misunderstanding” according to which Sade “is our progenitor or precursor [and]
as a result of our [analytic] profession, we are destined to embrace extremes.”^210
As for Kant, Lacan unequivocally states that “however much we may hope that the
[ethical] weight of [das Ding] will be felt on the right side, we find in opposition
[on the ‘wrong’ side] the Kantian formula of duty.”^211 Hence, we may infer that
the ethical register that takes its direction from what is to be found on the level of
das Dingcan be articulated in two contrasting ways: what is ultimately at stake is
whether, after the suspension of the pleasure principle and the servicing of goods,
ethics is finally located on the “right” or on the “wrong” side of the line, the limit
marked by the real hole in the Symbolic. While the superegoic transgression of
both Kant and Sade literally aims—in an implicit or explicit manner—at what
Lacan himself names the “point of apocalypse,”^212 the implosive self-saturation of
the Symbolic—and thus could be accounted for as an ethics of radical evil insofar
as it mythically plunges itself into the “unbearable” jouissanceof the primordial
Real—transgression is truly “ethical” when it aims at making pure desire, the Real-
of-the-Symbolic, “the domain of the vacuole,” appearas such, and therefore resists
the paradoxical tendency of the superegoic moral law to real-ize the Symbolic.^213
At this stage, we are thus able to formulate two overlapping general theses re-
garding the ethics of psychoanalysis: ( 1 ) it should oppose the oblivion and po-
tential obliteration of the real lack in the Symbolic as noneliminable limitation and
precondition of the Symbolic itself;^214 ( 2 ) it is inextricable from a psychoanalytic
aestheticsaimed at temporarily disclosing the void of desire, the void in the symbolic
Other, beyond specularity.
I therefore agree with De Kesel when he suggests that, for Lacan, Antigone is
first and foremost an “image”:^215 indeed, at the moment of being sentenced to
enter her tomb alive for not having compromised her desire to bury Polynices,
Antigone is attracted to and invested by an “unbearable splendour”^216 which,
Lacan says, referring to the himeros enargèsevoked by the chorus, “renders [pure]
desire visible.”^217 She is a representation of lack, and as such, one could well argue
that, in the instant before vanishing, she literally embodies the object-cause of de-
sire. On the one hand, the goodof specular narcissism constitutes the first barrier
that separates us from pure desire. On this level, “what I want is the good of the
others in the image of my own,” “my egoism is quite content with a certain altru-
ism,” thus “I can avoid taking up the problem of the evil I desire and that my neigh-
bor also desires.”^218 On the other hand, the beautyof the phantasmatic object a
should be located on a second barrier;^219 on this level, “the beam of desire” is “re-
doubled”:^220 it is both “tempered” by the effect of beauty and, at the same time,
unable to be “completely extinguished by the apprehension of beauty”; that is to
say, it continues its way where “there is no longer any object.”^221the subject of the fantasy... and beyond