I did recommend an interlinear edition of Antigone to those of you who know enough Greek to get by, but it’s not available. Use the Gamier translation instead, since it’s not bad at all.1
The following lines of the Greek text are the ones that concern us: 4–7, 323–325, 332–333, 360–375, 450–470, 559–560, 581–584, 611–614, 620–625, 648–650, 780–805, 839–841, 852–862, 875, 916–924, 1259–1260.
Lines 559–560 give us Antigone’s attitude toward life. She tells us that her soul died long ago and that she is destined to give help, ὠφελ
ν, to the dead – we spoke about the same word in connection with Ophelia.
Lines 611–614 and 620–625 have to do with the Chorus’s statements on the limit that is Atè, and it is around this that what Antigone wants is played out.
I already pointed out last time the importance of the term that ends both of these passages, ἐκτὸς ἄτας. Ἐκτός signifies an outside or what happens once the limit of Atè has been crossed. When, for example, the guard comes and tells of the event that challenges Creon’s authority, he says at the end that he is ἐκτός ἐλττίδος, outside or beyond all hope; he no longer hopes to be saved. Ἐκτὸς ἄτας has the meaning of going beyond a limit in the text. And it is around this notion that the Chorus’s song is developed at that moment, in the same way that it says that man goes toward πρὸς ἄταν, that is, toward Atè. In this business the whole prepositional system of the Greeks is so vital and suggestive. It is because man mistakes evil for the good, because something beyond the limits of Atè has become Antigone’s good, namely, a good that is different from everyone else’s, that she goes toward, πρὸς ἄταν.
So as to take up the problem in a way that allows me to bring my comments together, I must return to a simple, clean, unencumbered view of the tragic hero, and in particular of the one who concerns us, Antigone.
One thing has struck a commentator on Sophocles – commentator in the singular, for I have been surprised to find that it is only in a relatively recent book on Sophocles by Karl Reinhardt that something important has been brought out, namely, the special solitude of Sophoclean heroes, μονονμενοι, which is a nice term used by Sophocles, along with ἄφιλοι and φρενός οἰοβῶται, that is to say, those who lead their thoughts to graze far off. But it is nevertheless certain that it is not this that is involved here, for in the end tragic heroes are always isolated, they are always beyond established limits, always in an exposed position and, as a result, separated in one way or another from the structure.
It is strange that something very obvious has been overlooked. Let us examine the seven plays of Sophocles that are extant of the twenty-five which he is said to have produced during a life of ninety years, sixty of which he devoted to tragedy. They are Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus Rex, The Trachiniae, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus.
A certain number of these plays remain familiar to us, but you are not perhaps aware that Ajax is a very odd piece of work. It begins with the massacre of the Greeks’ flock by Ajax. Because Athena doesn’t wish him well, he goes crazy. He imagines he is massacring the Greek army, but it is their flock instead. Afterwards he awakens from his craziness, is overcome with shame, and goes and kills himself in a corner. There is absolutely nothing else in the play but that, which is, after all, rather peculiar. As I was saying the other day, there isn’t even the suggestion of a perepetia. Everything is there from the beginning; the trajectories that are set in motion have only to come crashing down one on top of the other as best they can.
We will leave Antigone aside for one moment, since we are discussing it.
Electra, too, is an odd play of Sophocles. In Aeschylus we find the Choephoroe and the Eumenides, where the death of Agamemnon gives rise to all kinds of things. And once his murder has been avenged, Orestes then has to deal with the avenging divinities who protect the maternal blood. There is nothing comparable in Sophocles. Electra is in certain ways the very double of Antigone – “Dead in life,” she says, “I am already dead to everything.” Moreover, at that climactic moment when Orestes is making Aegisthus jump for it, he says to him, “Do you realize you are talking to people who are just like the dead? You are not talking to the living.” It is an extremely odd note and the whole thing ends abruptly just like that. There isn’t the least trace of anything superfluous. Everything ends abruptly. The end of Electra involves an execution in the proper sense of the word.
We can leave aside Oedipus Rex, given the perspective I am adopting here. In any case, I am not claiming to promulgate a general law, since we know nothing of the greater part of Sophocles’s work.
The Trachiniae has to do with the end of Hercules. Hercules has come to the end of his labors, and he knows it. He is told he will be able to go and rest, that his work is over. Unfortunately, he mixed up the last of his labors with the desire for a female captive, and because she loves him, his wife sends him the delightful tunic that she has been keeping since the beginning in case of need, as a kind of weapon to be reserved for the right moment. She sends it to him and you know what happens. The whole end of the play is taken up with Hercules’s groans and roars of pain as he is consumed by the burning cloth.
Then there is Philoctetes. Philoctetes is a character who has been exiled on an island. He has been rotting away there for ten years, and then he is asked to render the community a service. All kinds of things happen, including the moving struggle with his conscience of the young Neoptolemes, who is dispatched to serve as bait in an attempt to deceive the hero.
Finally, there is Oedipus at Colonus.
You have no doubt noted the following. If there is a distinguishing characteristic to everything we ascribe to Sophocles, with the exception of Oedipus Rex, it is that for all his heroes the race is run. They are at a limit that is not accounted for by their solitude relative to others. There is something more; they are characters who find themselves right away in a limit zone, find themselves between life and death. The theme of between-life-and-death is moreover formulated as such in the text, but it is also manifest in the situations themselves.
One could even fit Oedipus Rex into this context. The hero has a characteristic that is both unique to him and paradoxical in relation to others. At the beginning of the drama he has attained the height of happiness. Yet Sophocles represents him as driven to bring about his own ruin through his obstinacy in wanting to solve an enigma, to know the truth. Everyone tries to prevent him, including especially Jocasta, who is always saying, “That’s enough; we already know enough.” Still he wants to know and in the end he does know. Yet I do grant that Oedipus Rex is an exception; it doesn’t fit the general formula of the Sophoclean hero, who is marked by a stance of the-race-is-run.
Let us now return to Antigone, whose race is run in the most obvious of ways.
On one occasion I showed you an anamorphosis; it was the finest I could find for our purpose, and it is indeed exemplary, far beyond anything one could have hoped for. Do you remember the cylinder from which this strange phenomenon rises up? It cannot properly speaking be said that from an optical point of view there is an image as such. Without going into the optical definition of the phenomenon, one can say that it is because an infinitesimal fragment of image is produced on each surface of the cylinder that we see a series of screens superimposed; and it is as a result of these that a marvelous illusion in the form of a beautiful image of the passion appears beyond the mirror, whereas something decomposed and disgusting spreads out around it.
That’s the kind of thing that is involved here. What is the surface that allows the image of Antigone to rise up as an image of passion? The other day I evoked in connection with her the phrase, “Father, why hast thou abandoned me?” which is literally expressed in one line. Tragedy is that which spreads itself out in front so that that image may be produced. When analyzing it, we follow an inverse procedure; we study how the image had to be constructed in order to produce the desired effect. So let’s begin.
I have already emphasized the implacable side of Antigone; the side that shows neither fear nor pity is apparent at every point. Somewhere in order to deplore this, the Chorus calls her, line 875, αὐτόγνωτος. That should be heard alongside the γνῶθι σεαυτόν of the Delphic oracle. One cannot ignore the meaning of the kind of self-knowledge attributed to her.
I have already indicated her extreme harshness when she tells Ismene of her purpose at the beginning. “Do you realize what is happening?” she asks. Creon has just promulgated what is called a κήρυγμα – a term that plays an important role in modern protestant theology as a dimension of the revelation. Her manner is as follows: “Here’s the situation then. This is what he has proclaimed for you and me.” Then she adds in the lively style of the text: “I speak for me.” And she goes on to affirm that she will bury her brother.
We will see what that means.
From then on things move fast. The guard comes and announces that the brother has been buried. At this point I am going to draw your attention to something that reveals the importance of Sophocles’s work for us.
Some people have said, and I seem to remember that it is the name of one of the many works that I consulted, that Sophocles is a humanist. He is found to be human since he gives the idea of a properly human measure between a rootedness in archaic ideals represented by Aeschylus and a move toward bathos, sentimentality, criticism, and sophistry that Aristotle had already reproached Euripides with.
I don’t disagree with the notion that Sophocles is in that median position, but as far as finding in him some relationship to humanism is concerned, that would be to give a wholly new meaning to the word. As for us, we consider ourselves to be at the end of the vein of humanist thought. From our point of view man is in the process of splitting apart, as if as a result of a spectral analysis, an example of which I have engaged in here in moving along the joint between the imaginary and the symbolic in which we seek out the relationship of man to the signifier, and the “splitting” it gives rise to in him. Claude Lévi-Strauss is looking for something similar when he attempts to formalize the move from nature to culture or more exactly the gap between nature and culture.
It is curious to note that on the edge of humanism it is also in this analysis, in this gap of analysis, of limits, in this attitude that the race is run, that the images rise up that turn out to be the most fascinating of that whole period of history which can be dubbed humanist.
I find for example the point in the text that you have in your hands, lines 360–375, very striking; it concerns the moment when the Chorus bursts forth just after the departure of the messenger whose comic responses and shuffling movements, when he comes to announce the news that may cost him dearly, I referred to earlier. It is really terrible, the Chorus says, to see someone so obstinate about believing he believes. Believing he believes what? Something that no one for the moment has the right to imagine, that is the play of δοκεῖ δοκεῖν. That’s the element I sought to emphasize in that line along with the other response: “You’re playing the fool with your stories about the δόξα.”That’s an obvious allusion to the philosophical games of the time that focused on a theme. The scene itself is quite ridiculous, for we are not really interested in whether the guard will be skinned alive or not on account of the bad news he bears, and he in any case gets out of it with a flourish.
Immediately afterwards in line 332 the Chorus breaks out in the chant that I said the other day was a celebration of mankind. It begins as follows:
πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κ᾽ οὐδ
ν ἀν-
θρώπον δεινότερον πέλει·
The lines mean literally: “There are a lot of wonders in the world, but there is nothing more wonderful than man.”
As far as Lévi-Strauss is concerned, what the Chorus says about man here is really the definition of culture as opposed to nature: man cultivates speech and the sublime sciences; he knows how to protect his dwelling place from winter frosts and from the blasts of a storm; he knows how to avoid getting wet. Yet there is a slippage here; there is, it seems to me, an undeniable irony in what follows, in the famous phrase παντοπόρος άπορος, which has given rise to a debate on the subject of its punctuation. The accepted punctuation seems to be the following: παντοπόρος, άπορος ἐπ᾽ ονδὲν ἔρχεται τὸ μέλλον.
Παντοπόρος means “he who knows all kinds of tricks” – man knows a lot of tricks. Ἄπορος is the opposite; it means when one has no resources or defenses against something. You are, I suppose, familiar with the term aporia. Ἄπορος means one that is “screwed.” As the proverb from the Vaud region has it, “Nothing is impossible for man; what he can’t do, he ignores.” That’s the tone of the text.
Next we have – ἐπ᾽ ονδὲν ἔρχεται τὸ μέλλον.
Ἔρχεται means “he advances.” Ἐπ᾽ ονδὲν means “toward nothing.” To μέλλον can be translated quite innocently as “the future”; it also means “that which must happen,” but at other moments it signifies μέλλειν, “to delay.” As a result, τὸ μέλλον opens up a semantic field that isn’t easy to identify precisely with a corresponding French term. The problem is usually solved by saying, “Since he is highly resourceful, he will never be without resources whatever he has to face.” The thought strikes me as a little petty bourgeois. It’s not clear that it was the poet’s intention to emit such a platitude.
In the first place, it is difficult to disconnect the two terms that are joined at the beginning of the sentence, παντοπόρος ἄπορος. I also note that later on in line 370 we find another conjunction, ὑφίπολις ἄπολις, that is to say “he who is both above and outside the city.” And this is the definition of a character generally identified, as I will explain later, with Creon, with his deformation. At the same time I am not sure that ἄπορος ἐπ᾽ οὐδὲν ἔρχεται can be translated as “because he doesn’t approach anything without resources.” It isn’t at all in conformity with the genius of the Greek language in this case. Ἔρχεται requires that ἐπ᾽ονδὲν be attached to it. Ἐπ᾽ agrees with ἔρχεται, not with ἄπορος. We are the ones who find there someone who is ready for everything, whereas it is literally a question of the following: “He advances toward nothing that is likely to happen, he advances and he is παντοπόρος, “artful,” but he is ἄπορος, always “screwed.” He knows what he’s doing. He always manages to cause things to come crashing down on his head.
You should respond to this turning point as to something in the style of Prévert. And I will confirm that such is the case. Just afterwards one finds the line Αἴδα μόνον φεῦζιν οὐκ ἐπάζεται, which means that there is only one thing he can’t come to terms with and that has to do with Hades. Dying is something he doesn’t know how to come to terms with. The important point occurs in what follows, – νότων δ᾽ἀμηχάνων φυγὰς. Having said that there is one thing that man hasn’t managed to come to terms with, and that is death, the Chorus says that he has come up with an absolutely marvelous gimmick, namely, translated literally, “an escape into impossible sicknesses.” There is no way of ascribing another meaning to that phrase than the one I ascribe. The translations usually attempt to say that man even manages to come to deal with sickness, but that’s not what it means at all. He hasn’t managed to come to terms with death but he invents marvelous gimmicks in the form of sicknesses he himself fabricates. There is something extraordinary about finding that notion expressed in 441 B.C. as one of mankind’s essential dimensions. It wouldn’t make any sense to translate that as “an escape from sicknesses.” Sickness is involved here μηχανόεν. That’s quite a gimmick he has invented; make of it what you will.
In any case, the text repeats that man has failed relative to Hades, and we enter immediately afterwards into μηχανόεν. There is something related to σοφόν in that, a term that isn’t so simple. I would just remind you of the analysis of the Heraclitean sense of σοφόν, “wise,” and ὁμολογε
ν, “to say the same thing,” that is to be found in the Heidegger text I translated for the first issue of La Psychanalyse. That σοφόν still has all of its primitive vigor. There is something of sophos in the mechanism, μηχανόεν. There is something ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽ἔχων, which transcends all hope and which ἔρττει. It’s this that directs him sometimes toward evil and sometimes toward the good. That is to say that this power or mandate, as I translated the word sophos in the article I was talking about, which is laid upon him by this good, is an eminently ambiguous one.
Right afterwards we find the passage beginning νόμους παρείρων, etc., upon which the whole of the play is going to turn. For παρείρων means undeniably “to arrange the laws wrongly, to weave them together wrongly, to get them all mixed up.” Χθονός is “the earth,” and θεῶν τ᾽ἔνορκον δίκαν is “that which is formulated or told in the law.” That’s the thing we appeal to in the silence of the analysand. We don’t say “Speak.” We don’t say “Enunciate” or “Recount,” but “Tell.” But that’s exactly what we shouldn’t do. That Δίκη is essential and constitutes the dimension of enunciation or ἔνορκον, confirmed by an oath of the gods.
There are two obvious dimensions that may be distinguished without difficulty: on the one hand, the laws of the earth and, on the other, the commandments of the gods. But they may be confused. They don’t belong to the same order, and if one mixes them up, there will be trouble. There will be so much trouble that the Chorus, which in spite of its vacillations does cleave to a fixed line, affirms, “In any case, we don’t want to be associated with so and so.” The point is to proceed in that direction is properly speaking τὸ μὴ καλόν or something that isn’t “beautiful,” and not, as it is translated, because of the very audacity of the idea, something that isn’t “good.” Thus the Chorus doesn’t want the character in question as its παρέδρος, that is as its companion or immediate neighbor. The Chorus doesn’t want to be with him in the same central point we are talking about. It doesn’t want to have close relations with him, nor does it want to ἴσον φρονῶν, to have the same desire. It separates its own desire from the desire of the other. And I don’t think I am forcing the issue when I find here an echo of certain formulas that I have given you.
Does Creon confuse νόμους χθονός with the Δίκη of the gods? The classical interpretation is clear: Creon represents the laws of the city and identifies them with the decrees of the gods. But it’s not as obvious as that, for it cannot be denied that Antigone is after all concerned with the chthonic laws, the laws of the earth. I haven’t stopped emphasizing the fact that it is for the sake of her brother who has descended into the subterranean world that she opposes κήρυγμα, that she resists Creon’s order; it is in the name of the most radically chthonian of relations that are blood relations. In brief, she is in a position to place the Δίκη of the gods on her side. In any case the ambiguity is obvious. And this is something that we will shortly see confirmed.
I have already pointed out how, after the condemnation of Antigone, the Chorus emphasizes the fact that she went in search of her Atè. In a similar vein, Electra says, “Why do you always plunge yourself into the Atè of your house, why do you persist in referring to the fatal murder in front of Aegisthus and your mother? Aren’t you the one who brings down all kinds of evil on your head as a result?” To which the other responds, “I agree but I can’t help it.”
It is because she goes toward Atè here, because it is even a question of going ἐκτὸς ἄτας, of going beyond the limit of Atè, that Antigone interests the Chorus. It says that she’s the one who violates the limits of Atè through her desire. The lines I referred to above concern this and especially those that end with the formula ἐκτος ἄτας, to go beyond the limit of Atè. Atè is not ἁμαρτία, that is to say a mistake or error; it’s got nothing to do with doing something stupid.
When at the end Creon returns bearing something in his arms, lines 1259– 1260, and, as the Chorus tells us, it seems to be nothing other than the body of his son who has committed suicide, the Chorus then says, “If we may say so, it is not a misfortune that is external to him; it is αὐτὸς ἁμαρτών, his own mistake. He’s the one who made the mistake of getting himself into the mess.” Ἁμαρτία is the word used, that is “mistake” or “blunder.”
That’s the meaning Aristotle insists on, and to my mind he’s wrong, for that is not the quality which leads the tragic hero to his death. It’s only true for Creon the counter- or secondary hero, who is indeed ἁμαρτών. At the moment when Eurydice commits suicide, the messenger uses the word ἁμαρτάνεtv. He hopes, we are told, that she isn’t going to do something stupid. And naturally he and the Coryphaeus stiffen in anticipation because no noise is heard. The Coryphaeus says, “That’s a bad sign.” The mortal fruit that Creon harvests through his obstinacy and his insane orders is the dead son he carries in his arms. He has been ἁμαρτών; he has made a mistake. It’s not a question here of ἀλλοτρία ἄτη. Atè concerns the Other, the field of the Other, and it doesn’t belong to Creon. It is, on the other hand, the place where Antigone is situated.
And it is to Antigone that we must now turn.
Is she, as the classic interpretation would have it, the servant of a sacred order, of respect for living matter? Is hers the image of charity? Perhaps, but only if we confer on the word charity a savage dimension. Yet the path from Antigone’s passion to her elevation is a long one.
When she explains to Creon what she has done, Antigone affirms the advent of the absolute individual with the phrase “That’s how it is because that’s how it is.” But in the name of what? And to begin with on the basis of what? I must quote the text.
She says clearly, “You made the laws.” But once again the sense is missed. Translated word for word, it means, “For Zeus is by no means the one who proclaimed those things to me.” Naturally, she is understood to have said – and I have always told you that it is important not to understand for the sake of understanding – “It’s not Zeus who gives you the right to say that.” But she doesn’t, in fact, say that. She denies that it is Zeus who ordered her to do it. Nor is it Δίκη, which is the companion or collaborator of the gods below. She pointedly distinguishes herself from Δίκη. “You have got that all mixed up,” she, in effect, says. “It may even be that you are wrong in the way you avoid the Δίκη. But I’m not going to get mixed up in it; I’m not concerned with all these gods below who have imposed laws on men.” ὥρισαν, ὁρίξω, ὅρος means precisely the image of an horizon, of a limit. Moreover, the limit in question is one on which she establishes herself, a place where she feels herself to be unassailable, a place where it is impossible for a mortal being to ὑπερδραμεῖν, to go beyond νόμιμα, the laws. These are no longer laws, νόμος, but a certain legality which is a consequence of the laws of the gods that are said to be ἄγραπτα, which is translated as “unwritten,” because that is in effect what it means. Involved here is an invocation of something that is, in effect, of the order of law, but which is not developed in any signifying chain or in anything else.
Involved is an horizon determined by a structural relation; it only exists on the basis of the language of words, but it reveals their unsurpassable consequence. The point is from the moment when words and language and the signifier enter into play, something may be said, and it is said in the following way: “My brother may be whatever you say he is, a criminal. He wanted to destroy the walls of his city, lead his compatriots away in slavery. He led our enemies on to the territory of our city, but he is nevertheless what he is, and he must be granted his funeral rites. He doubtless doesn’t have the same rights as the other. You can, in fact, tell me whatever you want, tell me that one is a hero and a friend, that the other is an enemy. But I answer that it is of no significance that the latter doesn’t have the same value below. As far as I am concerned, the order that you dare refer me to doesn’t mean anything, for from my point of view, my brother is my brother.”
That’s the paradox encountered by Goethe’s thought and he vacillates. My brother is what he is, and it’s because he is what he is and only he can be what he is, that I move forward toward the fatal limit. If it were anyone else with whom I might enter into a human relationship, my husband or my children for example, they are replaceable; I have relations with them. But this brother who is ἄθαπτος, who has in common with me the fact of having been born in the same womb – the etymology of the word ἀδελφός embodies an allusion to the womb – and having been related to the same father – that criminal father the consequences of whose crimes Antigone is still suffering from – this brother is something unique. And it is this alone which motivates me to oppose your edicts.
Antigone invokes no other right than that one, a right that emerges in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is – ineffaceable, that is, from the moment when the emergent signifier freezes it like a fixed object in spite of the flood of possible transformations. What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed.
She rejects everything else. The stance of the-race-is-run is nowhere better illustrated than here. And whatever else one relates it to, is only a way of causing uncertainty or disguising the absolutely radical character of the position of the problem in the text.
The fact that it is man who invented the sepulchre is evoked discretely. One cannot finish off someone who is a man as if he were a dog. One cannot be finished with his remains simply by forgetting that the register of being of someone who was identified by a name has to be preserved by funeral rites.
No doubt all kinds of things may be added to that. All the clouds of the imaginary come to be accumulated around it as well as the influences that are released by the ghosts who multiply in the vicinity of death. But at bottom the affair concerns the refusal to grant Polynices a funeral. Because he is abandoned to the dogs and the birds and will end his appearance on earth in impurity, with his scattered limbs an offense to heaven and earth, it can be seen that 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 be subjected to.
The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man.
That break is manifested at every moment in the fact that language punctuates everything that occurs in the movement of life. Αὐτόνομος is the word the Chorus uses to situate Antigone; it tells her, “You are going off toward death without knowing your own law.” Antigone knows what she is condemned to, that is, to take part, so to speak, in a game whose outcome is known in advance. It is, in effect, posited as a game by Creon. She is condemned to the sealed chamber of the tomb in which she will be put to the test, namely, that of knowing if the gods below will come to her aid. It is at this point in her ordeal that Creon pronounces his condemnation, when he says, “We’ll see how useful your loyalty to the gods below will be. You will have the food that is always placed next to the dead by way of an offering, and we’ll see just how long you last with that.”
It is at that moment that the tragedy is illuminated with a new light, in the form of Antigone’s κομμός, her complaint or lamentation. And it is significant that certain commentators have been scandalized by it.
When does this complaint begin? From the moment when she crosses the entrance to the zone between life and death, that is to say, when what she has already affirmed herself to be takes on an outward form. She has been telling us for a long time that she is in the kingdom of the dead, but at this point the idea is consecrated. Her punishment will consist in her being shut up or suspended in the zone between life and death. Although she is not yet dead, she is eliminated from the world of the living. And it is from that moment on that her complaint begins, her lamentation on life.
Antigone will lament that she is departing ἄταφος, without a tomb, even though she is to be shut up in a tomb, without a dwelling place, mourned by no friend. Thus her separation is lived as a regret or lamentation for everything in life that is refused her. She even evokes the fact that she will never know a conjugal bed, the bond of marriage, that she will never have any children. The speech is a long one.
It has occurred to some commentators to cast doubt on this side of the tragedy in the name of the so-called unity of the character represented as the cold and inflexible Antigone. The term ψυχρόν is that of coldness and frigidity. Creon calls her “a cold object to caress,” line 650, in a dialogue with his son, so as to let him know that he’s not losing very much. Antigone’s character is contrasted with her complaint so as to bring out the lack of verisimilitude in an outburst that, it is held, should not be attributed to the poet.
It’s an absurd misinterpretation, for from Antigone’s point of view life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from that place she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost.
And it is from the same place that the image of Antigone appears before us as something that causes the Chorus to lose its head, as it tells us itself, makes the just appear unjust, and makes the Chorus transgress all limits, including casting aside any respect it might have for the edicts of the city. Nothing is more moving than that ἵμερος ἐναργής, than the desire that visibly emanates from the eyelids of this admirable girl.
The violent illumination, the glow of beauty, coincides with the moment of transgression or of realization of Antigone’s Atè, which is the characteristic that I have chiefly insisted on and which introduced us to the exemplary function of Antigone’s problem in allowing us to determine the function of certain effects. It is in that direction that a certain relationship to a beyond of the central field is established for us, but it is also that which prevents us from seeing its true nature, that which dazzles us and separates us from its true function. The moving side of beauty causes all critical judgment to vacillate, stops analysis, and plunges the different forms involved into a certain confusion or, rather, an essential blindness.
The beauty effect is a blindness effect. Something else is going on on the other side that cannot be observed. In effect, Antigone herself has been declaring from the beginning: “I am dead and I desire death.” When Antigone depicts herself as Niobe becoming petrified, what is she identifying herself with, if it isn’t that inanimate condition in which Freud taught us to recognize the form in which the death instinct is manifested? An illustration of the death instinct is what we find here.
It is at the moment when Antigone evokes Niobe that the Coryphaeus sings her praise, line 840: “You then are half-goddess.” Then Antigone’s response bursts forth, and she is far from being a half-goddess: “This is absurd; you are making fun of me.” And the word she uses means “outrage,” which, as I have already indicated, is manifestly correlated to the moment of crossing over. The Greek word is used here in its proper sense, which is directly related to the term meaning to cross over – “outrage” is to go “out” or beyond (c’est aller outre), go beyond the right one has to make light of what happens at the greatest of costs. Ὑβρίζεις is the term Antigone confronts the Chorus with: “You do not realize what you are saying. You outrage me.” But her stature is far from diminished as a result, and her complaint, the κομμός, her long complaint, follows immediately.
The Chorus then goes on to make an enigmatic reference to three quite disparate episodes from the history of mythology. The first concerns Danae, who was shut up in a bronze chamber. The second is to Lycurgus, the son of Dryas, King of the Edonians, who was mad enough to persecute the servants of Dionysos, to pursue and terrify them, and even to rape their women and to make divine Dionysos jump into the sea. This is the first mention we have of the Dionysiac. In Book II of the Iliad we find Dionysos in a death-like state, and he goes on to revenge himself by transforming Lycurgus into a madman. There are a number of different forms of the myth – perhaps he was imprisoned; blinded by Dionysos’s madness he even killed his own sons whom he mistook for vine shoots, and he hacked off his own limbs. But that’s not important because the text only refers to the vengeance of Dionysos the God. The third example, which is even more obscure, concerns the hero Phineas, who is at the center of a whole bundle of legends that are full of contradictions and extremely difficult to reconcile. He is found on a cup as the object of a conflict between the Harpies, who torment him, and the Boreads, the two sons of Boreas who protect him, and on the horizon there passes, strangely enough, the wedding procession of Dionysos and Ariadne.
There is certainly a lot to be gained in the interpretation of these myths, if it turns out to be possible. Their disparate character and the apparent lack of relevance to the issues at hand is certainly one of the burdens that the tragic texts impose on their commentators. I don’t pretend to be able to solve the problem, but it was by bringing to the attention of my friend Lévi-Strauss the difficulty of this passage, that I recently managed to interest him in Antigone.
There is nevertheless something that one can point to in this rash of tragic episodes evoked by the Chorus at the moment when Antigone is at the limit. They all concern the relationship of mortals to the gods. Danae is entombed because of the love of a god; Lycurgus is punished because he attempted to commit violence on a god, and it is also because she is of divine descent that Cleopatra the Boread and rejected companion of Phineas is implicated in the story – she is referred to as ἄμιππος, that is to say, as swift as a horse, and it is said that she also moves faster across solid ice than any steed; she’s a skater. Now the striking thing about Antigone is that she undergoes a misfortune that is equal to that of all those who are caught up in the cruel sport of the gods. Seen from the outside by us as ατραγωδόι, she appears as the victim at the center of the anamorphic cylinder of the tragedy. She is there in spite of herself as victim and holocaust.
Antigone appears as αὐτόνομος, as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him.
Anything at all may be invoked in connection with this, and that’s what the Chorus does in the fifth act when it evokes the god that saves.
Dionysos is this god; otherwise why would he appear there? There is nothing Dionysiac about the act and the countenance of Antigone. Yet she pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire.
Think about it. What happens to her desire? Shouldn’t it be the desire of the Other and be linked to the desire of the mother? The text alludes to the fact that the desire of the mother is the origin of everything. The desire of the mother is the founding desire of the whole structure, the one that brought into the world the unique offspring that are Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone and Ismene; but it is also a criminal desire. Thus at the origin of tragedy and of humanism we find once again an impasse that is the same as Hamlet’s, except strangely enough it is even more radical.
No mediation is possible here except that of this desire with its radically destructive character. The fruit of the incestuous union has split into two brothers, one of whom represents power and the other crime. There is no one to assume the crime and the validity of crime apart from Antigone.
Between the two of them, Antigone chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of the criminal as such. No doubt things could have been resolved if the social body had been willing to pardon, to forget and cover over everything with the same funeral rites. It is because the community refuses this that Antigone is required to sacrifice her own being in order to maintain that essential being which is the family Atè, and that is the theme or true axis on which the whole tragedy turns.
Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes, immortalizes that Atè.
June 8, 1960
I would like now to focus on the meaning I give to such an exploration of the tragedy of Antigone.
It may have seemed demanding to some of you. For some time now I have used the metaphor of the rabbit and the hat in connection with a certain way of making something appear from analytical discourse that isn’t there. I might almost say that on this occasion I have put you to the test of eating raw rabbits. You can relax now. Take a lesson from the boa constrictor. Have a little nap and the whole thing will pass through. You will even notice on waking that you have digested something after all.
It is on account of the procedure I have adopted – and it’s no doubt quite a demanding one obviously, quite a tough one – of requiring you to accompany me in breaking the stones along the road of the text that it will enter your body. You will see in retrospect that even if you are not aware of it, the latent, fundamental image of Antigone forms part of your morality, whether you like it or not. That’s why it is important to analyze its meaning, and it’s not the watered-down meaning in the light of which its lesson is usually transmitted.
Involved here is nothing more nor less than the reinterpretation of the Sophoclean message. You can certainly resist this resharpening of the text’s high points, but if you decide to reread Sophocles, you will perceive the distance we have traveled. Even if I am challenged on a given point – for I don’t exclude the possibility that I, too, on occasion may misinterpret something – I believe I have dissipated the all-encompassing nonsense in which Sophocles is carefully preserved by a certain tradition.
While I was discussing that with some of you who were countering my views with memories they had of reading Oedipus at Colonus – memories that were obviously influenced by the scholarly interpretation – I remembered a little footnote. There are people here who like footnotes. So I will read one that is to be found in a work that psychoanalysts ought to have read at least once, namely, Erwin Rohde’s Psyche, of which there exists an excellent French translation.
On the whole, you will find more there, and more that is certain, concerning that which Greek civilization has handed down to us than in any work originally written in French. The most brilliant people on earth don’t have all the arrows in their quiver. As it is, we are unfortunate enough to have a romantic movement that didn’t rise much above the level of a certain idiocy, and we by no means possess all the advantages when it comes to erudition.
On page 463 of the French translation of Erwin Rohde’s book, you will find a little footnote on Oedipus at Colonus, which I have already discussed with you in terms that are directly related to what I am concerned with today. Rohde writes: “One only has to read the play with an open mind to realize that this savage, angry, pitiless old man who calls down horrible curses on his sons” – Rohde is perfectly correct, for twenty minutes before the end of the play, Oedipus is still crushing Polynices beneath the weight of his curses – “and who as a man thirsty for revenge looks forward passionately to the misfortunes that are about to descend on his native town, has none of that profound peace of the gods, of that transfiguration associated with the penitent, which traditional exegesis is pleased to observe in him. The poet does not make a habit of disguising life’s realities, and here he shows himself to be fully aware that destitution and misfortune do not usually have the effect of transfiguring man; they depress him rather and strip him of his nobility. His Oedipus is pious. He was from the beginning in Oedipus Rex, but in his distress he turns savage.”
That is the testimony of a reader who is not especially concerned with the problems of tragedy, since his work is an historical account of the different concepts that the Greeks had of the soul.
As far as we are concerned, I have tried to show you that at a time that preceded the ethical formulations of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles presents us with man and questions him along the paths of his solitude; he situates the hero in a sphere where death encroaches on life, in his relationship, that is, to what I have been calling the second death here. This relationship to being suspends everything that has to do with transformation, with the cycle of generation and decay or with history itself, and it places us on a level that is more extreme than any other insofar as it is directly attached to language as such.
To put it in the terms of Lévi-Strauss – and I am certain that I am not mistaken in invoking him here, since I was instrumental in having had him reread Antigone and he expressed himself to me in such terms – Antigone with relation to Creon finds herself in the place of synchrony in opposition to diachrony.
I have stopped half-way in what I might have said about the text. We are not in a position to exhaust its significance this year, if only for reasons of time, but it is clear that the question raised at the end concerns what I shall call the divine use of Antigone.
In this connection one might make a number of comparisons. Antigone hanging in her tomb evokes something very different from an act of suicide, since there are all kinds of myths of hanged heroines, including girls, such as that of Erigone, who is linked to the advent of the cult of Dionysos. Dionysos has given wine to her father, but because he doesn’t know its properties, he violates her and dies. She then hangs herself on his tomb. It is an explanatory myth of a whole rite in which we see more or less simplified and symbolic images of girls hanging from trees. In short, one finds there a whole ritual and mythical background, which may be brought back to resituate in its religious harmony all that is produced on the stage. It is nevertheless true that from a Sophoclean perspective the hero has nothing to do with that kind of use. Antigone is someone who has already set her sights on death. The invocation that is wrapped around this stem is something else; it doesn’t have to do with human defiance here.
That’s as far as I will go today. Involved in what I had to say to you about catharsis is the beauty effect. The beauty effect derives from the relationship of the hero to the limit, which is defined on this occasion by a certain Atè.And on that subject I will now, so to speak, pass the word to someone else (passer la parole), conscious of the fact that I am using the very definitions of the structure of the seminar.
In effect, I don’t want to be the one who, like some jack-of-all trades, takes upon himself alone the task of poking about in all those more-or-less heterogeneous fields that offer the traditional formulations of these things.
At a certain level within you, I mean all of you individually at a certain point in your thinking, there is a form of resistance to the things I am trying to express, and it consists of making sympathetic comments that are more-or-less ambiguous in kind on what has come to be known as my learning or, as is also said, my cultural background. It’s something I don’t like. It also has a negative side; one wonders where I find the time to assemble all that. But you will recognize that my existence began a little before yours. I may not have had two hundred years of mowing like an English lawn, but I am getting there. In any case, I am closer than you are, and I’ve had time to forget several times over the things I discuss with you.
I would, therefore, like today to ask someone to speak about the beautiful who seems to me to be particularly well-equipped to discuss it in relation to something that I take to be essential for the continuation of my argument; that something is the definition of the beautiful and the sublime as articulated by Kant.
Involved there is a form of category analysis that is of the highest significance in any effort to connect up with the topological structuration that I am pursuing with you here. It seems to me essential to take the time to recall Kant’s insights, if you have already read The Critique of Judgment, or to hear what they are, if you haven’t yet had the opportunity to read that work. That is why I have asked Mr. Kaufmann to speak to us now.
You will see afterwards the use that we might make of the work he will be presenting for your benefit today. [Mr. Kaufmann’s presentation followed.]
You were certainly right to state that infinitesimal calculus is evoked behind the experience of the sublime. One should note that in Kant’s time infinitesimal calculus still harbored a kind of mystery of the signifier that has totally disappeared since that time.
The 1764 passage you quoted from Kant should really be communicated to Claude Lévi-Strauss, as the inaugural speech he gave on being appointed to his Chair at the Collège de France is already implied there. I don’t mean by that antedated, but anticipated precisely in a way that is not emphasized at all in Rousseau. Kant already founds the ethics of ethnography there.
The work you presented today suggested to the audience here, which is heterogeneous in its educational background, the idea of structures around which Kant both regroups and dissociates the idea of the beautiful. We might have placed in the background the idea of pleasure in Aristotle and have quoted the nice little definition he gives of it in the Rhetoric.
We will use that as a fulcrum – something that is in traditional philosophy – when we take up again where we left off the question of the effect of tragedy. Although we think we always have to defer to Aristotle, that effect concerned cannot be fully explained in terms of moral catharsis.
June 15, 1960
1 The best equivalent in English is, of course, the Loeb bilingual edition.