Antigone: Between the Beautiful and the Sublime

If Lacan reads literary texts in order to learn from them, moreover to learn things he would not find in other kinds of text or experience, one can understand why Antigone plays such a role in the 1959–60 seminar, ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’. It is a commonplace understanding in classical criticism that in this play Sophocles depicts Antigone as a tragic heroine who is ready to die in order to save the unwritten values of the family, values coming directly from the realm of the gods, thus salvaging ethics from any political encroachment. She is taken to state that even if her two brothers died fighting, one for Thebes, the other against Thebes, their fates should not be distinguished in death. This provides Hegel with a central argument in his well-known analysis of the play, an analysis that Lacan acknowledges, even if it is to explore unexpected avenues or even to take a somewhat eccentric route to the play.1