Lacan - key quotations

Jacques Lacan

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Dennis Porter (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999 [first publ. in French 1986]) Page references are to the ebook available via QM Library

1. [As against a tradition of regarding Sophocles as a humanist:] We consider ourselves to be at the end of the vein of humanist thought. From our point of view man [sic] is in the process of splitting apart. (pp. 273-74)
2. Goethe certainly rectifies the Hegelian view that Creon is opposed to Antigone as one principle of the law, of discourse, to another. The conflict is thus said to be linked to structures. Goethe, on the other hand, shows that Creon is driven by his desire and manifestly deviates from the straight path; he seeks to break through a barrier in striking at his enemy Polynices beyond limits within which he has the right to strike him. He, in fact, wants to inflict on him that second death that he has no right to inflict on him. All of Creon’s speeches are developed with that end in view, and he thus rushes by himself toward his own destruction. (p. 254)
3. It is not for him [Goethe] a right opposed to a right, but of a wrong opposed to – what? To something else that is represented by Antigone. Let me tell you that it isn’t simply the defense of the sacred rights of the dead and of the family, not is it all that we have been told about Antigone’s saintliness. Antigone is borne along by a passion. (p. 254)
4. [Creon] seeks the good. [...] He exists to promote the good of all. (p. 258)
5. His error of judgement [...] is to want to promote the good of all [...] as the law without limits, the sovereign law, the law that goes beyond or crosses the limit. (p. 259)
6. [Antigone] right through to the end feels neither fear not pity. [...] That is why, among other things, she is the real hero. (p. 258; cf. p. 273)
7. [Antigone] is inhuman. (p. 263)
8. [Atè] designates the limit that human life can only briefly cross. [...] Beyond this Atè one can only spend a brief period of time, and that’s where Antigone wants to go. [...] She literally cannot stand it anymore. Her life is not worth living. (p. 262-63)*
9. Something beyond the limits of Atè has become Antigone’s good, namely, a good that is different from everyone else’s. (p. 270)
10. [Antigone is not] the servant of a sacred order, of respect for living matter. [...] When she explains to Creon what she has done Antigone affirms the advent of the absolute individual with the phrase “That’s how it is because that’s how it is.” [not an identifiable quotation from the play] But in the name of what? (p. 277-78)
11. Involved is an horizon determined by a structural relation; it only exists on the basis of the language of words, but it reveals their unsurpassable consequence. The point is from the moment when words and language and the signifier enter into play, something may be said and it is said in the following way: “[...] The order that you dare refer me to doesn’t mean anything, for from my point of view, my brother is my brother.” [not an identifiable quotation from the play] (p. 278)
12. This brother is something unique. And it is this alone which motivates me to oppose your edicts. (p. 279)
13. Antigone invokes no other right than that one. (p. 279)
14. One cannot finish off someone who is a man as if he were a dog. One cannot be finished with his remains simply by forgetting that the register of being of someone who was identified by a name has to be preserved by funeral rites. (p. 279)
15. [...] At bottom the affair concerns the refusal to grant Polynices a funeral. Because he is abandoned to the dogs and the birds and will end his appearance on earth in impurity, with his scattered limbs an offence to heaven and earth, it can be seen that Antigone’s position represents the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being with reference to any content, to whatever good or evil Polynices may have done, or to whatever he may be subjected to. (p. 279)
16. The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man [sic]. (p. 279)
17. That break is manifested at every moment in the fact that language punctuates everything that occurs in the movement of life. (p. 279)
18. Antigone appears as [autonomos], as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him. (p. 282)
19. The fruit of the incestuous union has split into two brothers, one of whom represents power and the other crime. There is no one to assume the crime and the validity of crime apart from Antigone. Between the two of them, Antigone chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of the criminal as such. No doubt things could have been resolved if the social body had been willing to pardon, to forget and cover over everything with the same funeral rites. It is because the community refuses this that Antigone is required to sacrifice her own being in order to maintain that essential being which is the family Atè, and that is the theme or true axis on which the whole tragedy turns. (p. 283)
20. Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes, immortalizes that Atè. (p. 283)