nitely be read together with his other claim, in a different lesson, that the only right
invoked by Antigone’s temporary occupation of the place of pure desire is “What
is, is.” In Sade’s case, the ex nihilois foreclosed: the “static” repudiation of the void
through reified pain finally risks unwillingly losing being and returning to the pri-
mordial Real; in Antigone’s case, on the contrary, the ex nihilois affirmed as such:
being as lack of being and desire as its metonymy are thus preserved.
Toward the end of Seminar VII, Lacan seems to be increasingly convinced of the
fact that pure desire is to be located on a limit which is better understood as
the ephemeral space of an “in-between” (see graph 5. 3 ). Pure desire is no longer
the ultimate beyond; however, the subject who accesses it cannot help continuing
on his way to reach such an ultimate beyond. Antigone’s desire finally aims at that
which is beyond the limit that pure desire itself is: at the precise moment when
pure desire appears as such in the guise of a “glow of beauty” and the limit (of the
real lack of the Symbolic) is trespassed, “a certain relationship to a beyond of
the central field [the zone ‘in-between’ of pure desire] is established, but it is also
that which prevents us from seeing [the] true nature” of such a beyond.^253 As Lacan
immediately indicates, such a beyond is nothing but “the inanimate condition...
in which the death instinct is manifested”;^254 Antigone’s pure desire thus prob-
lematically identifies itself with “the pure and simple desire of death as such”:^255
radical desire is radically destructive.^256
In order to give a clear idea of what is possibly thestructural deadlock of Semi-
nar VII, we should observe that it is not a coincidence if Lacan does not further
specify here the nature of such an “inanimate” beyond. Elsewhere in Seminar
VII, however, in discussing a different issue, he is forced to lay his cards on the
table—that is, to admit that his (inconsistent) postulation of a mythical presym-
bolic or postsymbolic totality,the “primordial Real,” necessarily entails as its corre-
late the “massive” jouissanceof the One. “That which lies beyond is not simply the
181
Graph 5.3
Sasymbolic death pure desire“beyond”
(primordial Real)“ in between”