through the imposition of an (impossible) universal good turned into a “crimi-
nal” good.^241
At this stage, we are therefore able to understand why Lacan enigmatically
affirms that Antigone is attached to the limit of the ex nihilowhich “is nothing more
than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man.”^242
Hegel interpreted Sophocles’ tragedy as the struggle between the law of the fam-
ily (Antigone) and the law of the state (Creon). In opposition to this reading, Lacan
identifies threedifferent laws: the “transparent,” normative nomosof Zeus; the un-
written laws of the “gods below” which represent Zeus’s obscene side; a “certain
legality” which is “not developed in any signifying chain or in anything else...
a horizon determined by a structural relation [which] exists only on the basis
of... language, but reveals [its] unsurpassable consequence.”^243 It goes without
saying that both the first and second kinds of law are ultimately represented by
Creon; on the other hand, Antigone “denies that it is Zeus who ordered her to
[bury Polynices],” and equally “dissociates herself ” from the gods below. An-
tigone, rather, “establishes herself on the limit,” the limit of the Symbolic, the Real-
of-the-Symbolic, the ex nihilounveiled as such.^244 Lacan thus affirms that Antigone
acts exclusively in the name of the following right: “What is, is.”^245 This mysteri-
ous affirmation immediately becomes clearer as we recall our discussion of the
status of the Real in Seminar VI: the Real-of-the-Symbolic is the “elective point”
of the relationship of the subject to his “pure being as subject.” Not only does
Antigone’s positioning on the “radical limit” of the ex nihiloaffirm the “unique
value” of Polynices’ being independently of any reference to the specific content
of his actions, but, more generally, the heroine is also obliged to “sacrifice her
own being in order to maintainthat essentialbeing” which is the very limit that
Creon intends to obliterate....^246 We must conclude that Lacan’s aesthetic ethics
is, at the same time, an ontological ethics, an ethics of the preservation of being
as the void of the Symbolic.
( 4 ) In my opinion, this is the climax of Lacan’s clever use of Antigoneto explain the
ethics of psychoanalysis. Without a doubt, an elaborate attempt has been made to
demarcate Antigone’s (psychoanalytic) ethical act from Creon’s (Sado–Kantian)
“criminal good,” one which is generally successful. Yet, at the same time, what
remains unclear in this argument is the status of “massive” jouissancewith respect
to the “radical limit” of the ex nihilo,not to say its ethical implications with re-
spect to pure desire. On this issue, Lacan repeatedly contradicts himself, and in var-
ious ways.
Problems are not limited to the paradox that, as we have seen, despite the fact
that Antigone’s act is clearly meant to “save” the Symbolic (being as such, the Real-
of-the-Symbolic) against Creon’s temptation to real-ize it, this ultimately amounts