of enjoyment gives rise to a certain new surplus enjoyment. n15 Kant's law is experienced as
noneconomical in the subject's economy of pleasure and reality, as it has no concern and gives no consideration to the
subject's well-being, but at the same time it opens a new vista of enjoyment. For the ethics of duty, self must suffer. The
greater the purity of respect for the law, the greater the pain that obedience induces, a pain that is tinged with obscene
pleasure. The categorical imperative is not unlike de Sade's law of pleasure-inducing pain and Freud's superego. Indeed,
Freud compares the categorical imperative, which works in "a compulsive fashion and rejects any conscious motives,"
n16 with the taboos of primitive tribes. Lacan agrees: when civilization is based on abstract duty without reference to
feeling or passion, the structural law of desire is unleashed and leads to discontent, destruction, and death. There is a
"sepulchral mound at the limit of the politics of the good, of the general good, of the good of the community," n17
writes Lacan. "For life after all is rottenness." n18 An ethics that does not recognize this basic fact is likely to nourish
disenchantment and strengthen the catastrophic tendency of desire on the pretext that it is serving the wider good.
[*1335]

If the Good is the outer control on the road to jouissance, the Beautiful is the guard next to the selpuchre, like the
sentry at Polynices's mound who will both see and marvel at Antigone's beauty and defiance, and will arrest her as she
approaches the body of her desire. The beautiful image, the radiant apocalyptic beauty of the aesthetic experience, is our
main glimpse at jouissance and it occurs through phantasms. The phantasm, the image of beauty, and the fleeting
excursions of the libido represent our relationship with our death, our second symbolic death. They both express the
desire for nothingness and occlude the locus of this desire. Beauty does not lull and numb us in the same way as the
Good; it keeps us alert to the possibility of jouissance at the same time that it bars entry to it. Enter Antigone, the
martyr of the ethics of desire. Lacan, like so many others before and since, will return to Antigone and turn her into his
own primal myth and turn her grave into the foundation stone of legality. We turn to Antigone in order to see the ethics
of psychoanalysis come to life and compare it with Heidegger's ontological ethics, another major tradition for which
Antigone has been the seminal text.

II.

For centuries, Greek tragedy has been the meeting point of philosophy, literature, and ethics, of reason, form, and
the law. Classic tragedy, Nietzsche's philosophical opus par excellence, was the testing ground of the Odyssey of Spirit
for Hegel, of desire for Freud, jouissance for Lacan, and of the primordial memory of Being for Heidegger. Amongst
the great works of world literature, no one "has elicited the strengths of philosophic and poetic interest focused on
Sophocles' Antigone." n19 "Of all the masterpieces of the [*1336] classical ... world - and I know ... them and you
should and you can," n20 wrote Hegel, "the Antigone seems to [make] the most magnificent and satisfying work of art
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of [its] kind." n21 Hegel calls Antigone "celestial, the most resplendent figure ever to have appeared on earth." n22 If
the whole philosophical tradition were lost, says Heidegger, but the Ode to Man, the first choral song of Antigone, was
saved alongside its translation by Holderlin, we would be able to reconstruct all of the great philosophical themes of
Western culture. Lacan dedicates his seminars on ethics to the maiden, using her as an example of the Freudian
revolution in morality. "Even if we are not aware of it, the latent, fundamental image of Antigone forms part of [our]
morality." n23

Oedipus the King and the myth of Oedipus have been recognized as key texts for the understanding of psyche and
identity. The daughter of Oedipus, Antigone, must be similarly acknowledged as a foundation of thought and action
concerning physis and nomos, nomos and dike, law and justice. Antigone finds her place in the synchrony of the
Western unconscious, alongside a small repertory of elementary structures and myths so pervasive in our culture that
only a sense of misplaced arrogance and originality have stopped us from acknowledging the "repetitive and "epigonal'
tenor of so much of our consciousness and expressive forms." n24 Heidegger fully agrees: all progressivist and
evolutionary anthropology is false. n25 "The beginning is the strangest and the mightiest. What comes afterward is not
development but the flattening that results from mere spreading out ... Historical knowledge resides in an understanding
of the mysterious character of this beginning... If anything at all, [it is a knowledge of] mythology." n26 Antigone is as
important for the exploration of the origins and the force of law as Oedipus is for the foundation of identity. But,
"origins" does not refer here to some idealized "childhood of man." Instead it refers to the leap, both original and final,
in which man founded himself by finding himself before the Other who put to [*1337] him the first, continuing - and
last - ethical commands which constitute the philosophical foundations of law as laid down in Antigone.

We are well aware of the jurisprudential and speculative readings of Antigone. The tragedy concerns the unfolding
of a series of conceptual juxtapositions, embodied and represented by the two diametrically opposed protagonists. The
key conflict may be that between divine and human law, or between law and justice, family and state, or individual and
society; but its narrative presentation always follows the same path. The antagonists judge and are themselves judged by
their opponent and by the critic. We can read the two opponents as irreconcilable principles or as steps in the dialectic.
The juridical presentation will always sharpen the issues, abstract the action, and present the conflicts as right against
right, or right against wrong, or even wrong against wrong. But in all instances it is discourse against discourse, law
against law, and the antagonistic partialities that will circle each other and eventually will be sublated as the law
becomes, in Hegel's felicitous phrase, the embodiment and accommodation of reason and need. But can we read
Antigone as anything other than a lesson in morality, or a stage in the unfolding of Spirit's self-consciousness in law? If
the play is not about the conflict of right against right, how is Creon wrong and what does Antigone want? These are
the questions that Lacan and Heidegger pose and which we will follow in their readings.

Creon is a representative of the Athenian Enlightenment, and of the power of rational thought and institutions to
civilize and organize the world. His reign is based on kratos, authority, on bia, power or violence, and on logos, reason,
language, and law. Antigone, on the other hand, in her unwavering commitment to the philoi, kin and beloved, to the
everlasting, unwritten laws of dike, and to the rites of death, appears to stand for primordial forces untamed by the
power of logos. The complex dilemmas and conflicts that move the action are expressions of the fatal intertwining of
the power of reason with its manifold others. Pivotal in this respect stands the first choral stasimon, the famous Ode to
Man, a superb celebration of the civilizing power and achievements of human reason and craft. Man, the most
wonderful, awesome, terrible of all creatures has used his powers to invent sailing, agriculture, animal husbandry, the
building of shelters and of cities, and he has crowned his achievement with the creation of laws and institutions. He has
taught himself language and the power of thought [*1338] and wisdom, phronema, which have become the two great
foundations of human essence. The Ode appears at its first reading as a powerful expression of the anthropocentric
belief in gradual but inexorable progress through the irresistible conquest and rationalization of fields and forces outside
human control.

Creon's political philosophy is a somewhat simplified version of the Ode's secular rationalism. For Creon, the laws
and policies are man-made, they aim to increase the happiness of the citizens, and their wisdom can only be judged
from experience. The Supreme Good which combines civic safety and public well-being is a single, internally coherent
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value, which prevents the creation of meaningful ethical conflict. The power of practical wisdom to expand to new areas
and the civilizing temper have no limit. Good judgment is therefore the most precious gift and lack of wisdom, me
phronein, the worst affliction. n27 The gods do not reason differently from men; to know man is to know God and fate.
Creon abhors the prospect that women might acquire public power and he denies the existence of any form of
distinctively female rationality, except madness. Finally, he does not accept that family ties should make any difference
in the way rational men conduct their affairs. The only true kinship he recognizes is that between political allies. Even
sexual pleasure is determined by political considerations, and an unpatriotic wife is "a misery in ... bed." n28 Creon's
favorite word is symmetros; n29 the concept of symmetry permeates the discourse of rationality. It is a juridical
symmetry of higher and lower principles, where reason triumphs over madness, male over female, age and experience
over youth, right over wrong.

Against Creon's simple utilitarianism, the Ode's celebratory sentiments are soon confronted with the darker side of
human endeavor. Tragedy holds a mirror to the human psyche and to the world which refutes philosophy's excessive
intellectualism. Each one of the optimistic statements is soon found wanting. The Earth and the beasts appear in the Ode
as the resource and object of man's civilizing intervention. His incomparable skills and devices, mechanes, and the
instruments of his techne have tamed nature. But soon this exploitative attitude is challenged by a totally different view.
When Haemon tries to make his father change his mind, he sees nature as an example of harmony, its forces yielding to
superior forces and adjusting to natural rhythms. The domesticated [*1339] animals soon become metaphors for
nonrational forces; birds and horses become symbols of violence and passion, dogs and birds bring carrion torn from the
corpse and pollute the city. Finally, the last choral song that celebrates Dionysus presents an image of nature totally at
odds with that of the Ode; nature, whose God and personification is Bacchus, is now mystical and orgiastic, possessed
by sacred rage and breathing fire.

Next, the Ode boasts that man taught himself language, thought, phronema, and the mood of legality that creates
cities astynomous orgas ("the mood and mind for law" n30 ). Creon too has an instrumental theory of language and legal
communication: he sees language as a tool of the sovereign and a medium for the pronouncement of laws in clear,
indisputable terms. But soon this view of language is profoundly challenged. In very few works of literature is the
active, "performative" work of language more lethally in evidence. The dark prophesies and the murderous curses, the
shrieking wails and the monstrous cries of Teiresias's birds are parallelled to the frenzied language of mad barbarians.
n31 Haemon's attack is conducted in a monstrous eagle-like scream; the curse on the house of Oedipus is madness of
language and frenzy of mind, phrenon Erinys. n32 And when Creon's world collapses at the end, this exponent of the
instrumental use of speech disintegrates into a series of incoherent screams and cries which carry the dreadfulness of
supreme existential catastrophe: io, io, aiai, aiai, oimoi, oimoi, pheu, pheu. n33 Language, from an instrument of rule
and the dividing line between man and beast, has become a lethal weapon; from the repository of logos, the epiphany of
madness. The Ode itself already expresses doubt as to the all-conquering power of reason when it comes to what
appears as the greatest achievement, law and justice. In law and politics, success is the hardest. n34 Man comes "now to
destruction[,] now again to greatness[;]" n35 when he keeps human law and divine justice he is [*1340] high in the
city, hypsipolis, but he becomes stateless, apolis, if he acts with rashness and stubbornness.

The poem starts and finishes with phronein; Antigone is about practical wisdom, phronesis, about the way in
which it leads individual and city to happiness, about the nature and components of phronein, and finally about
thought's relation to action. But the word has another meaning that refers to the darker recesses of the psyche. Phrenes
are states of mind, sane or mad, good or evil, Dionysically frenetic or cynically ataraxic, passionately active or
apathetically passive. Pathos, or passion, happens to the individual and is not of her own choosing. For Aristotle,
someone who is impassioned is like someone who is asleep, drunk, or mad. n36 Phronein is about self-determination
and rational decision making; phrenes or thumos, on the other hand, are the seat of ate and daemon, the supernatural and
God-given in Homer, or more generally, the unexplainable and nonrational springs of human action. These may be the
outcome of a family curse that passes on to the offspring, of ate, divine or secular madness, of wine taking or sexual
passion, or of fate. But whatever their provenance, there is always a residue of nonrational motivation of action that
shadows the claims of reason to find political and ethical-legal obligation. As with all reformations and counter
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reformations, the relative position and strength of autonomous and heteronomous action, of "innocent guilt" and "pious
impiety," lies at the heart of the Greek Enlightenment. Both thought and unthought, Eros, Dionysus, and Thanatos are
behind human action.

Creon's error of judgment is to want to promote the good in all which is presented as the law without limits, and as
a sovereign law that comes to the limit. Tragedy offers the first objection to the identification of law with reason from
Aristotle to Kant: the Good cannot reign overall without an excess with fatal consequences. In its identification with
reason, the law becomes imperious: it represents the good of all, although not necessarily the public good, and it must
go to the limit, cross over beyond all limitations and tame all to its reign. What are the fears of Law? "Woman,"
madness, anarchy, everything that cannot be translated to gain and utility. What are law's desires? To tame everything,
turn it to productive use and then to cross the limit, go where it is not allowed to go, to the outside or to excess, and to
enter the place of the gods, of dike [*1341] and of desire. But in doing so the law takes up the outside and excess into
its own heart.

III.

If Antigone is for Lacan the best opening for an analytical theory of ethics, its first ode is, according to Heidegger,
the place where we moderns, "inexperienced at such hearing, and because moreover our ears are full of things that
prevent us from hearing properly," n37 must turn to discover the design and essence of being human. It is a question of
openings, of the original unfolding of the ontological difference, of the bursting out of human essence, and of the
beginning of history. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, n38 Heidegger has reached a point in his reading of a number
of Heraclitus fragments in which he has defined Being as physis and aletheia, appearance and unconcealment, and
logos, as the steady gathering and intrinsic togetherness of being. Being as logos, the collectedness and gathering of
opposites and their polemos, gives beings "supreme radiance i.e. the greatest beauty." n39 One such example of logos,
separate and distinct in itself but at the same time a gathered togetherness that maintains itself as such, is "the nomos for
the polis, the statute that constitutes ... the original unifying unity of what tends apart." n40 But how does human
essence open out of the collectedness of Being and logos, of physis and nomos? Heidegger turns for the answer to
Antigone's Ode on Man. "Chorus: Numberless wonders[,] terrible wonders walk the world but none the match for
man[,]" polla ta deina kouden anthropou deinoteron pelei. n41

Man is the strangest deinotaton, a word which in its ambiguity expresses both the extreme reaches and the abysmal
depths of Being. Deinon means the terrible "overpowering power," terrifying and awe-inspiring; but man is also deinon
in the sense of the violent one. Violence is not just part of his action but of his Dasein. The basic trait of man's uncanny
essence is his strangeness. It continually causes him to abandon violently the familiar and the secure for the strange and
overpowering. But, in this endless and violent fleeing to the unknown he becomes pantoporos aporos, and hypsipolis
apolis. Heidegger, and after him Lacan, identically [*1342] change the accepted punctuation and translation of these
key lines, paradoxically linking the opposed terms. Man opens and follows a myriad path on his flight from home,
poros, but he is cast out of all of them. He achieves his essence in and out and for the polis, historically. "He advances
toward nothing that is likely to happen, he advances and is pantoporos, "artful,' but he is aporos, always "screwed.'... He
always manages to cause things to come crashing down on his head." n42 And again, polis is the time and place where
the paths meet, the site of Dasein. But the political action that makes a citizen highest in the city leaves him also without
site, city, and place, alien and lonely as he must first create the ground and order of his creation.

The conquest of the sea, the earth, animals, and birds that opens the Ode is not a description of man's activities. All
of these are an outline of his overpowering Being that brings both his and all other beings into their own being. The
second strophe names the elements of the overpowering powers: language, thought, passion, laws, and buildings rule
man and must be taken up by him as he launches in his ever new ventures. This is a standard translation:
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Chorus: And speech and thought, quick as the wind and the mood and mind for law that rules the city - all these he has
taught himself and shelter from the arrows of the frost when there's rough lodging under the cold clear sky and the
shafts of lashing rain - ready resourceful man! Never without resources never an impasse as he marches on the future -
only Death, from Death alone he will find no rescue ... n43

But "how could ever man have invented the power which pervades him, which alone enables him to be a man?" n44
asks Heidegger. He offers his own translation, which clearly diverges both syntactically and semantically from the
accepted.

And he has found his way

to the resonance of the word,

and to wind-swift all-understanding,

and to the courage of rule over cities.

He has considered also how to flee

from exposure to the arrows

of unpropitious weather and frost.

Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue,

he comes to nothingness. [*1343]

Through no flight he can resist

the one assault of death,

even if he has succeeded in cleverly evading

painful sickness. n45

Heidegger reads the key term edidaxato against received opinion and its dictionary value to mean not that man has
invented and taught himself language, thought, and laws, but that he has found his way towards their overpowering
order and there has found himself. As soon as man departs into Being, he finds himself in language. Language, this
uncanny thing speaks man; its overpowering power helps him speak and create the violent words and acts through
which he breaks out into his myriad paths, and breaks and subjects his world into its manifold beings. The beginning of
language is a mystery; it arose in the violent overpowering of power, of original, archaic poetry and philosophy in
which the Greeks spoke of Being. The original work of language is not a semiurgy but a demiurgy. Mastering the
violence of language makes man; through speech and understanding he tames and orders the powers of the world and
moves into them as the violent creator of beings and history. But all violence shatters against one thing, a limit that
surrounds and delimits man's creative violence: death. Shattering against the uncanniness of death is the essence of
being. But it is not the fact of death that is shattering, not the exit itself, but the exitlessness which is proper to Dasein,
its innermost and necessary possibility. The opening is the admission to the exit, the exitless exit. For Heidegger, being
moves to death, death is the necessary possibility and telos of Dasein. Everything that enters life begins to die, and the
certain but indeterminate imminence of death, of Dasein's demise, is Dasein's ownmost possibility and the signpost of
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its individuation. The logos gathers the supreme antagonism, the struggle of life and death, which is the intrinsic
togetherness and possibility of Being.

The third strophe brings together the two meanings of deinon and their interrelation in the deinotaton. Deinon as
man's violent power is evident in knowledge and art (techne); these look beyond the familiar and cause beings to
present themselves and stabilize in their being. Deinon, as the overpowering power on the other hand, is evident in the
fundamental dike, the proper order and governing structure of Being, against which the violence of speech and act will
break out and break up. Techne confronts dike as man sails into the order of Being, violently tears it asunder using his
power [*1344] against its overpowering dispensation, and brings forth the existence of beings. Dike is the
overpowering order, techne the violence of knowledge. The reciprocal relation, the conflict between Being as a whole
and man's violent Being-there leads to disaster as violence shatters against Being.

Heidegger then proceeds to the final reading of the poem, a paradigmatic presentation of his combined ontology
and hermeneutics, and his own act as deinotatos. What lies between the lines of Antigone is the shattering, the writing
of disaster. The possibility of catastrophe has an ontological permanence. The fall into disaster is fundamental, an
inescapable condition of human existence. The essence of being human rises on the breach into which the
overwhelming power of Being bursts, "in order that this breach itself should shatter against being." n46 Man cultivates
and guards the familiar, home, polis, and hearth, only "to break out of it and to let what it overpowers break in." n47
The violent one desires the new and unprecedented and abandons all help and sympathy to fulfill the call of Being; but
to achieve his humanity he knows of no peace and reconciliation, no permanent success and status. "To him disaster is
the deepest and broadest affirmation of the overpowering." n48 The greatness of the Greeks was to understand the
suddenness and uniqueness of Being that forcefully revealed itself as physis, logos, and dike, and to respond to its
awesome overpowering in the only way that could bring forward beings out of Being, that is violently. The violence
that the violent one uses against the overpowering order leads to catastrophe. Heidegger insists that hierarchy and
domination are implicit in the gathering of Being in logos. The violent, creative man is not to be found in the bustle and
activity of everyday, mundane life. The disapproval of the violent one by the Chorus that closes the Ode is not an
admonition to the peaceful resignation of undisturbed comfort, but a confirmation that the uncanniness of human being
can only be found in those few heroic shepherds of Being who respond to the unique call of Dasein with violence.
Dasein comes to Being through violence and shattering; it perdures through catastrophe and death's imminence. That is
how Dasein happens, that is how history opens. Violence is the midwife of the law.

What do we find if we turn to Lacan's reading of Antigone? Heidegger. In place of fundamental ontology, we find
a psycholog- [*1345] ical ontology. The overwhelming power of Being organized as the order of dike has now become
the unconscious. In the Lacanian scene, it is the unconscious which is organized as logos. We are thrown into language
which makes us human, and which also defines the basic limit, the lack in the midst of the subject. Language, like
logos, is gathered and gathers to the overwhelming truth, the Real, the unfulfillable desire of the Other. And it is
Antigone, the omos raw daughter of a raw father, who violently and inhumanely comes to act on her desire. What are
the characteristics of Antigone? She is beautiful, radiant, fascinating; she is at the limit where life is about to cross into
death and death enters into the sphere of life. But this is also "the point where the false metaphors of being (l'etant) can
be distinguished from the position of Being (l'etre) itself." n49 Her radiance and splendor derive from her place on this
border. In pushing against the limit, her violence shatters against death and Being itself bursts through. Antigone's
beauty is the radiance of Being, her image purges us of the order of the imaginary and gives us a glimpse of the Real.

But what lies across the border? Lacan is specific. It is ate. Nothing pampoly, immense, vast, monstrous, and
wonderful enters, literally creeps herpei, into the life of men, ektos atas, without and beyond ate, fate, the curse, and
infatuation, says the Chorus. n50 Dodds defines ate as "a state of mind - a temporary clouding or bewildering of the
normal consciousness... [A] partial and temporary insanity ascribed ... to an external "daemonic' agency... [A] "psychic
intervention.' " n51 Ate is not connected originally with moral guilt or punishment but with a rashness, an
overdetermination of action brought about by God, fate, alcohol, or sexual passion. Lacan not only exploits these
connections, but takes them much further.
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Ate is the crucial field, the limit that one can only fleetingly approach. "It concerns the Other, the field of the
Other." n52 The gods lead men towards infatuation/jouissance, ate, but the effect is to make them confuse good and bad
and to take them beyond the limit. n53 "Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes, immortalizes Ate." n54 She moves towards
it, she briefly crosses the limit, she is ektos ates. But what is this field beyond? Lacan first compares the Other with
[*1346] the order of the law, although its legality does not belong to any signifying chain. Secondly, the Other is the
desire of the mother, "the origin of everything," and "the founding desire." n55 Finally, Antigone's ate is a desire of
death. "I gave myself to death, long ago, so I might serve the dead[,]" says Antigone to Ismene. n56 Antigone's desire
takes her beyond the limits of humanity, beyond ate, into the field of jouissance where she will lie with the beloved in
death. Her desire is a death drive; in desiring she becomes a death-bound being, but she will not give way on her desire.
She lives her life at the limit, her passivity intimates that she is already dead and that she desires death, that she can only
live her life as if dead. What lies beyond and what language demands is that man realizes "that he is not." n57

We can hear here Antigone's death knell. Her obedience to Dike, her eros is monstrous; she is besotted with
thanatos, and will be betrothed with Hades and death. Antigone is full of references to the momentous linking of the
primordial forces of love and death. "Antigone: I go to wed the lord of the dark waters" n58 (Acheronti nympheuso).
Antigone consummates her passionate and destructive love with her philtatoi in death; her affection for Polynices but
also for the unlucky Haemon, caught in the maelstrom of forces larger than life and death, will be fulfilled in the burial
and wedding chamber of Hades: "Messenger: And there he lies, body enfolding body ... he has won his bride at last,
poor boy, not here but in the houses of the dead." n59

This is not the eros of Platonic harmony, nor the Hegelian familial love that unites the spouses and sublates them
in the coming son. There is no gain to be made from it against Creon's enlightened utilitarianism, according to which
there must be return for all investment. Antigone's eros is pure expenditure, a gift with no return, Sappho's "elemental
force of nature, a whirlwind rushing down the mountains." n60 It belongs to an oiko-nome of monstrosity and seems to
support fully Lacan's reading of the tragedy as the foundational text of an ethics of death-bound desire.

Lacan models analytical ethics upon Antigone's desire. But what does Antigone want and what do we want of
Antigone? [*1347] Does she follow the law of family and the gods, the big "O" of the symbolic order, or does she act
out her desire for death? We hear what she says, but what does she really want? What does the woman want? These are
the questions that Creon asked Antigone and Freud repeated. Creon is convinced that there is a dislocation between
Antigone's demand and act, and her desire. Within the framework of his political rationalism, Antigone can only act
for gain or as part of a conspiracy to overthrow him. The only alternative is that she is "mad," that a permanent and
unbridgeable gap has developed between her locution (what she says) and her illocution (what she intends), a state that
psychoanalysis examines under the name of hysteria. A dangerous political rebel or an unhinged hysteric?

Antigone's answer is: "I was born to join in love, not [to] hate." n61 As we saw in Lacanian theory, love has the
character of fundamental deception.

We try to fill out the unbearable gap of "Che vuoi?,' the opening of the Other's desire, by offering ourselves to the Other
as object of its desire... The operation of love is therefore double: the subject fills in his own lack by offering himself to
the other as the object filling out the lack in the Other - love's deception is that this overlapping of two lacks annuls lack
as such in a mutual completion. n62

Antigone's sacrifice is the sign of absolute desire. She offers herself to Polynices in order to complete his passage and
fill his lack, and at the same time she removes herself from the commotion of activity and passion onto the plane of pure
desire and existence. Polynices has been separated from all his characteristics, devoid of content, and lies between his
first bodily death and the refusal of the second symbolic death, an empty vessel of existence. Creon's distinctions
between friend and foe, and hero and traitor, are of no importance to Antigone in this state of limbo in which the unique
value of Polynices lies in his (non)being rather than any of his properties or actions.
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We cannot know for certain Antigone's object of desire. What we know is that Antigone desires and that she will
always act on her desire. But the acting appears secondary. Her calm serenity intimates a saintly passivity, an
ontological aloofness: like her brother, she is already elsewhere, her inscrutable desire is a state of being rather than an
act. In the eyes of the chorus, Antigone is [*1348] cold, inhuman, the raw omos daughter of a raw father, the symbolic
uncooked that stands opposed to culture. She is one of civilization's discontents prepared to act upon her desire. Creon's
utilitarianism makes him unable to understand this "bizarre" calculation and he finally adopts the "female madness"
alternative. But this makes her even more dangerous in his eyes. Her stubborn persistence to death, her frightening
ontological ruthlessness which exempts her from "the circle of everyday feelings and considerations, passions and
fears," n63 turns her into a symbol of sedition. In desiring unto death, Antigone challenges the symbolic order of state
law and male authority and becomes a rebel in the name of desire.

Creon's repeated refusals of God, family ties, and the dead, are necessary aspects of all rationalist politics. They are
part of a considered politics of forgetting that every polis must use in order to ban that which questions the legitimacy of
the institution. This memorial politics - and all discourse of rational legitimation is necessarily in part a Periclean
funeral oration - turns the imponderable powers that threaten the city into past memory and recitation. It transcribes
them into a well-organized narrative that re-presents and thus transcends the fearful past presence; and in putting them
into logos it encloses them into a singular and familiar order of argument and persuasion. Our repeated and memorized
myths help us elevate and remove the terrible predicaments of life, and forget the pain of the event.

Creon is a master of the strategy of forgetting and of concealing through denial and memorization. The temporal
order he refers to is finite; the past repeated comes to the service of the future through a temporality that is linear and
quantitative, rationally organized and mastered. His time and the time of state and legality cannot answer to eternity or
the time of the event. The function of the time of repetition and of memory is therapeutic. Their representations aim to
make, forget, and sublate what is alien to self and the alien itself, and thus heal the wound that the abyss opens in the
psyche and the social bond. But it was never a presence in the homogeneous time of logos, and so it can not be fully
represented and can not be banned and forgotten. The abysmal always returns, as Creon finally learns.

Antigone belongs to a different temporality. Her measure is not a natural lifetime. It is her desire to die before her
time, she says to Creon; she says to Ismene that her soul has died a long time [*1349] ago. n64 Always, forever,
eternity: these are the temporal markers of her existence. The sequential time of law and institutions that binds
generations through calculations of gain and the totalizing time of history have intruded upon Antigone's timelessness
and have upset the cyclical rhythm of earth and blood that preexists and survives the writing of the law. But Antigone's
infinite temporality does not appeal just to the time of nature, physis, but to the timelessness of dike. It is the laws
presided over by dike, unwritten and everlasting, the laws of Hades, that Antigone gladly follows. n65

This time of dike, which is opposed to the finite time of the institution, but is not simply natural time, could be
paralleled with the unsettling of temporal sequence that psychoanalysis diagnoses in the work of the unconscious.
Antigone has suffered an original excitation, Freud's unconscious effect, that has disturbed the psychic apparatus but
has not been "experienced." It will only surface and be acted upon later in an action which will "remember" the original
blow, however, which was never recorded as a memory and was thus always forgotten. Freud speaks of this parasite of
the psyche who has come there uninvited and unacknowledged as the "prehistoric, unforgettable other person who is
never equalled by anyone later." n66 Freud has Oedipus in mind; but Antigone too is a timeless recorder of the
forgotten unforgettable as she acts out her desire. Antigone's devotion to Polynices is the outcome of a mad,
immemorial desire that has been inscribed into her before and outside of the time of institutions and laws. Her action is
the unconscious effect of a stranger in the house of Being that has never entered it. An original seduction has taken
place, the self has been taken hostage by the primordial Other whose desire is an excessive overflowing and an
inexorable command. In this approach, the conflict would be between the passion for the brother that emanates from the
recesses of the psyche not open to the operations of reminiscence and logos, and the unspeakable wrong against the love
object that the institution commits. Can there be a law that emanates from this dark region of desire and challenges the
legality of the city and the repression of the family? Lacan's ethics incorporates the tragic necessity of our desire and the
fatal love and excessive passion of femininity. For this law, which is not only unwritten and eternal, but also the most
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unique and singular, the so- [*1350] cial bond is not just about good and evil, or about right and wrong. Its time is
neither that of natural eternity nor of historical totality, but rather the infinite time of the event; in this diachronous time,
that "there is" comes before what "there is." We can conclude that for both Heidegger and Lacan, Antigone is a
foundational text, a myth of origins and openings which leads to striking and unexpected similarities between
fundamental ontology and psychoanalytical ethics. Historical being and the law share the same structure and
mythology. In Heidegger, the field of the Other is the overpowering dike beyond logos, language which opens Dasein.
Being human comes into Being in the violent conflict between techne, knowledge and violent overpowering, and dike,
the order of Being, and is carried out in acts of heroic persons who acknowledge their issuelessness in the face of death.
For Lacan, Antigone is one such person; she answers the call and the desire of the Other-Thing and becomes the radiant
beauty that represents the beyond. If Dasein happens in the violent confrontation between dike and techne, in Lacan the
subject is born in the conflict between the order of the Real-jouissance and the multifold efforts to suppress it. If Being
is radiantly beautiful for Heidegger, Antigone, who follows her desire against the state, is the splendid and blindingly
beautiful heroine who opens the field of ethics proper. If for Heidegger, violent men in their uncharted and doomed
wanderings through and against the order of the world opened history, Lacan's Antigone, the radiant maiden, is such a
violent one. Her beautiful image gives us a glimpse into the truth of desire and her brutal action shows the deep
structure of subjectivity. Finally, the affinity between ontological and psychoanalytical ethics is indicated by Lacan's
profound disinterest in moral codes and principles. And yet something disturbing remains after Heidegger's violent and
Lacan's morbid musings. Heidegger does not mention love at all in his reading of Antigone, while for Lacan,
Antigone's eros, like Christian love, is a force of destructive ferocity. We must return to the text in search of
Antigone's love and law's desire.

IV.

Philia and eros, kinship and love, form the constant background of Antigone. They are, along with death, the
inescapable forces that will never be conquered. Blood and lineage are key registers in Antigone's resistance and are
linked with divine law. But what about love as eros? What is the relationship between law, justice, and eros? The focal
point for our reading is the fa- [*1351] mous Ode to Love of the third stasimon. Haemon has failed to make his father
change his mind. Their initially polite conversation deteriorated into outright confrontation and an exchange of insults.
Haemon's threat that his father "will never set eyes on [his] face again" n67 and Creon's pronouncement of the terrible
death that awaits Antigone are still echoing. And at this rather unlikely moment in the action, the Chorus sings one of
the most moving poems to love ever written. n68

Eros anikate machan, love never conquered in battle, n69 or in the Lacanian translation "invincible love of
combat"; n70 the Ode starts with an invocation of the invincibility of eros and desire, and ends with an appeal to the
goddess of love, amachos, unconquerable Aphrodite. Neither mortals nor the gods can escape the power of desire; but
beware love's power. It sets blood relations into fatal struggle, it twists the minds of the just and warps them toward
injustice and ruin. n71 None can escape desire, enarges blefaron imeros, n72 the burning desire imeros that comes from
the eye blefaron, and is there, before the eye enarges, for all to see, the desire of the eye. Imeros is the Platonic desire
that emanates from the beauty of the loved and through the eyes deluges the soul of the lover with a shower of love. n73
This beauty effluence that floods the soul gives rise to a floating, rocking, overflowing desire. Iemenos rei, says Plato in
Cratylus, n74 in an anthropology of desire to sit next to the cosmology of motion of panta rei. And all along, eros is
enthroned in sway side-by-side with the mighty laws, presiding over the magistracies of the eternal laws, ton megalon
paredros en' archais thesmon. n75 Paredros Imeros, the desire that judges; the desiring judge presides over laws and
institutions megalon archais thesmon, and in cases of conflict, imeros, desire, prevails so that one transgresses the great
laws.

The Ode is commonly interpreted as a commentary on the disrespectful outburst of Haemon against his father.
Eros has taken over and has metamorphosed Haemon from loyal son to rebellious, love-torn youth. But in what sense is
love seated in judgment [*1352] next to the eternal and unwritten laws? What is this close relationship between desire
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and law? To sketch an answer to this question, we must both return to and forget temporarily the Hegelian
interpretation. Antigone is not just the kinswoman, nor is she solely answering in her self-sacrificial determination the
command of the gods. She is in love, and her desire makes her sacrifice her life to her beloved. There is something
unsettling in Antigone's references to eros. Antigone, an incestuous product of the greatest illegitimacy, the bastard
daughter of the most bastard of families in mythology, comes to save the law and the city out of the deep, overflowing
desire for her beloved brother. There are repeated indications of sexual passion and intimacy. Polynices is not just
philos, kin, but philtatos, the lover. In her desperate attempt to explain her motives to Ismene, Antigone claims that the
greatest joy and reward for her action is that "I will lie with the one I love" and the one who loves me sinless in my
crime, phile met' autou keisomai, philou meta, osia panourgesasa. n76 It is kalon, beautiful to lie forever with he whom
the bonds of reciprocal desire link. Within five lines, Antigone twice insists that she desires to lie keisomai with the
brother meta. Lacan argues that the uncommon use of the preposition meta, after or with, at the end of sentences
indicates the fierce presence Antigone represents, n77 a point further emphasized by the repetition of the oxymoron osia
panourgesasa and theon entim' atimasasa. n78 But the gods are observers and not the sole authors of these laws, and
they, as much as the mortals, are subjected to the law of desire.

It is this unbelievably strong desire that animates the most controversial part of the tragedy, Antigone's casuistry.
It is the second place in which law and love are explicitly and closely connected and it is a commentary on and
explanation of the great unwritten and eternal laws that Antigone so often invokes. The passage appears in the middle
of the last threnody of Antigone just before she is led away to her grave.

Antigone: Never I tell you.

if I had been the mother of children

or if my husband died, exposed and rotting -

I'd never have taken this ordeal upon myself,

never defied our people's will. What law [nomou],

you ask, [is my warrant for] what I say? [*1353]

A husband dead, there might have been another.

A child by another too, if I had lost the first.

But mother and father both lost in the halls of

Death, no brother could ever [bloom for me].

For this law alone I held you first in honor. n79

Antigone defied the state because Polynices was her brother; she would not have buried a husband or son in
flagrant defiance of law and blood. She goes on to confound her bizarre, disturbing argument with an even greater
assault on the presumed principles of logic, consistency, and publicity. A husband and sons can be replaced if they
perish; but the brother of dead parents is irreplaceable, and this fact makes her duty to him paramount.

Few problems of tragedy have been discussed more than the question of the authenticity of these verses. n80 Both
stylistic and narrative arguments have been used to discredit the passage. The most important is the argument of
inconsistency. Antigone allegedly has stated clearly the principle of divine justice according to which burial rites
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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1353

should be paid to the dead by the living, a duty that falls first and foremost upon their relatives. Her action has been
consistent with this principle until the end. She now advances a motive that is wholly unworthy of her, a casuistical
argument of great moral dubiousness. The unwritten divine law on burial rites makes no distinction between friend and
foe and demands the same rites for all; the blood relationship requires equal treatment for the whole family. And yet in
these few lines, Antigone totally redefines the law and the nature of her duty. As Jebb puts it, she suddenly abandons
"the immovable basis of her action, - the universal and unqualified validity of the divine law." n81 This is further
exacerbated by the primitive sophism that turns the uniqueness of the dead brother into a principle of ethical action,
bringing the tragedy "perilously close to bad comedy." n82 There is, however, one incontrovertible piece of evidence in
favor of the authenticity of [*1354] the passage. Aristotle in Rhetoric, n83 written circa 338 B.C. and less than a
century after the death of Sophocles, cites the disputed passage and quotes almost verbatim the two most controversial
lines about the irreplaceability of the brother.

The interpretative axiology broadly coincides with what we could call the modern attitude toward morality and
legality, Kant's law of law. The Kantian undertones of the detractors are evident in Jebb's striking description of the
problem. Antigone's casuistry abandons the "universal and unqualified validity of the divine law." n84 Ethical action
can only be based upon and apply a law that is general, universal, and unqualifiedly valid, in other words, a law that has
all the formal qualities of the categorical imperative and follows Kant's Begriff. But this interpretative principle that
claims to return Antigone to her proper dignity is in reality the ethical principle of Creon. His refusal to bury Polynices
is based on his separation between friend and foe, and his universalizable claim that one cannot honor equally heroes
and traitors. But as Hegel's critique of Kant has shown, such a law can only have formal qualities. Its substance is
utterly empty, the law proscribes and at the same time prescribes itself, and conceals its demand in the luxurious robes
of its transcendental validity. n85 But in applying this maxim of alleged universal validity, Creon discovers the tragic
critique of deontological ethics: the Good, either as Right Reason and its modern transformation in the Kantian law, or
as the public interest, can never rule completely without a surplus or lack, excess or absence, and fate will inscribe itself
on the margin of this surplus or absence which the Good or the concept opens. It appears, therefore, that the natural law
of modernity calls upon Antigone as one of its first authoritative statements and then proceeds to read the predilections
of the moderns into the original. Ethics is turned into legality; morality is turned into the following of the universal law;
the basic conflict of the jurisprudential readings, between the law of the state and divine law, is abolished as both laws
appear as instances of the same formal principle and the action of both protagonists appears as deviation and perversion
of the law.

And yet, there is another reading that both respects the historical and textual integrity of Antigone and justifies its
position as a [*1355] key document in the history of Western ethics and law, and the law's unconscious. But in order to
approach it we must forget, if we can, our tradition that identifies ethics with universal form, and moral action with
obedience to the law. In this reading, the force of the demand to bury the irreplaceable brother, which moves Antigone
to her mad sacrifice, is a violation of the law as well as the ground upon which all law arises. This archaic source of
duty responds to the concrete call and demand of the most unique and singular person. "Antigone's position represents
the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, to whatever good or evil
Polynices may have done, or to whatever he may have been subjected to." n86 The call exerted upon Antigone by her
dead brother stands before the Platonic divisions into good and evil, or the Kantian distinction between right and wrong.
The uniqueness of the relationship and the extremity of the demand gather and apply the irresistible force that Antigone
feels. Whatever is repeated or repeatable, on the other hand, loses its urgent character and lowers the expectation of
absolute obedience. And if repetition is the life of the law, can we not argue that the law and repetition rise on the
ground of unrepeatability and that the singular always comes before the universal, in both senses of "before"?

The uniqueness of the demand is determined by the singular corporeality, the incarnate presence of the individual
who arises in the field of vision and makes the demand. When speaking to Polynices, Antigone addresses him as
kasigneton kara, beloved head, face, of my brother. n87 It is Polynices's head, in its beloved physicality, suspended
between the Earth from which he has departed and Hades where he cannot arrive without the love of Antigone, that
gave her the "law [whereby] I held you first in honor." n88 The ethical demand arises not out of a form or an idea, but
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out of desire, in a somatic encounter and through the epiphany of a head in need. And if the ethical demand arises
concretely in the meetings of heads and bodies, its structure is not dissimilar to that of the unconscious, and its action
bestows its singularity upon its addressee who answers its request. Antigone is Hegel's eternal sister who follows the
law of singularity, femininity, and the unconscious, but also has a presentiment of the ethical. But her ethicity is a
response to a necessary contingency: it is the death of the parents [*1356] that makes the brother unique and turns the
unconscious desire into the law of desire: it is this internally fissured law which demands that Antigone protect
Polynices both from her own law and from that of the State. Similarly, if the ethical substance is the union of the
opposites, of man and woman, of consciousness and unconsciousness, of universal and singular, of state and divine law,
Antigone shows that the pleasure of the copulation and of the concept(ion) never fully arrives and that, contra Hegel,
the law of reason and man will be judged in the (nocturnal) light of desire and woman. Antigone obeys the law, but the
law she obeys is not just some universally valid rule; its command is the outcome of an overwhelming desire created in
the unrepeatable encounter with the suffering (br)Other. Antigone's transcendental surfeit is not to be found in her
pleromatic existence but rather in her standing for and before (anti) the Other. In some traditions this incarnate Other,
the absolute alien and the most proximate, is the earthly face of God.

V.

What can Antigone's love teach us about the ethics of ontology and psychoanalysis? Heidegger has repeatedly
insisted that it is not the work of philosophy to "legislate" ethics or to busy itself with the ethics of law and justice of the
moral philosophers. Its task is to concentrate on the destiny and truth of Being and to trace the demand for ethics and its
various answers back to its primordial linkage with the dispatch of Being. The "truth of Being" is the way a people
dwells, the combination of knowledge, art, political arrangements, their historical understanding of the world, gods, and
themselves. Ontological thinking abandons the futile and conflicting debates of the moralists in order to understand the
fundamental constellation within which human life is organized in each epoch, and which is the historical realization of
primordial Being and ethos.

The demand for a specific ethics betrays the naive position that ethics can be made to measure. The dispatch and
allotment of Being, our lot and destiny, is the shape of our historical existence, our bond to our form of life. This bond
cannot be of our making alone; it is not so impoverished to have been fabricated by human reason. We found ourselves
thrown in it, in medias res, answering its call. Its force lies in the "demand which is placed on the individual to assume
his place within [his] society, ... to answer the call of [*1357] Being in his time ...." n89 The thinker must not heed
demands that come from elsewhere; he must concentrate on answering the call of destiny, to abide by the dispensation
of Being.

It is this and similar arguments that have been used to suggest that fundamental ontology is a denigration of ethics.
We should immediately add, however, that the Heideggerian injunction is itself a strong law. Indeed, Heidegger
repeatedly gives an ethical tone to the demand that we abide by the destiny of Being, the only way to have a fitting life.
But "if this commandment has an ethical meaning, it is not in that it belongs to the domain of the ethical, but in that it
ultimately authorizes every ethical law in general." n90 In other words, the Heideggerian injunction is not the law of
rules, principles, and codes, or the ethics of Derrida's "ethical domain." n91 It is rather the law of law, before and
outside ethics as discipline, the force that puts into circulation and authorizes all extant laws. The law of laws is the
"equivalent to what Heidegger calls law as the assignment of the dispensation of Being." n92 In this reading, destiny
imposes an ethical demand that could even be called the original ethic; but the answer to it cannot take the form of a
code or a collection of principles and rules. It is the very refusal to issue an ethical code that abides by the ethical
demand. "To follow rules is to uproot oneself from dwelling. To provide ethical directives is to condemn to the
everyday the person who adopts them." n93 We can now appreciate the importance of Heidegger's reading of Antigone
and of reading Antigone contra Heidegger; this reading can be used as the testing ground for the relationship between
Being and ethics, the site of the original ethics, and of the law of law.
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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1357

The key trope and strategy through which Heidegger claims the primacy of ontology over ethics is the presentation
of dike as the primordial orderliness of the world and of nomos as our share in it. Dike is not justice but the
overpowering structure of Being that emerges and shines in its permanent presence as physis, and is gathered together
in its collectedness as logos, which unites opposites while keeping their tension. Physis, logos, and dike, object and
subject, law and justice, are aspects of the essential unity of Being. Man's techne, violent knowledge, attacks dike and in
this [*1358] original event and reciprocal relation, man ceases to be at home and both home and the alien are
disclosed. In his violent naming and acting, the manifold of beings and his own Being-there as history, are made
manifest and shatter in the catastrophe that lurks before every achievement as its existential precondition.

At first glance it looks as if Heidegger's ontological ethics is identical to Antigone's call and follows closely from
dike's unconscious. And yet something troubling remains. The hypsipolis, Heidegger's violent one, according to the Ode
on Man, honors both the laws of the land, nomous chthonos, and the justice of gods, theon t'enorkon dikan. If man
comes into his historical being in the conflict between the violence of knowledge and deed (techne) and the
overpowering order of the world (dike), dike is split right from the start. But what is the nature of this split? This
primordial division cannot be between the mere jurisprudential "is" and "ought." Their separation will come about only
at a later "fallen" stage, heavily influenced by Plato. In Platonism, Being and thought are sharply distinguished; thought
becomes dominant while Being is defined as an essence and an idea. But as the Good is the idea of ideas, and Being
consists of ideas, Being comes into opposition with the Good that stands beyond Being and acts as its model. Thus, it is
only after the forgetfulness of Being has set in and Being has been defined as an idea, that the "ought" of moral systems
arises and opposes itself to Being. The road for the strict modern split between is and ought, and object and subject, has
been opened; it will come to its full and dogmatic fruition in Kant. But, according to Heidegger, Antigone still speaks
the unity in antagonisms of Being and it is here that we should seek the ground of the law.

If dike is the way of the world, the stuff on and out of which the basic distinctions of morality, religion, and law
emerge, it is the nomos of nemein, the earth that works on dike and brings into the open the human Being-there. Nemein
means dividing, breaking up, sending away in many directions, without pattern, structure, or aim. The nomos of Being
is a nomadic assignation. In this version, destiny is not belonging but exile, the oedipal destiny of the blind wanderer, of
the stranger in the house of Being. The truth of Being and of nomos/ethos has from the very start many conflictual,
warring truths. The letter the Being sends is unwritten but follows the law of writing. It is never fully present in the
historical presence; it always finds itself already caught in the process of dissemination and difference, nomadic, and
polyvalent. But even more funda- [*1359] mental, as Antigone reminds us, there are two invincible and inescapable
powers, unbreakably and fatefully linked - love and death. Heidegger showed how the knowledge of death opens the
field of human possibilities in living. The individual discovers her existential specificity by recognizing the singularity
of her being in relation to death. Nothing and no one underwrites and guarantees existence; no truth, history, or ego can
recenter a subject that opened herself to the mortal possibility of living. The flight of existence to death forces the
individual to get hold of the only properly human possibility, the violent forcing of the overpowering. This is the
specifically human Being-there of which the Ode gave Heidegger the best unconcealment: a continuous flight forward
in pure, uncharted possibility that is both opened and shattered against the total Other of death.

If death, however, is the limit that opens Dasein, Antigone shows that it is the loving turn to the suffering and
unique Other that bestows on the individual her own singularity. If death is the external limit that must be brought
inside life to put human life into Being, the Other is the internal limit that in asking and receiving help, creates
individualities out of Dasein. And it is in this sense that the original nomos divides and breaks; the paths and byways
that destiny opens take their unpredictable directions and map out mortal possibilities because they are signposted by
the unique encounters with unrepeatable others who always come before us and impose on us the mystery of an
originating "must." The law of law, destiny, is always open to an outside, an otherwise than Being, death, and the Other.

Similar criticism can be made of the ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan's readings of traditional ethical theory are a
useful corrective to the exaggerated and misguided character of its most exalted claims, and his attempt to redirect
ethics from the ideal to - his conception of - the Real is of great importance. The link between law and desire, the
importance of unconscious destinies for the social bond and the intrinsic implication of Otherness in the formation of
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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1359

self, open the way for a reassessment of ethics. There is something incommensurable between what is good for
individuals beyond the pleasure and reality principles, and the law of city or family. This gap cannot be closed in the
coming together of the spirit and must be acknowledged as a tragic necessity which cannot be idealized or rationalized.
The only ethical universal is desire and its action is fateful; it inscribes itself on the body and no inter- [*1360] nal or
external force can shield us from the destiny inscribed on the unconscious.

The desire of the Other is a promising starting point for a theory of ethics that is open to psychic need. But Lacan's
obsession with the criminal origin of the law and the primacy he attributes to death's immanence in the formation of the
subject, distort his ethics to such an extent that eros almost disappears. He consistently misses Antigone's strong love
for the suffering brother and ridicules those interpretations that emphasize Antigone's references to eros. As a result, his
interpretation of Otherness does not refer to concrete human beings but to structural principles, like language, the
maternal object, and death. Violence, shattering, and death, as the imminent and immanent of humanness, may link the
origin of historical Being with the openings of individual subjects, but as Antigone indicates, they are not the sole
ground of law. We must reread the ontological and analytical myths from the perspective of Antigone's love.

We can conclude that destiny, the universal force of law according to the tragedy, lives and is enforced in singular,
unpredictable, and forceful manifestations. Moira and tyche, fate and luck, are both necessary and contingent. The Other
who arises before me and the demand she puts to me happen unpredictably and without warning and could have
happened otherwise. But there is an inexorable necessity, a strict legality to this contingency; some Other will arise
before me and I will have to answer her demand. Indeed, my own individual Dasein is the necessary opening to the
contingent demands of fate that appears to me in the face of the Other. This reading retains the basic insights of
Heidegger's ontology. It accepts that the demand for a moral code while indicating the ethical character of the destiny of
Being cannot be satisfied without violating the essence of the ethical relation. The reason why a definite ethics is not
possible is that Dasein is primordially ethical and that openness to the Other is part of the basic design of Being. Acts of
destiny are not signs of an essence; they do not re-present an absent cause or fate, nor are they means used to achieve
some unknown ends. On the contrary, such acts are the manifestations, the epiphany of destiny. And if destiny is the
"unwritten law" before human and divine, in a more modern and linguistically obsessed terminology, the writing of fate
performs. It acts (forces) in speaking and it speaks by killing. In other words, destiny is life open to the call of
something beyond self. This beyond is quite specific for Antigone. If she answers its call, she says, she could [*1361]
face her brother as the most beloved of friends and she will lie with him in nocturnal bliss.

Death, eros, and the force of the (br)Other are the registers of destiny; they put into operation its unwritten and
universal law and they confirm the basic insight of Lacan's ethics. Its epiphany is always in the singular. Law is force:
both the ethical force of the living, embodied Other, entombed in the "you must," and the destructive force of the Other
as a shrouded corpse and death. Both a force internal to law, that befalls and obligates, binds the I to the law and saves
it, and an externally applied force, the sanction and limit of the law, which kills the I to save the law. Law's force is a
force that binds and preserves or a force that severs and preserves. But the law of the law, destiny, is unknown. We can
never know destiny but we must follow it, like Antigone. Fate comes as the Other, the dying/dead Other who asks to
save or bury her. The force of the "must" is the force that the most remote and different from self imposes on self. Death
is the Other of life; the stranger who is left outside the wall of Thebes to be devoured by the dogs; the force of eros as
the total transcendence of the world projected by and revolving around self. Fate is the other. Could we not argue then,
against both ontology and psychoanalysis, that (unknown) fate is the Good (or God)? It stands before the law and
infuses it with its opposition to justice and with the superiority of justice over law. Fate is also destiny as the force of the
multiplicity of Being (gods as others) that propels the law into Being. These are the horizons that shape the genealogy
of jurisprudence. Greek philosophy founded ontology and sent out the letter that Heidegger gratefully received. But
Greek tragedy, in its sense of tragic destiny, alludes to singularity and Otherness, a destructive force and an unmediated
duty, that has been always associated with Greek's Other, the Jew. This force could be the writing of the dead body or
the Other. Antigone alludes to both, but she does not give a final answer. She asks who knows what the rules are among
the dead. n94 She leaves it to (s)he who answers the call of the "must."
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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1361

Conclusion

Finally, what is the reason for our eternal fascination with Antigone? In our interpretation it is not Antigone who
follows justice, but justice is the creation of Antigone. Justice is the fantastical screen that philosophers, poets, and
lawyers have er- [*1362] ected to shield themselves from the question of the desire of the Other. The question of
justice can only arise for us on the burial ground of Antigone. It is her death that first alerts us to the desire for the
Other in the midst of the law, to the unique and contingent character of the demand by the Other, that is to the reasons
that make justice both necessary and impossible: we can only negotiate our own desire for the Other through our
fantasies of justice, but the radical dissymetry, the abyss of the Other's desire will always leave behind a remainder for
which neither the law nor fantasy can fully account. In her own excessive love of both her brother and death, Antigone
may be the eternal reminder of an abyss that enfolds and enforces all law.

Legal Topics:

For related research and practice materials, see the following legal topics:
Criminal Law & ProcedureBailGeneral OverviewCriminal Law & ProcedureSentencingCapital PunishmentCruel &
Unusual PunishmentCriminal Law & ProcedurePostconviction ProceedingsImprisonment

FOOTNOTES:

n1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, at 216 (Jacques-Alain Miller ed.,
Routledge 1992) (1986).

n2. Id.

n3. Sigmund Freud, Why War?, in Civilization, Society and Religion 341, 359 (James Strachey ed. & trans., 1985).

n4. Lacan, supra note 1, at 66-67.

n5. Id. at 209.

n6. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Civilization, Society and Religion, supra note 3, at 243, 318 (footnote omitted).

n7. Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious, in Ecrits: A Selection 292, 311
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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1362

(Alan Sheridan trans., W.W. Norton & Co. 1977) (1966).

n8. Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do 237 (1991).

n9. See John Rajchman, Truth and Eros 87-142 (1991).

n10. Lacan, supra note 1, at 76.

n11. Id. at 217.

n12. Id. at 234.

n13. Costas Douzinas & Ronnie Warrington, Justice Miscarried 132-85 (1994).

n14. Freud, supra note 6, at 302.

n15. Zizek, supra note 8, at 229-77.

n16. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1919), in The Origins of Religion 43, 50 (James Strachey ed. & trans., Penguin Books 1990).

n17. Lacan, supra note 1, at 233.

n18. Id. at 232.

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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1362

n19. George Steiner, Antigones 103 (1986). At key historical moments of state or foreign oppression, playwrights throughout the world
have turned to Sophocles and have interpreted the story of the self-sacrificed maiden as a symbol for their times. Anouil's Antigone captured
the spirit of the French resistance; Brecht's symbolized the desperate hope of redemption of German dissidents under the Nazis. And when
the cultural embargo was lifted in early 1992, the first play to be performed in the South African homelands by a European company was a
contemporary version of Antigone. Towering over all modern translations stands Holderlin's Antigona, the isothea antithea, the equal of
gods and their adversary. Antigone appears to have a magnetic pull, she is the object of a desire unabating through the centuries which
incessantly attracts the modern back to her ancient bridal selpuchre. "New "Antigones' are being imagined, thought, lived now; and will be
tomorrow." Id. at 304.

In this Article, the translations of Antigone are based on the Penguin edition of Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays (Robert Fagles
trans., 1984), with an introduction by Bernard Knox [hereinafter Antigone]. Some of the translations have been altered to emphasize the
usually understated legal vocabulary and concerns of the original tragedy. References to the Greek text are from the classical annotated
edition of Antigone by Sir Richard Jebb. See Sir Richard Jebb, Antigone (classical annotated ed. 1966).

n20. 2 George W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics 1218 (T.M. Knox trans., Yale Univ. Press 1975) (2d ed. 1892) (footnote omitted).

n21. Id.

n22. Steiner, supra note 19, at 40.

n23. Lacan, supra note 1, at 284.

n24. Steiner, supra note 19, at 123.

n25. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics 155 (Ralph Mannheim trans., Yale Univ. Press 1959) (1953).

n26. Id.

n27. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 1465-70.

n28. Id. at l. 726.

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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1362

n29. Jebb, supra note 19, at l. 387.

n30. Id. at l. 396.

n31. Id. at ll. 1105-08.

n32. Id. at ll. 676-77.

n33. Id. at ll. 1391, 1399, 1405, 1420.

n34. In the myth recounted in Plato's eponymous dialogue, Protagoras insists on the paramount importance for the city, but also the great
difficulty in keeping justice and respect for law. Men owe their progress and the establishment of cities to the laws, and Zeus orders that "if
any one is incapable of acquiring his share of [justice and respect for the city] he shall be put to death as a plague to the city." Plato,
Protagoras 54 (W.K.C. Guthrie trans., 1956).

n35. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 408-09.

n36. Aristotle, The Ethics of Aristotle 232-33 (J.A.K. Thomson trans., 1976); cf. E.R. Dodds, The Greek and the Irrational 179-235 (1973).

n37. Heidegger, supra note 25, at 146.

n38. Heidegger, supra note 25.

n39. Id. at 131.

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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1362

n40. Id.

n41. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 376-77.

n42. Lacan, supra note 1, at 275.

n43. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 395-404.

n44. Heidegger, supra note 25, at 156 (emphasis in original).

n45. Id. at 147.

n46. Id. at 163.

n47. Id.

n48. Id.

n49. Lacan, supra note 1, at 248.

n50. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 687-89.

n51. Dodds, supra note 36, at 5.

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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1362

n52. Lacan, supra note 1, at 277.

n53. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 700-01.

n54. Lacan, supra note 1, at 283.

n55. Id.

n56. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 630-31.

n57. Lacan, supra note 1, at 298.

n58. Antigone, supra note 19, at l. 908.

n59. Id. at ll. 1369-71.

n60. Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles 198 (1981).

n61. Antigone, supra note 19, at l. 590.

n62. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 116 (1989).

n63. Id. at 117.

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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1362

n64. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 630-31.

n65. Id. at ll. 506-07.

n66. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and "the Jews" 45 (Andreas Michel & Mark S. Roberts trans., Univ. of Minnesota Press 1990)
(1988).

n67. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 856-57.

n68. See infra text accompanying notes 64-71.

n69. Antigone, supra note 19, at l. 874.

n70. Lacan, supra note 1, at 268.

n71. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 887-88.

n72. Id. at ll. 890-91.

n73. Euripides, Phaedra 251 B (1953).

n74. Plato, Cratylus 122 (H.N. Fowler trans., 1926).

n75. Antigone, supra note 19, at l. 892.

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16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1325, *1362

n76. Id. at ll. 86-87.

n77. Lacan, supra note 1, at 265.

n78. Antigone, supra note 19, at l. 87.

n79. Id. at ll. 995-1004.

n80. In 1821, August Jacob claimed that passage was spurious; in 1824, Boeckh pronounced the lines authentic; the most accomplished
scholar of Sophocles, Sir Richard Jebb, reviewed the debate and came down strongly in favor of the lines being interpolated. Jebb, supra
note 19, at 164, 258-63; see also Steiner, supra note 19, at 50.

" "I would give a great deal ... if some talented scholar could prove that these lines were interpolated, not genuine,' " Goethe is reported
to have said to his friend Eckermann. Bernard Knox, An Introduction to Antigone, in The Three Theban Plays, supra note 19, at 46. An
army of philologists, philosophers, and critics have tried desperately to satisfy Goethe's request.

n81. Jebb, supra note 19, at 259.

n82. Steiner, supra note 19, at 50.

n83. Aristotle, Rhetoric, in Collected Works 3, 9, 16 (W.D. Ross ed., 1951).

n84. Jebb, supra note 19, at 259 (emphasis added).

n85. George W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right (T.M. Knox trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1967) (n.p., 1821); Allen Wood, Hegel's
Ethical Thought 140-73 (1990); Charles Taylor, Hegel 365-88 (1975).

n86. Lacan, supra note 1, at 279.

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n87. Antigone, supra note 19, at l. 988.

n88. Id. at l. 1005.

n89. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics 247 (1987).

n90. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference 80 (Alan Bass trans., Univ. of Chicago Press 1978) (1967).

n91. Id.

n92. Robert Bernasconi, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics, in Deconstruction and Philosophy 125 (John Sallis ed., 1987).

n93. Id. at 134.

n94. Antigone, supra note 19, at ll. 586-87.