Having said this, in opposition to De Kesel I believe that Antigone as an image
of lack is also inevitably understood by Lacan as a modelfor the ethics of psycho-
analysis as articulated in Seminar VII. This can easily be demonstrated by means
of a simple syllogism. We are told that Antigone represents the “essence of trag-
edy”;^222 we are also told that “tragedy is at the root of our [psychoanalytic]
experience”;^223 hence (the suicidal nature of ) Antigone’s act is at the root of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. An aesthetic ethics cannot be reduced to an aesthetics:
the centrality of Antigone’s image can be extracted only from Antigone’s own act.
This does not, of course, imply that Lacan is content with locating suicide at the
center of his ethics: on the contrary, he is certainly aware of this impasse. On the
basis of what we have just seen, we may well agree with him when he states that
“Antigone hanging in her tomb evokes something very different from an act of
suicide.”^224 Nonetheless, the fact remains that Antigone’s ethical act, a precondi-
tion for desire’s being made visible, is followed by her hanging.... Quite simply,
at this stage, Lacan cannot find a better “image” for his ethics, one which would,
after representing the representation of lack, represent the moment of symbolic
reinscription instead of an irrevocable disappearance into the unrepresentable
lack itself.^225
In other words, in my opinion, Seminar VII ultimately fails to elucidate the way
in which the Lacanian ethics of “pure” desire is distinct from the Sado–Kantian
anti-ethics of “massive” jouissance.I would rather argue that such an essential dis-
tinction can be recovered in Seminar VII only retroactively, and in a germinal form,
from the standpoint of what Lacan elaborates in later years. Let us approach this in-
tricate matter in a roundabout way.
( 1 ) Lacan says that the discourse of science which dominates the world nowadays
is engaged in an ambiguous relationship with the Thing: although it “repudiates
the presence of the Thing insofar as from [science’s] point of view the ideal of ab-
solute knowledge is glimpsed,” this same ideal is “something that equally posits
the Thing without accounting for it.”^226 In other words, the mythical achievement
of absolute knowledge would be perfectly equivalent to the real-ization of the
Symbolic: science “posits the Thing without accounting for it” in the sense that
the more it repudiates its presence as the real lack of the symbolic order, the closer
it comes to returning to the primordial Real by means of a self-saturation. This is
why, elsewhere in Seminar VII, Lacan can rhetorically ask: “Have we crossed the
line... in the world in which we live?”^227 He believes that the possibility of the
death of the Symbolic has become a tangible reality for us: one need only think
of the impending threat of the nuclear holocaust and “an anarchy at the level of
chromosomes.”^228