Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

86 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

sexual function. It is true that that influence extends very far; but we do not
overlook the fact that an individual woman may be a human being in other
respects as well. If you want to know more about femininity, inquire from
your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can
give you deeper and more coherent information.27

I define feminists as thinkers ‘in, of, and from the feminine’ where
the latter invokes not a known and but desired potentiality for differ-
encing the monism of phallic culture in which the feminine is voided as
an empty cipher of difference to the One. The feminist thinker
refuses to remain caught in the structure of Freud’s exhausted clos-
ure, that has laid down a normative concept of knowledge with
femininity as the unknowable object of masculine art or science.
Feminists do not merely wish to turn the tables, however, and render
masculinity the object of an all-women university, academy or
laboratory, as in Tennyson’s poem about Princess Ida’s dream.
Instead we wish to know ourselves—the as yet un-re-cognized femi-
nine difference beyond the limitations of the all-important sexual
function—a term which, paradoxically, itself excludes a conceptu-
alization of its own sexual specificity, subordinating its pleasures and
resources to a functionality defined in a Malthusian relation to
heteronormative masculinity and familial reproductivity. Feminists
want to report from their experience, their imagination, and their
formal research on that which, signified but not exhausted by the
psycho-linguistic term femininity, is however, not merely a radically
unknowable otherness, the very cipher of difference. Surrounded by
enormous dangers of misunderstanding, the Israeli psychoanalyst,
theorist, and artist Bracha Ettinger, for instance, introduces the term
‘the matrixial’ to postulate as a feminine a non-essential, psycho-
symbolically constituted specific sexual difference that is capable of
generating dimensions of fantasy and meaning as a shifting supple-
ment to the phallic organization of subjectivity and meaning.28 The

27 Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’ in [1933] in Penguin Freud Library, 2, New
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, 1973), 169.

28 Bracha Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Differences, 4.3
(1992), 176–208; ‘The Becoming Thresholds of Matrixial Borderlines’, in
George Robertson (ed.) Travellers’ Tales (London, 1994) 38–62; ‘Plaiting
in a Being-in- Severality and the Primal Scene’, Almanach of Psychoanalysis

beyond oedipus 87

matrix will not invert or replace, but complement and shift
that which has been generated from and accords with the psycho-
corpo-real imaginary of the masculine subject: what can be defined
as phallocentric. Lacan famously declared that there is no sexual
rapport because there is no knowledge of the sexual difference of the
feminine. If such were to be discovered, he thought, it would have to
be reported ‘from the ladies’ side’. Lacan allowed a theoretical
possibility which he, however, refused, declaring that although he
kept asking, women never told him what they wanted, what was this
jouissance beyond the phallus.29 His theories open the space of a
possible theorization of such a dimension of subjectivity, precisely
‘beyond the phallus’ (beyond its ordering logic of one and other,
castration and lack) but not outside of the psycho-symbolic param-
eters of psychoanalytical thought. Unlike previous attempts to
‘excavate’ a pre-Oedipal feminine, associated with precocious or
archaic phases of intimacy with the mother, Ettinger’s Matrix func-
tions beside, beneath, as well as beyond but not merely before the
phallus as a symbol for elements of subjectivity.

Thus I want to follow—rehearsing the recurring metaphor of
Woolf’s trespassing walk on the lawns of Cambridge dons—
both the lively tread of Zoe¨ Bertgang and the leaping spring of
Jane Harrison’s vision of the origins of art across the spaces of
masculinist psychoanalytical thought to reread certain possibilities
held before us in the archaeology of cultures by mythic figuration
or image at the threshold of life and death that refuse to be con-
tained as chronologically archaic, while their antiquity both histor-
ically and psycho-logically, attests to their vital, if not mortal
importance.

III (Rehovot, Israel, 2002), 91–112. For a special issue devoted to Ettinger’s
post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalytical theory see Theory, Culture and
Society, 21.1 (spring 2004).

29 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and
Knowledge 1972–73, Encore Seminar XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London, 1988). For a commentary on
this seminar and the counter-theoretical work of feminist theorists in France
see Stephen Heath, ‘Difference,’ Screen, 19.3 (1978), 51–112.

88 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

getting beyond oedipus

There can be no doubt that what both liberated and blocked Freud
imaginatively and intellectually was the figuration of the human
psyche through the exclusive structure of the Oedipus myth.30
The origins of psychoanalytical method in the originally dialogical
work of Freud’s analytic theatre with a series of highly intelligent
young woman patients, the so-called hysterics who have attracted
much feminist attention, was deflected and ultimately buried when
his own self-analysis, starting after the death of his father in 1895,
laid over that rich seam of conversations with young Zoe¨s the
narcissistic image of an exclusively masculine, Oedipal psyche.31

While many intellectual women engaged with psychoanalysis
soon after its initiation and many radically revised Freud’s theses of
the Oedipal complex, locating it much earlier and making it a more
rageous and intense, pre-verbal affair between child and a reinstated
Mother, none truly challenged the fundamental premises of its ul-
timately defining role around the theme of castration in human
subjectivity which frames our concepts of sexual difference (mascu-
line identification with the phallus and feminine lack—offering only
the illusion of being the phallic object of desire for the masculine
Subject) and sexuality. Moreover, the exclusive dominance of the
Oedipal model makes it virtually impossible to think with the femi-
nine since its version of the feminine is already incorporated struc-
turally as what cannot yield meaning except as absence or loss:
Woman/Other/Thing, in Lacan’s formulation. Almost all psycho-
analytical theories of the feminine, therefore, operate within the
walls of the Oedipal topos even if they overtly attempt to reevaluate
aspects of femininity that they can only, revealingly, subordinate as
the pre-Oedipal. Precocious, archaic, remaining closer to a maternal

30 See Joan Raphael-Leff’s reading of the different concept of psychic life
that might have followed from Freud’s engagement with the Isis–Horus myth
rather than that of the Oedipus legend, which contains, according to Jane
Harrison, the trace of the killing of the old king by the incoming stranger, now
mapped onto a patriarchal social system of dynastic succession.

31 I am indebted for this insight to Carol Gilligan, speaking in 1992 at
the ICA, London, on the occasion of a symposium to mark the publication
of Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester Freud’s Women (London, 1992).

beyond oedipus 89

dyad or to identification with the maternal body that cannot be
entirely rejected, the feminine in so many post-structuralist feminist
rereadings of Freudian theory is arrested theoretically in an archaic
period of subjective development, confined to the lowest strata of
psychological archaeology.32 Identified with emotion, disruption,
the maenadic wildness, the unmediated intensity of acting out that
ritual would socialize, and drama sublimate, the feminine, like the
Sphinx, still remains outside the realm of the truly human, and is
itself hardly allowed to deliver from its sexual specificity anything of
general significance in the understanding or symbolic potential of the
human. The feminine tends, therefore, to be identified only with the
materialized maternal and hence the sexual, copulatory, or lactating
function of Freud’s model, and seems to be unthinkable as a principle
in the symbolic domain of thought.33

It is important to stress here that although both Julia Kristeva’s
thesis on the chora and the semiotic and Luce Irigaray’s philosoph-
ical and psychoanalytical theses on a psycho-corporeal sexual dif-
ference have been hugely influential, and while the texts of both
intimate radical possibilities, neither work beyond Oedipus at a
structural level. In very different ways that have their own value, in
both Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s works, early moments in the formation
of feminine subjectivity, may be transvalued, or radical differencing

32 A recent, brilliant but definitively phallic attempt at re-feminine in
terms of bi-sexuality and a two-part Oedipus complex is offered in Julia
Kristeva’s ‘On the Extraneousness of the Phallus: or, The Feminine between
Illusion and Disillusion’, in Sense and Non-sense of Revolution, trans.
Jeanine Herman (New York, 2000), 94–106.

33 I am necessarily summarizing a vast and complex field of debate,
softening important lines of major differences between feminist theorists
and theoretical traditions. As will become clear, what appear to be quite
different in their attempts to theorize the feminine in the works of Irigaray,
Kristeva, Silverman, and many others share, despite important differences,
the theoretical horizon of the Oedipal formulation of human subjectivity.
Not in a position to contest the clinical aspect, I follow Joan Raphael-Leff
here in stressing that the choice of classical myth made by Freud entailed
insight and blindness, closing of dimensions of subjectivity clearly imagined
in other myths or mythological systems. It is here that classical myth and
feminist thought function as investigative intersections about what we allow
ourselves to imagine about ourselves and what we foreclose by rendering
one imaginative device and narrative an authoritative canon.

90 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

of the imaginary and symbolic proposed, and telling critiques of the
damage caused to the feminine subject by the inhospitality of
the Oedipal structure may be delineated. Following Ettinger,
however, I would argue that until now a specific re-theorization of
femininity and hence subjectivity as a whole has not been offered
that can make a substantial difference to the Oedipalized psycho-
analytical model: that is, subjectivity is premised on castration, lack,
and the phallus is its exclusive signifier.

This phrase, ‘the sexual specificity of the feminine’, may already
cause some readers anxiety. We have been trained to be ‘good’
feminists by policing any suggestion that there might be such a
thing as the sexual specificity of the feminine because we too quickly
confuse ‘specificity’, that is, a particular semiotic or symbolic mean-
ing creating and affective dimension, with a fundamental derivation
of such particularity from a non-symbolic source: the anatomical
body or, worse, the biological disposition. Thus the suggestion that
we might think about the ‘specificity of the feminine’ easily smacks
of the dreaded crime essentialism: that is, the derivation of the
meaning of the feminine from some given physiological or inherent
level of being. That the morphology of the feminine as it is inevitably
mediated through fantasy and imaginary or symbolic representation
might yield imaginative or intellectual resources for thought and
understanding of the human or social condition is commonly treated
as frankly embarrassing. Prepare to blush. Remember psychoanaly-
sis itself is precisely a theory without nature: it is all in the mind,
or rather psyche.

Or perhaps, following Jane Harrison, Zoe¨ Bertgang, or Virginia
Woolf, we have to have more courage, to run over the lawns and
stones of intellectual orthodoxies, even of our own, feminist making,
while escaping from the traps of binary inversion that are laid
whenever we try to do so. In so far as I have been conjugating
classical myth—a poetic tradition of imaginative meaning and cul-
tural memory—and feminist thought—a rigorous engagement with
post-structuralist concepts of signification and the psycho-linguistic
constitution of subjectivity, my invocation of ‘the feminine’ must
here be understood in such toughly theoretical terms, and not as a
sudden fall from theoretical grace into the abyss of essentialism. It
must be possible to address the still unanswered question of sexual

beyond oedipus 91

difference, in Lacan’s terms, ‘from the ladies’ side’, while remaining
rigorously within the carefully plotted domain of psychoanalytical
uses of myth as means to excavate the processes of, yes, affectively
embodied but psychically virtual subjectivities. It was Julia Kriste-
va’s major purpose to reinstate the corporeal—the drives—into the
discourse of psychoanalysis after its structuralist and hence heavily
linguistic turn with early Lacan. It was Luce Irigaray’s major contri-
bution as a dissident daughter of that school to track the metapho-
rics of sexual bodies and sexual difference through the discourse of
Western philosophy and psychoanalysis. So, resting on their sub-
stantive ‘bodies’ of thought, we can take for granted that we are
allowed to engage with this fascinating domain between what
Ettinger writes as the corpo-real and fantasy: the beginnings of the
psyche’s imaginings or what Lacan would in his later return call the
realm between trauma and fantasy. To do this we must step sideways
from an exclusive focus on Oedipus in the extended legend to that of
other members of his family through whom we might recover this
lost potential of a feminine difference, not reducible to the binary
opposition masculine/feminine which, in Oedipal principle, can only
place the feminine in the space-off of its monstrous and menacing
archaic other or conclude that, however noble in its fidelity, it can
never rise to the level of a general ethic or morality.

listening to antigone

As this volume demonstrates, many of us are called back to Oedi-
pus’ daughter/sister, Antigone. The debate about this mythic char-
acter stretches from at least Sophocles to Hegel and now onto
Lacan, Irigaray, and Butler. As literary work, Sophocles’ play war-
rants careful textual analysis. As philosophical problem, Antigone’s
actions have generated major theories of the ethical and the polit-
ical. But what is a specifically psychoanalytical reading of both a
cultural text and a philosophical problem? How did Freud’s reading
of texts from many historical periods isolate and theorize particular
structures of subjectivity? Antigone has been a signifier and a myth
infused with diverse meanings by varied interpreters: she figures in
debates on gender and ethics, on kinship and the state, on resistance

92 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

and fascism (in the essay by Kate Fleming on Anouilh’s Antigone and
its unstable readings in occupied France). My contribution is a small
one, drawing into this exciting field a debate internal to French
psychoanalytical theory, which has, I think, enormous ramifications
for the still developing discourses of feminist analysis and a feminist
imaginary. In this volume, Miriam Leonard offers a stinging critique
of Lacan’s reading of Antigone in terms of an opposition between the
pure and impure, between the heroic beauty of the virgin rebel and
the contaminated crime of an impure mother, Jocasta. She calls
Lacan to account for a sexual politics embedded in the repressed
structure of his text on Sophocles’ play. This powerful critique is
warranted and serves to alert us to the constant vigilance we need in
reading all texts for the play of political desire and an ideological
unconscious. My starting-point is neither critique nor exoneration.
It is the practice of analytical reading that Lacan himself enacts in his
seminar and to which Bracha Ettinger responds by offering another
reading, indeed of the most contested lines of the Sophocles’ play:
Antigone’s declaration of the reasons for her action.

Let me start this other reading, therefore, with a long quotation
from the psychoanalytical theorist and artist whose concept of the
matrixial feminine is the focus of the second half of this paper, Bracha
Ettinger.34 In her reading of the figure of Antigone, Ettinger concludes:

What in Antigone’s argument is waiting to be heard and com-passioned is
her suffering from the tearing away into total separateness of her principal
partner-in-difference, until this moment separated-in-jointness. If the al-
most impossible knowledge of the Thing-Event concerns the originary

34 First proposed in 1992, in a paper titled ‘Matrix and Metramorpho-
sis’, Differences, 3.4 (1992), 176–208, Bracha Ettinger’s radical theses on a
supplementary signifier of a non-Oedipal feminine difference or feminine
dimension of the symbolic has been elaborated across the series of major
articles, books, collections, and catalogue essays (on her art work). A
collection of her e´crits appeared in French in 2000: Bracha Lichtenberg
Ettinger, Regard et espace-de bord matrixiels (Brussels, 2000) and an
English selection is being edited by Brian Massumi for University of Min-
nesota Press. Other key articles include ‘Metramorphic Borderlinks and
Matrixial Borderspace’ in John Welchman (ed.), Rethinking Borders
(Basingstoke, 1996), 125–59. A special issue of Theory, Culture and Soci-
ety, 21.1 (2004), including essays by Jean Franc¸ois Lyotard, Judith Butler,
and myself is devoted to this theory.

beyond oedipus 93

feminine rapport, it is not death itself that inflicts the horrible cut in the
matrixial web, but the passage to a bestiality that threatens to blow up and
explode this sphere altogether into separate pieces.35 (my italics)

This extract introduces a new vocabulary that may at this point
hold little meaning for the uninitiated reader. I want to open the
space to hear this text, which is part of Ettinger’s conclusion, so that
as we read it closely what its web of words is trying to plot out will
become more resonant, effecting an opening of the play and myth to
other, hitherto unrecognized possibilities.

Since the publication of Judith Butler’s philosophical and feminist
reflections in Antigone’s Claim, we have been invited to think
‘beyond Oedipus’—that is, to go beyond his mythic support for
the hetero-normative ordering of sexual difference and kinship in
an innovative and emancipatory way.36 Butler focuses on the im-
possible no-place in kinship structures of the woman, Antigone,
who is both daughter and sister to her father-brother, both aunt
and sister to her nephew-brother, both daughter and granddaughter
to her mother-grandmother. Antigone has been subject to a radical,
feminist rereading as a figuration of non-filial, non-familial affili-
ation sought beyond the family plot that Butler reveals as the
foundational and continuing metaphor for philosophy, ethics, and
political science.

The passage I have just quoted and which I will quote again later
after what I hope to be useful explication of its meaning suggests,
however, yet another significance in the mythic figure of Antigone
than that to which Hegel and his followers or feminist philosophers
such as Irigaray and Butler still confine her as a counter-force. What
is needed beyond critique of phallocentrism is what the Butler move
cannot contemplate without becoming anxious about a femininity
that remains a trapped and trapping positionality inside the hetero-
normative frame. Thus the move beyond Oedipus, here as else-
where, is a move beyond phallically defined sexual difference,

35 Bracha Ettinger, ‘Trangressing With-In-To the Feminine’, in Penny
Florence and Nicola Foster (eds.), Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices,
Philosophy and Feminist Understandings, (Aldershot, 2000), 205.

36 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death,
(New York, 2000).

94 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

that, despite its own hopes, becomes only the ever more occluded
reinstatement precisely of the universal normalization of the phallus
as the only arbiter of subjectivity and meaning. Oedipal sexual
subjectivity reversed into its non-Oedipal opposite does not shake
its logic; it merely makes anything of the feminine in its specificity
even more untheorizable, for we move from a gendered family plot
to a non-familial system of affiliations—certainly important in
terms of sexualities and their living. If we sacrifice sexual difference
to emancipation from the limits of gender, we also sacrifice the
feminine on a theoretical altar once again. You either get sexual
difference by Oedipus, or no sexual difference at all, which adds up
to the same monistic logic of the One or the None.

I want to suggest that it is premature to suspend the debate on
femininity/sexual difference. Like Ettinger, I think we can go be-
yond Oedipus in a way that radically opens the field of human
thought and culture to a feminine supplementary and poeı¨tic struc-
ture that is not defined Oedipally (absence/presence), and that,
therefore, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Oedipal binary
masculine (þ)/feminine (À), and thus with our commonsense, post-
Oedipal understanding of gender as men and women. This other
feminine is not of women (gender — social or linguistic), confined to
female persons or experience. Ettinger poses the matrixial as a facet
of human subjectivity that is, however, particularly hospitable to
aspects thereof that have special resonance for the perpetually per-
plexed and disillusioned (Kristeva) feminine subject. There is still a
deep confusion between gender: man and woman, and sexual dif-
ference: psycho-linguistic positionality defined according to the
logic of a certain signifier (or signifiers) that leads to anxiety if we
talk of the feminine as having any meaning beyond its negative
function as the Other of the One, to use Luce Irigaray’s terms.37

But psychoanalysis does confuse the matter of my stringent de-
fence against essentialism. What makes its discourse and practice
challenging is precisely the fact that psychoanalysis is a tradition of
thought that tries to think, conceptually and affectively, about a

37 Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter
(Ithaca, NY, 1985). Few philosophers have been more readily misread and
ignorantly accused of essentialism than Irigaray.

beyond oedipus 95

material corporeality of intensities, drives, and non-linguistic
potentials that are retrospectively invested psycho-symbolically
with meanings, through later psychic operations such as fantasy
and linguistic operations such as signification so as to produce the
psychosomatic entity that is human subjectivity itself always failing
before attempted fixing. Mediated and represented, consciously and
unconsciously reprocessed, displaced, repressed, and symptoma-
tized, psychoanalysis cannot abandon the bodily offering of poten-
tialities for translation from sensations into images and thoughts
that it never imagines as a given nature. The relays between pro-
cesses (intensities, affects, drives) and their formations is the heart
of its difficult theory. The materiality of always retrospectively
imaginary corporalities anaclitically supports structures of fantasy
and meaning without the latter ever being reducible to origins in
‘the body’: that is the core of the theory of drives, symptoms, and
the unconscious that elaborates stories of energies into figurations
of subjectivities.

The opening quotation of this section on Antigone suggests that
in the actions and words of Antigone as she is constructed textually
in the Sophoclean tragedy, ‘Something is waiting to be heard and
com-passioned’. That means some affect and some meaning are
suspended awaiting us as readers and viewers in this text that invites
us to share in suffering and affectivity but only if we become
differently attuned listeners: retuning our psychic receivers to this
different pulse of subjectivity.

What, we must ask, is this something that in Antigone’s argument
is waiting to be heard and com-passioned? Is it ‘her suffering’, that
is, both her pathos and her trauma? Or is it the trauma that this
character as an imaging of subjective moments brings to us in this
tragedy that has already happened when the play opens? From what
is ‘she’ suffering? What is the trauma ‘she’—Antigone as image—
can transmit to us, the necessary subjective site of the translation of
artistic gesture and performance into resonant meaning?

Bracha Ettinger argues that Antigone’s pain/trauma arises ‘from
the tearing away into total separateness of her principal partner-in-
difference, until this moment separated-in-jointness.’ This is a rad-
ical redefinition of the role of Polyneices, Antigone’s brother/
nephew. Polyneices is placed not merely in his perverse kinship

96 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

relation to his sister/aunt; he is evoked as the embodiment of
a subjective condition defined by two structures: ‘partnership-
in-difference’ and ‘separation-in-jointness’. These paradoxical
neologisms define Ettinger’s excavation of a dimension of human
subjectivity that she calls subjectivity as encounter signified as
Matrix. The Oedipal or castration paradigm defines subjectivity as
the effect of accumulated cuts and cleavages caught up and retro-
spectively defined by castration that posits the subject as the discrete,
territorialized celibate One, cut away from a non subjective con-
tinuum or archaic Other. The matrixial paradigm suggests that,
beside this model and not instead of it, we can trace elements of
another dimension or subjective stratum in which subjectivity is
generated not by cut and an economy of loss and absence, but by
encounter, severality, and sharing from the inception with an
unknown, partial Other that is never fused, never lost, never had,
never absent, but constantly sensed, into and from which its partner
in difference, separated in jointness, fades and retunes. So no images
of absolute rupture, cut, isolation, no mention of symbiosis or
autism. Instead Ettinger calls to mind a shared borderspace that is
only imaginable as the co-creation of an always, already several
trans-subjectivity. Instead of the scarred singularity of the Lacanian
subject, imagine two trembling poles within a shared field linked and
thus not fused by threads whose transmissions of events that occur in
that shared border-space resonate within each pole simultaneously
but differently.

Let me quote now, in this invocation of the matrixial dimension,
Antigone’s famous lament in Sophocles’ text when she tries to ex-
plain the motivation of her burial of her brother to the Chorus as she
fearfully contemplates her appalling fate of being buried alive:38

Never, I tell you,
if I had been the mother of children
or if my husband had died, exposed and rotting—

38 There is one other instance of such an explanation in classical litera-
ture: indeed some thing that Sophocles borrowed from the historian
Herodutus who tells the story of the wife of Intaphrenes, who when
threatened with death for conspiracy by Darius asked to save her brother
rather than her husband on similar grounds (Herodutus, 3.119). I am
grateful to Lois Williams for this drawing my attention to this reference.

beyond oedipus 97

I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself,
never defied the people’s will. What law,
you ask, do I satisfy with what I say?
A husband dead, there might have been another.
A child by another too, if I had lost the first.
But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death,
no brother could ever spring to light again.39

For Jacques Lacan, in his psychoanalytical study of Sophocles’
play, Antigone does not represent the clash of social versus natural
moralities (gendered as masculine and feminine, state and family,
philos and polis), as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the ethics of sexual
difference. For Lacan, Antigone is the image of the aesthetic.40 His
reading depends on a formula. Lacan identifies the human with the
cut that initiates the subject as an effect of language. The cut simply
makes meaning possible by marking a differentiation that itself is the
inscription of prohibition; something of the infinite possibility of
being is negated, refused, excluded, differentiated, subjected to a
prohibition: not this. The law, regularity itself, creates the very
possibility of meaning by the act of negative differentiation.

This structure is erected, as Fig. 3.6 suggests, on a ground
provided by another dimension that is radically foreclosed by

Lacan:
The human is only the effect of language whose support is Being

The Symbolic: the effect of the cut
Nature/Culture

Life itself/beyond/negative support
BEING

Fig. 3.6. The horizontal topology in Lacan.

39 Sophocles, Antigone in The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Eagles
(London, 1984), 105.

40 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Eternal Irony of Community’, in Speculum of the
Other: Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1985); George Steiner,
Antigones (London, 1993); G. W. F Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. A.V. Miller (London, 1977), 266 ff. For a contemporary feminist
engagement, see Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and
Death (New York, 2000).

98 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

signification that allows only certain pairings to be meaningful on
its plane. Thus Lacan hypothesizes a beyond language: the Real,
which is pure Being. I take this to convey the notion of life itself,
being a living thing (zoe¨) which is, in its pre-symbolic condition, an
undifferentiated state, that is, the invisible but necessary support for
the formal inscriptions of syntactic difference that sustained bios:
narratable signified human social living. These syntactical differ-
ences are the effect of language, for instance, that famous initiating
pair: nature/culture. Thus we have both a vertical and a horizontal
topology with a frontier that marks a territory of radical otherness,
the zone of the Other/Thing, in Lacan’s scheme, and this boundary
marks the humanization of life. Upon its substrate, a binary system
of significatory difference is created that makes us sexed speaking
subjects through the play of the binary slash: culture/nature—man/
woman, and so forth (see Fig. 3.7). This inscribes, in another
local differentiation, a sexual marking and a sexualizing of the
logic of (þ/À) that will determine the signification of the signs
Man/Woman. Thus whatever is beyond language can have by def-
inition no meaning since it is the negative ground—being—on
which meaning, signification, is created in a series of relational
marks of difference internal to its already erected elevation. The
double negation of the ‘feminine’, signifying the minus pole of the
significatory pairing above the line, is thus captured, with different
but always lacking valencies, in both vertical and horizontal

The logic of the CUT ¼ on/off

Phallic Model

+/À

M / ‘F’

Woman/Other/Thing/Death/the Real

The Feminine is also beyond in so far
as the feminine is negated by the function of
‘f’ as merely the other of the One, the specular
of the Same (M¼ þ)

Fig. 3.7. The horizontal and vertical topologies in Lacan.

beyond oedipus 99

systems. For Lacan, the feminine becomes, with Death, aligned with
the Thing, the Other in a radical sense, while at the same time, the
feminine acquires a negative inscription in the linguistic and psycho-
sexual domain as the negated other to the masculine, the À to its þ,
the lack to the illusory phallic plenitude. Thus there is a double
structure of femininity in phallic logic: as both linked to death and
radical inhuman Otherness imaged in part behind the monstrous
Sphinx, and linked in the signifying chain as emptiness. It is this
double role that confuses us and means that we become afraid to
think the feminine for fear that, in our attempts to fill its emptiness
with meaning, we merely confirm even in inversion a masculine
logic of this negative difference and risk collapse into the horror
of the Real where, as subjects, we cannot exist. The level at which
we must challenge both Freud and Lacan is, therefore, paradoxic-
ally the place where Lacan takes us in his reading of Sophocles, and
where Bracha Ettinger will read Sophocles’ Antigone for sexual
difference that the Lacanian system cannot imagine; a space be-
tween life and death, meaning and no-meaning. For Lacan the figure
of Antigone, textually and performatively summoned in the play
Antigone, blazes forth as an unsettling image that tips into a visi-
bility encountered by the audience watching the play, as perform-
ance or read text, a sense of the radical ‘beyond’ the orders of life
and language that is conceivable only as its absence, hence as death,
non-being, non-meaning, non-differentiation. For, from the mo-
ment the play opens, Antigone is condemned to be buried alive for
having dared during the night to cover with earth her rebel brother
in defiance of the king’s decree that his traitorous act against Thebes
cause his body to be left rotting and desecrated outside the city
walls. Recall for a moment the figure of the devoured but still fleshy
foot from the painting by Ingres that evokes the horror of this place,
outside the walls, where animals, monsters, and the dreaded Sphinx
feed on the unburied (de)human(ized) dead.

Polyneices is to have no grave and for her act of humanizing
burial—mere ritual gesture—Antigone must live to die in her own
tomb: the dead remain unburied while the living are entombed. The
play on the desecrated and unburied dead lying exposed above
ground (not returned with appropriately semantic ritual to the
earth) and the living entombed creates the chain of meaning and

100 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

trauma along which the dramatic text’s mythic substrate is strung.
That the two poles at the joint yet separate ends of this string are
brother/sister, hence masculine/feminine is significant, but I think the
play suggests another kind of connectedness in difference between
the brother/sister pair that is not reducible to the masculine/
feminine opposition. Here I diverge somewhat from Simon Gold-
hill’s interesting reading of the sisters’ relation within the play, and
the forgotten figure of Ismene that puzzles over feminism’s apparent
neglect of the difficulty of sisterhood in the story. It is not the
masculinity of the brother that calls for Antigone’s action in the
reading I am offering here: it is the fact of his being a sibling whose
humanity is being violated by his unburial. Ismene is, as Goldhill
himself affirms, first hailed precisely by the term that should call
forth in her the same necessity as that from which Antigone has
acted: ‘Of common kin’. The repetition of common—shared and
kin—family underlines not merely the relational connection but a
commonality whose failure to respect renders Ismene the unaffect-
ing cipher to Antigone’s tragic beauty.

On one level of understanding, life and death are a binary mean-
ing-generating opposition in which death is the theoretical negativ-
ity around which we, the humans, fashion the meaning of life, for
instance, by the rituals of burial performed by the living on the dead
body. These rituals give meaning to human life by turning its disap-
pearance into a semanticized form: death. We might say that we
became human because, in our earliest cultural moments, we per-
formed this distinction and did not just toss the bones of our
relatives on the midden with the rest of our recent debris of food
and excrement. We are humanized precisely because we ritually
mark the difference of human from animal by creating an idea of
death as the negative, still human other of the living state.

Antigone is condemned to some kind of impossible half-position,
neither killed nor living. She is to be buried alive because she refused
to leave her brother uncovered by the rites of burial that would
alone ensure the imaginary and symbolic persistence of his human-
ity after his physical death. Doing this in the knowledge that it
carried the death penalty, Antigone becomes an image of what
Lacan calls a second death. As textually fabricated image, ‘Anti-
gone’ according to Sophocles, transgresses an impossible boundary

beyond oedipus 101

because normally there can be no knowledge of this other beyond
the horizontal plan of Figure 3.7: death, this utterly beyond that is
both testament to her acknowledgement of her brother’s irreplace-
able being and to her own. Nothing can be reported back from this
space: death. But in an aesthetic practice, such as a play, we are
given an image by the uncanny structure of an unfolding drama that
depends for its dramatic tension on telling us of an act already
committed under a law already defied, whose punishment is already
a death sentence. Thus we open upon an image of the transgression,
the irresolvable oscillation between living and death that can be
refracted back through the work of art to flash out in splendour, as
Lacan puts it, as beauty. Bracha Ettinger writes: ‘The aesthetic
dimensions arises in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60 [the
text in which Lacan discussed Antigone] via the question: what is
the surface that allows the emergence of ‘‘images of passion’’,
images of suffering, images of the indelible play of subjectivity in
and beyond the body and its materiality?’41

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in which he discussed Antigone
as the image of the beauty, Lacan invoked the Marquis de Sade, as a
further explanation of this function of the support, this surface on
which emerge images of suffering.42 De Sade explained that torture
does not kill us; rather it makes us experience ourselves by dislocat-
ing body and subjectivity while making the former the support for
the experience of the latter. Pain stresses the body so that its resist-
ant materiality becomes the support for the suffering that is sub-
jectivity projected by the experience of bodily pain apart from it,
experienced in an intensity that appears to lie beside its unbearable
physical suffering, indeed as a result of it. The subject wants to die

41 Ettinger, ‘Transgressing’, 191.
42 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Sem-
inar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (Lon-
don and New York, 1992), 261 ff. ‘In the typical Sadeian scenario,
suffering does not lead the victim to the point where he is dismembered
and destroyed. It seems rather that the object of all the torture is to retain
the capacity of being an indestructible support. Analysis shows clearly that
the subject separates out a double of himself who is made inaccessible to
destruction, so as to make it support, borrowing a term from the realm of
aesthetics, one cannot help calling the play of pain.’

102 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

to escape the pain but, if the body does not succumb to the torture,
the body remains a material support for a subjective dislocation that
is, in effect, what pain and suffering are, the agonistic experience of
subjectivity. Torture stages the play of pain that raises subjectivity to
a level of besideness. Bracha Ettinger comments on Lacan:

The extraordinary passion which transports death into life and impels life
into death arises only, says Lacan, from some contact with that which is, the
unique and irreplaceable, with what has no substitute, and can not be
exchanged. Beauty enters the picture through ideas of relations with the
irreplaceable. A disappearance in appearance creates the effect of beauty.
The effect of beauty results from the relation of the subject with the horizon
of life, and from traversing to a second death. From Antigone’s point of
view, life ‘can only be lived from the place of that limit where her life is
already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from the place that
she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost.’ This limit,
detached from historical time, is a source of creation ex nihilo.

If the surface of passion captures such a unique value to make an image of
it, this image creates a barrier that blocks us from traversing to the other
side, and, writes Lacan, the image of beauty is the effect of blindness,
blindness to the other side, blindness as the castrating schism. The function
of the beautiful, therefore, is precisely ‘to reveal to us the site of man’s
relationship to his own death and to reveal it to us in only a blinding
flash’.43

Thus Antigone as image is named an outrage within Lacan’s text
and Lacan pulls out meanings from its various forms, aller outre,
outrepasser. The Latin form, transgress, occasions a change, but not
in the Kristevan sense of renovation of meaning. It introduces the
idea of criminality or prohibited passage. Beauty glows in the place
of an impossible, illicit transgression whose motor is desire: that
mark of the ultimate prohibition of the Father’s Law. ‘The aesthetic
question operates, therefore, at a limit materialized and represented
in art by the human body. . . the envelope of all possible phantasms
of human desire.’44 The human body is thus both transport and

43 Ettinger, ‘Trangressing’, 191. Translations are by the artist from the
French original transcripts of the seminar published in English as The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis.

44 Ettinger, ‘Transgressing’, 192, citing Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
281.

beyond oedipus 103

barrier from the Other beyond—a second death that is, as figured
through this play, the feminine. Thus Bracha Ettinger concludes: ‘It
is in the domain of aesthetics that the frontier that separates the
human being from death converges on the frontier that separates
the human being from the feminine.’45

Saying this is not to force a natural assimilation of the feminine to
the non-human, but to reveal, in proper structuralist terms, the map
of meanings and associations by which these terms become symbol-
ically aligned. They do not need to be so, as symbolic is always
social and cultural, and other maps of relations can be proposed,
already calling out to us from that archive of cultural memory: myth
and its writings.

Now I want to introduce the heretical, feminist question: What if
that aesthetic, glimpsed in Sophocles’ image of Antigone, the sister/
daughter/aunt, is not just about the encounter with death that, in
effect, reinstates the blinding cut on the other side of which is both
death, the absolute void of otherness, and the feminine? What if it
textually/performatively allows us a glimpse of another economy, a
subjective and subjectivizing connectivity between terms of differ-
ence—partners in difference, as it were, such as the dead and still-
living but already under the mark of death through the transmission
of trauma, through the co-responsibility of subjects who share a
non-Oedipal sense of the humanity of the other as a result of having
been in contact with an unknown other as the condition of coming
into life at all? The conditions under which we come into life, bare
life, are not, as Lacan’s scheme suggests, non-human. Ettinger will
stress that they are already under the mark of humanizing, subjecti-
vizing life. For those of us born, and without prejudice to any
choices a potential mother may make about her own body, we can
consider that our prolonged prenatal sojourn, months of living
activity, sensation, movement, hearing, responding to the co-pres-
ence of an unknown other living entity can be conceived in relation
to a non-phallically defined ‘invisible feminine specificity’ that
is understood not as place or organ, but as a register of trans-subject-
ivity and encounter of the several. Please, dear reader, first remember
the Ingres painting and the evocation of the feminine-sphinx as

45 Ibid.

104 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

non-human within a menacing cave. Then forget that horrible
image of the maternal body as a monster or enclosure. Think
instead of the airwaves, of transmissions and retunings, of reson-
ance and pressure, sensing the not quite presence of an other fading
in and fading out, leaving traces in both vibrant but unknown
partners, at the point of not-quite contact that is, none the less, a
moment of exchange and co-aesthesis. I am not referring here to the
feminine within phallocentric signification: the minus to a phallic
plus, with a feminine that Lacan placed with the Other and the
Thing beyond the very boundaries of human meaning. We can
refuse to submit to Lacan’s elimination of this feminine from all
human sense-making, and instead imagine as feminine specificity a
model for certain, not all, dimensions of human subjectivity that
concern such aesthetic connectivity signalled as separation in joint-
ness and partners in difference.

In her speech, Antigone clearly invokes the ground for her abso-
lute obligation to bury her brother in their joint standing for, as well
as having in common a space of co-generation not simultaneously
with each other, as in the case of twins, but as a space of sharing that
defines a primary ethical order of co-being, that is about connect-
ivity and co-response-ability (Ettinger’s term) and not the solitary,
celibate individuality of the phallic order. Invoked, but waiting to be
heard in Antigone’s pathos, is this feminist heresy: that the condi-
tion of being humanly generated and born is an ethical ground
ab initio, a form of linking, an already trans-subjectivity conceived
as primordially, irreducibly relational—in a form that appears
transgressive to a phallic autism when its archaic foundations are
activated and invoked politically, ethically, aesthetically, symbolic-
ally as the basis for human thought and action.

Antigone’s now no longer perplexing explanation stresses that the
relationality, the connectivity that is shared by the fact of being born
is not the dyadic bonding of mother to child, but the shared capacity
to sense and feel human connectivity, to the limits of one’s own
death. This is not merely the Levinasian ethic of maintenance of the
humanity of the other, but the activation of a shared humanity that
cannot survive if the other’s is abused.

To say this requires us to acknowledge that the non-gendered
space of the several that is the effect of a sexual difference of the

beyond oedipus 105

feminine impacting on all subjects who are born, the always co-
inhabited plurality of our becoming with an unknown other; what
medicine or religion will define only as the asubjective carrying
called pregnancy, is a humanizing site of potential meaning for
defining an irreducible human co-affectivity and co-respons-ability
that can be called upon with the realm of ethical and political action
as an account of human feeling and necessity. If Bracha Ettinger
dares to invoke psychoanalytically and not medically, the later
stages of the jointness of pregnancy—of becoming and transform-
ing—as the site of this traumatic trans-subjective potentiality, we
must be careful not to let the cultural repressions that have evacu-
ated from all sense and fantasy the sexual specificity of the feminine
once again close down these thoughts by jumping to the conclusion
that any invocation of our becoming space is reductive, natalist,
or essentialist.

Let me firmly distinguish between the phallic concept of mother-
hood which involves a mother and a baby already in some fantas-
matic circuits of need, demand, and desire for each other as objects,
from the condition Ettinger defines as later stages of pregnancy
when, in a non-prohibited pre-birth intimacy that she dares to
name non-prohibited incest, a potential and still partial and unreal-
ized subject-to-be co-inhabits a later to become psychically re-
invoked space.46 This is not a place which would take us back to
bodies and organs and fantasies of the inside of the woman’s body
imaged as a cosy or suffocating house, a cave, a dwelling, an
envelope, a chora, and so forth; all these render the feminine merely
instrumental as the enclosure within which a One-to-be-separated is
generatively held. In this border-space or web of subjective trans-
ference: thought under the prism of the Matrix, the becoming infans
is a proto-psychic entity sharing a borderspace with a fantasizing
subject-other who is being transformed psychically as well as libid-
inally by the co-emergence of a new subjective condition defined by
the coexistence with this unknown other that she fantasizes and

46 Her challenging concept of the non-prohibited pre-birth incest clearly
supplements the whole edifice of cultural theory premised precisely on the
incest taboo. See her elaboration of this concept in her fascinating feminist
reading of the Judaic ritual of the red heifer, or red cow, ‘The Red Cow
Effect’, in Beautiful Translations, ACT 2 (London, 1996), 82–119.

106 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

thinks about not as a fishy-embryo in a watery sack but as a
psychically affecting and human other: and why? Because this
process is a repetition with a difference of her own becoming in a
severalized space of co-emergence with an unknown partial other.
Thus certain moments may be considered psychic evocations and
creative transformations of what was once experienced archaically:
a pregnancy, a friendship, pedagogy, an analysis, an aesthetic ex-
perience, an artwork.

In phallic logic, the mother can be reduced to a body (later
imagined as the dark cave, the fire-belching throat, the abjectly
monstrous other). In Ettinger’s matrixial logic, the late, pre-birth
covenant of the several unknowns is the site of an archaic partial
subject–partial subject encounter. This must be stressed: there are
no full subjects (for whom another becomes a known or desired and
invested object). Yet in this encounter there are co-affective
exchanges that are mutually transforming both partners in their
radical unknowability to each other in the shared border-space.
The becoming mother subject is transformed by an unknowable
otherness that she can only fantasize as a human subject. The
becoming child is becoming human precisely in its garnering of
material from this incestuous proximity with an unknown human-
izing otherness that cannot yet be human although this encountering
is what conditions that possibility.

What if, through a feminist turn within psychoanalysis, we can
imagine what Ettinger names a different difference? Here the femi-
nine is not just the yawning void of a non-subjective body but
signifies an inter/trans-subjectivizing structure/encounter/space
where potentially human subjects co-emerge and co-transform
within a space of minimal difference? Neither fused nor separated,
yet distinct and sharing, a structure can be imagined that delivers
potential for fantasy and meaning to the human subject that arises
from the feminine outside of its definition by the phallic. Risking
what is for phallic thought the unthinkable and the heretical, we can
hypothesize psychoanalytically, hence without any risk of essential-
ism, a before-birth moment of archaic encounter/severality that,
like all elements psychoanalysis theorizes, exists only in its non-
originary repetitions of events occurring traumatically, that is, too
early for meaning-making but not too early to lay down the imprint

beyond oedipus 107

for later psychic investments and recaptures in fantasy. Holding fast
to the psychoanalytical logic of belated, retrospective catching up of
corpo-real ‘events’ into psychic representation, we can non-
essentialistically think of relays between the zones of trauma (the
real) and fantasy/thought (imaginary and symbolic). Thus Ettinger
proposes a supplementary humanizing dimension that, not dis-
placing but supplementing and differencing the phallic, deserves
the designation matrixial-feminine because it is the sexual specifi-
city of the feminine that brings this dimension into human possibil-
ity via this braiding of real and imaginary encounter.

The matrixial as supplementary stratum offers the potential for
experiences subjacent to language: especially those we encounter
through the affective channels of artistic practice and imaginative
experience in ritual, drama, sound, and image. What if the experi-
ence of art is itself dependent on unconsciously activating that
re-encounter with human meaning, meanings that structure our
sense of being human (sex and death and the beyond)? If myth is
the childhood of art, encoding the deepest affectivities and anxie-
ties, can we not, like Zoe¨ Bertgang, deliver it into analysis and
transformative knowledge to a different effect?

Theories of subjectivity and theories of the aesthetic so encoded
in myth converge at the site of revised theories of sexuality and
sexual difference. At its most basic, Ettinger’s matrixial supplement
to theories of subjectivity and sexual difference allows us to revisit
key sites of Western discourse on art and on the subject with the
possibility that the feminine can be theorized beyond the Oedipal
concept of woman as the castrated or abjected other, the desired
incestuous mother or the passive unwanted sister. We can think a
different feminine structuring as a supplementary dimension of
subjectivity not based on the cut alone: castration—but also on
combination of minimal difference (adult/becoming child) and con-
nectivity, shared border-spaces and co-affection.

Never, I tell you,
if I had been the mother of children
or if my husband had died, exposed and rotting—
I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself,
never defied the people’s will. What law,
you ask, do I satisfy with what I say?

108 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

A husband dead, there might have been another.
A child by another too, if I had lost the first.
But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death,
no brother could ever spring to light again.47

When Antigone speaks from the point of no return condemned
between a no-life and not-yet-death of enclosure, alive in a tomb,
she utters a long lament that explains her actions.48 What she has
done, to bury her criminal brother on pain of death for disobeying
the king’s edict that he should remain dishonoured, she declares she
would only do for a brother. This is the point at which Goethe and
other commentators have balked. Why so?

Antigone’s argument is that a child or a husband can be replaced.
But once her mother and father/brother are dead, there can be no
more brothers, no others who shared in this space of generation that
bonds her particularly with this representative of the human family.
Her speech can, therefore, invoke the maternal matrix—the womb
invoked in the Greek adelphos—as a site that can structure meaning
and become the basis for an ethical position. In Lacan’s text, this
evocation of the mother’s body and her desire is, however, swiftly
erased by being folded immediately into the paternal metaphor: ‘born
of the same womb . . . and having been related to the same father’.49
Under this patriarchal slippage, the brother functions then as the sign
of the One, the unique, the irreplaceable, that which the phallus
signifies through its logic of the One and its negation, life or death.

Painter and psychoanalytical theorist, Bracha Ettinger questions
the exclusive sovereignty of this logic and suggests that a shifting of
this phallic perspective allows us to imagine dimensions of subject-
ivity—especially those that flash out in our encounter with the
aesthetic—beyond the phallic model of One and its Other, life/
death, nature/culture, masculine/feminine, presence/absence. She
transgressively dares to think of the constituting shadow of mater-
nal, that is, adult feminine sexuality and desire as signified by ‘the
borderspace of the several’ that is the generation of children as a
support for other fantasies and other logics that are premised on

47 Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Eagles, 105.
48 These form lines 995–1004, in ibid. Eagles, 105.
49 Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 279.

beyond oedipus 109

trans-subjectivity from the start. This does not mean things origin-
ate in the female body in a reductive or essentialist fashion. It argues
that our psychic beginnings in this space of severality makes con-
nectivity the originating condition of subjectivity instead of the
usual view that it is a series of cuts and separations: birth, weaning,
language, castration that form the founding conditions of the sub-
ject. Ettinger has forged from her reflections on her own painting,
arising at the open passageway of transmitted trauma between
generations of the Holocaust, two new terms to locate her theoret-
ical innovation in relation to our accepted theories of poetic mean-
ing and figurative speech: matrix and metamorphosis.

There is nothing cosy about the situation of matrixial co-subject-
ivity. It is the pathway of transmitted trauma, hatred, anxiety, or
fear as much as it can become the basis for theorizing the way in
which what is not me can none the less affect me, and in which I can
handle affects that are not mine: these capacities seem critical to
understanding the transmission of trauma and affect that art as
encounter induces at the level of subjectivities. In the matrixial
supplementation of our theories of the subject, subjectivity func-
tions as an encounter and not only, as in phallic logic, as the effect of
the cut, of separation. Using the metaphor of psychic aerials tuning
in and out to transmitted signals that acquire shape and form once
registered even beyond the permeable place of the boundaried I,
Bracha Ettinger furthermore retheorizes a dimension of the gaze in
the field of vision that painting in what I have named ‘painting after
painting, after history’ illuminates.50 This involves a visual field
which incites a longing to look as the desire for proximity or

50 Painting after painting in after-history refers to a feminist resumption
of the unfinished business of painting prematurely foreclosed in the tactic-
ally necessary anti-modernist moves of feminist critiques of modernism. It
also locates this resumption within the field of post-Auschwitz aesthetics
and philosophy. We both come after history and exist in a new epoch
beyond previous historical patterns as a result of the Holocaust. See Gri-
selda Pollock, ‘Gleaning in History. . . ’ in G. Pollock (ed.), Generations
and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London, 1996),
266–88 and Griselda Pollock, ‘Painting as a Backward Glance that Does
not Kill’, in ed. Greg Hainge (ed.), Fascism and Aesthetics, special issue of
Renaissance and Modern Studies, 43, (2001), 116–44.

110 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

reconnection while never letting a gaze fix, master, or hide, grow
active and turn passive.

Secondly, in lieu of the figures of metaphor and metonymy, figures
of substitution characterizing phallic signification, dreamwork, and
analysis, Ettinger coins the term metramorphosis as the passage-
way through which ‘affected events, materials and modes of being
infiltrate and diversify onto non-conscious margins of the Symbolic
through/by sub-symbolic webs.’ Thus never rising fully to what
Julia Kristeva would name the communicative dimension of the
symbolic, but hovering like her concept of the semiotic, at its
transformative margins where affectivity hinges bodily intensities
to the sub-symbolic intimation of meaning as affect, metramorpho-
sis catches poetically that which we have now come to experience
and accept in radical moments of modern painting from Rothko
onwards. Locatable in traditional art historical framings, the moves
that Bracha Ettinger’s paintings now dare to make by looping back
to reconnect with that suspended moment ‘after Rothko’ are also to
be considered under the sign of her Antigone for another historical
reason. The artist/theorist writes and we read again:

What in Antigone’s argument is waiting to be heard and com-passioned, is
her suffering from the tearing away into total separateness of her principal
partner-in-difference, until this moment separated-in-jointness. If the al-
most impossible knowledge of the Thing-Event concerns the originary
feminine rapport, it is not death itself that inflicts the horrible cut in the
matrixial web, but the passage to a bestiality that threatens to blow up and
explode this sphere altogether into separate pieces.51

Antigone must bury her brother not because he is the irreplace-
able One, but because he is a partner in a co-humanity. His bes-
tialization by lying unburied for the birds and dogs to tear his flesh is
inescapably her transmitted trauma. The death of the other is in part
my death if we take the definition of a human openness to reside in
that archaic encounter under the feminine matrixial web as the
co-emergence of subjectivity in a relation of non-familiar I and
non-I. According to Ettinger, Antigone would rather die than bear
the mauling of her human link with the (br)other. His relation to

51 Ettinger, ‘Trangressing’, 205.

beyond oedipus 111

her, however, stems not from his real personality as a good or bad
man (as Creon tries to persuade Antigone in the text), nor from
family loyalty based on a shared fatherhood or even parentage with
Oedipus and Jocasta as their twice-over pro-genitor. It is an ethical
act, a statement of an unbreachable co-affectivity ‘in, of and from
the feminine’ as a structure of human possibility that, arising in the
Real of our vital gestation, awaits imaginative and symbolic
re-articulation to become a means of thinking and fantasizing who
and what we are in that forever belated process of re-enactment in
image and thought that is psychic life and symbolic representation.
It is this that Antigone performs in a speech that calls to us for
understanding of a pain she can hardly bear now its consequences
are to be lived: she calls to us as witnesses and co-com-passionate.
As image, she is not feminine because Antigone is a female charac-
ter, a daughter-sister of Oedipus, challenging the laws of the state
with those of a pre-social kinship. In this text by Sophocles, the
woman’s, Antigone’s, words produce an image in, of, and from
the [matrixial] feminine in affective performance of the anguish of
her trans-subjective suffering, her suffering as trans-subjectivity.

It is not, therefore, as Judith Butler has argued, Antigone’s dis-
ordering place in kinship relations that Sophocles’ play offers to our
changed hearing and compassioning, but her elevation of a struc-
ture of the matrixial feminine severality to an ethical articulation as
an act.

Have I lost you all? In this labyrinth of post-Lacanian aesthetics,
it is easy to lose one’s way and find oneself misunderstood. For
nothing is so precluded from feminist thought than the feminine,
especially in any suggestive relation to its bodily sites of desire and
creativity. Through already approved theoretical paradigms we are
permitted to decry its abjection and our peers respect us when we
wish to find ways beyond it, beyond Oedipus. But why can nothing
of the feminine in its sexual specificity be ever imagined as consti-
tutive of what it is to be human? Why must this astonishing prox-
imity of the becoming, co-affecting two that is the doubled passage
of human creation be denied any place in our imaginative and
symbolic orders?

For Bracha Ettinger, what lurks awaiting recognition as a philo-
sophical and dramatic trace in the play by Sophocles has a terrible

112 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

concrete resonance in the historical moment of which she is the
bearer. The wound to the matrixial web of co-humanity invokes the
bestiality of the unmarked, unburied inhuman dying of her own
family/people and those of the Roma, Sinti, and Lalieri peoples in
ghettos, execution sites, and concentration camps of the Jewish and
Romany Final Solutions in Europe between 1941 and 1945. Found
or sought in the anonymous and ubiquitous images of atrocity that
form the photographic archive of that genocide, her recurrent paint-
ing of three haunting figures of her unburied non-Is stay time and
hold that crime and its mourning before our eyes (Fig. 3.8).

Bracha Ettinger began painting in the mid-1980s with a series of
large-scale canvases titled After the Reapers. Seared onto nuclear-
ized landscapes of disaster, gesturally evoked traces of skeletal
bodies and death’s heads marked the limits of the Western represen-
tational tradition premised on the bounty of the land and the
specular idealization of the body. The ash of cremated millions
beneath the grass of Europe, the unbearable images of corpses of
those starved to an inhuman death potentially mark the ethical end
of the possibility of that once self-affirming and beneficent Western
tradition of figure and landscape. Turning to the ultimate anti-
auratic machine, the photocopier, the artist began to work with
the remnant of a Family Album that now historically registered
the dislocation and yawning absence: the Shoah.52 Passing found
images of both a personal and a collective archive through the
photocopy machine while interrupting it at the point it scattered
its dust/ash as the residue of the burnt image, Bracha Ettinger
assembled only fragments of apparitions into ghostly assemblages
of invisible bodies by placing several papers in vertical Perspex
framings. The fragments on torn papers of sometimes searing violet
were assembled into spectral figures and combinations that

52 Anyone directly involved in the Shoah necessarily scans these often
unidentified photographs of camps, massacres, and ghettos, fearing as
much as desiring to recognize a lost family member. Could these people
be me, could they be a sister, mother, grandmother, aunt, friend? Thus the
actual remnants of family photographs and the whole archive of the col-
lective disaster resonate with personal and immediate terror as well as
longing to refind, even for a moment.

ig. 3.8. Bracha Ettinger Eurydice no. 17, 1994–6. oil and xerox on paper mounted on canva
25.2 Â 52 cm, mounted on chassis, 29 Â 55.5 cm. (Private collection.).

114 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

reformed a fractured alphabet of what she named ‘the memory of
oblivion’.53

In the early 1990s she began a series called Autistworks, returning
to these intermediate spectres that dusted the page, with her paint-
loaded brush, but now with colours of red and violet, the colours of
blood and of grief. If something of Western representational logic
was incinerated at Auschwitz, aspects of the formalist and literalist
attention to painting’s defining potentialities as space and colour
could be once again re-articulated, but on the other side of this
radical post-modern disillusion.

In 1992 the artist began a third major series, whose title evoked
another marginalized feminine figure of the classical archive: Eur-
ydice, the mythic woman abandoned at the mouth of a hell she had
already seen by her artist lover Orpheus and killed in a second death
by his backward glance. Eurydice is also a figure of the feminine that
allows us to ask what she, like Antigone, might say from that place
between two deaths. Like many of her works there is a recurring
encounter that Bracha Ettinger repeatedly re-stages through work-
ing again and again from one image of a frieze of naked women
about to be shot, taken from an unidentified photograph of mass
murder by Einsatzgruppen Aktionen in Mizroc in the Ukraine in
1941. Isolating three figures, a woman with her head averted, a
woman appealing to the place where the viewer now stands but
that once held the perpetrator soldier photographic witness, and
a woman tenderly protecting her small child in her arms, Bracha
Ettinger has spent over a decade at this arresting spot both bringing
her ‘three graces’ back into view and fading away representational
violence by an aesthetic practice of painting on that suffering as
support. Bracha Ettinger’s paintings lay veils of colour to deflect our
looking from the naked atrocity that the genocidal gaze of the

53 Bracha Ettinger, Matrix Hala(a)—Lapsus: Notes on Painting (Oxford,
1992). These are the carnets in which the artist daily recorded responses to
her painting practice and from whose scattered grains she began to develop a
theorization that, once transplanted to the terrain of psychoanalysis, could
offer another means of thinking and articulating what arose in and through
an aesthetic practice of painting as trans-subjectivizing encounter. These
writings are textually analysed by Carolyn Drucker, Translating the Matrix,
Versus Occasional Paper, 1, Versus, 3 (1994).

beyond oedipus 115

original photograph encodes. Her combination of machinic draw-
ing in ash and overpainting in searing violets or reds shields the
women from the voyeuristic or abjecting gaze, bringing the intensity
of face and gesture: these are her pathos formulae—close enough to
the viewer to establish the possibility of affecting contact across
time that becomes materialized in the space that painting can create.
But this contact then remains suspended at the gulf that marks the
epoch that began here, the epoch Adorno names ‘After Auschwitz’.
Attentive to the physical and material marks that conjure the illu-
sion of the image in the same movement as it returns to materiality
and thus dissipates into its irreducible colour and gesture, the artist
works and works again with veils and webs of grief colours to ‘erase
all image while conserving its constituents: its fragility, its screen, its
blur, its abstract character, its ‘‘shadow space’’[Michaux].’ Christine
Buci-Glucksman calls this ‘veil-painting’ and ‘violet skin’.54

Yet, as theorists of the transmitted trauma argue, these ghosts and
their past inhabit the artist as a child of survivors occupying her own
present, constituting an expanded trans-subjective field that makes
her participate in traumatic ways with their dying which, like Zoe¨
the analytical life bearer, she argues can be otherwise mourned
through a matrixial processing of traumatic encounter in the metra-
morphic process of painting and matrixial gazing. It is not just a
matter of life or death, but of co-emerging at their threshold. Thus
Ettinger argues against Lacan, insisting that, because of the Matrix,

life and death are constituted in the psyche as already human even when
beyond the reach of the human symbolic exchange or communication, even
at the corpo-real level. Human body is not animal body. Non-human
bestiality inflicted on any of my non-Is diminishes, and can also abolish,
the capacity of the matrixial web for the reabsorption of loss, for transfer-
ence of memory and for the processing of mourning. Antigone’s private
death—she hangs herself in the womb-tomb—is less a price to pay than
living through the irremediable explosion of the matrixial borderspace.
Antigone literally acknowledges the corpo-real source of this psychical
space: the shareable maternal womb.55

54 Christine Buci-Glucksman, ‘The Inner Space of Painting’, in Bracha
Ettinger, Halala Autiswork (Aix en Provence, 1995), 58–68.

55 Ettinger, ‘Trangressing’, 205.

116 g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k

The painter, working through a joint psychoanalytical and aes-
thetic exploration of/conversation with the mythic images of Anti-
gone/Eurydice as figures for the present historical moment of a post-
Shoah Jewish feminine subjectivity, proposes the aesthetic: the
shocking encounter with the other’s dying, as the site of an aesthetic
poeı¨sis that generates an ethical dimension: the encounter with the
human in the space of the inhuman act of its desecration that can, in
its ethical witnessing become a transport/transformation.

What speaks to me through this painter’s practice and her reading
of Sophocles’ Antigone mediated by Lacan’s aesthetic turning is the
anguish of the survivor’s child. Formed by a transmitted trauma
from a past event she did not witness, she becomes not only a
witness without an event, which is, she then argues, the condition
of every viewer of art, the inheritor of affect without the historical
cause being known in ourselves. The artist also becomes what she
calls a wit(h)ness, capable of bearing the trauma of others, or rather,
incapable of not sharing it. Yet this gives death a means of transport
to another site of living, even if that is still tragic. Antigone’s stance
is not to set moral social law below family law, or the law of the
gods who represent for human thought the beyond and below of
being itself. The mythic figure of Antigone can be reread to offer
what the historical trauma of our times has made horrifyingly real:
that all our humanity is compromised if any of us is reduced from
the human to the bestial, that such a wounding of the commonality
can become a political intention, a bureaucratic aim, an adminis-
trative achievement that makes us collectively wonder what Anti-
gone faced individually: what are the conditions for living on?
Ettinger suggests that humanity arises not in the logic of phallic
difference, one/other, but is unqualified, originary and that such a
connectivity arises from and is the gift—dora—of a feminine site of
matrixial co-subjectivity. Funeral rites are a mark of the human,
but, Bracha Ettinger is arguing, only because being itself is already
human through the matrixial, feminine prism and thus the feminine
enters into thought not merely as the Thing/Other/Death or nega-
tivity and radical alterity. The feminine subjectivizes from that place
of always already human becoming. If that is the case then sexuality
as well as the aesthetic and the ethical is intimately associated with
the matrixial site of feminine difference.

beyond oedipus 117

If feminine originary sexual difference is an enigma of which we can know
something through the matrixial prism, and if this prism opens to us the
contact with the spaces of non-life, the transgression [the aller-outre, the
outrage] with/in/to the feminine via the process of art has a particular
aesthetic effect because in transmitting sub-knowledge from the site of
transgression, in a borderspace that contacts by a surplus of borderlinking,
the artist can bear wit(h)ness to and articulate sub-knowledge of/from the
sex of the other. The fate of Tiresias—the figure who transgressed from male
to female and back—which is impossible in the phallic stratum is also a
matrixial ‘promise of happiness’ even if such beauty is tragic [as is the work
of Bracha Ettinger in repeatedly visiting the site of Eurydice—woman
caught between two deaths at the mouth of hell].56

The mythic feminine figures of Antigone and Eurydice thus flash
out as mytho-poetic signifiers for an intellectual and political com-
munity concerned to re-stage the relations between classical myth
and feminist thought in an ethics of our anxious present that can
take on Freud’s injunctions to look to our own experience, and to
our poets/artists and then to write our insights into theoretical
formulations that offer a means of placing the matrixial concept
of the feminine as a profoundly important contribution to those
areas for which the Western classics remain a continuing archive
and provocation: ethics, aesthetics, and human sociality.

56 Ibid. 205–6.

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part ii

Myth and Politics

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4

Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond: Antigones
and the Politics of Psychoanalysis

M iriam Leonard

In her recent book Antigone’s Claim Judith Butler returns to a
question once posed by George Steiner: What would have happened
if psychoanalysis had taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its
point of departure? If Freud has forever changed the meaning of
Sophocles’ Oedipus for the twentieth century, Oedipus’ daughter/
sister seems largely to have escaped the analysts’ couch. But, as
Griselda Pollock has argued in this volume, a desire to move ‘be-
yond Oedipus’ has gripped the recent history of psychoanalysis. As
Pollock notes, ‘there can be no doubt that what both liberated and
blocked Freud imaginatively and intellectually was the figuration of
the human psyche through the exclusive structure of the Oedipus
myth’. While psychoanalysis has its origins in Freud’s encounter
with ‘a series of highly intelligent young woman patients’, the
analyis of the female psyche was ‘ultimately buried when his own

Thanks to Vanda Zajko, Charles Martindale, Griselda Pollock, Katie Flem-
ing, and Simon Goldhill for their help with this essay. I would also like to
thank the editors of PCPS where a longer version of this essay with a
different focus appeared in 2003.

122 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

self analysis . . . laid over that rich seam . . . the narcissistic image of
an exclusively masculine, Oedipal psyche’.

But the move ‘beyond Oedipus’ has coincided with the re-emer-
gence of Antigone as a crucial figure in the post-Freudian history of
psychoanalysis. For Jacques Lacan, Antigone will come to occupy a
pivotal role in his formulation of an ethics of psychoanalysis. Mov-
ing away from the Hegelian reading of the play as a clash between
opposing political positions, Lacan will identify Antigone with an
ethics of pure desire. Luce Irigaray returns to Antigone to uncover
the phallogocentric bias of both the Hegelian and Lacanian read-
ings. For Irigaray, Antigone’s exclusion from the political is no self-
willed exile, but is rather the result of the prejudice of her readers
from Hegel to Lacan and beyond. The conflict between Lacan and
Irigaray, I will argue, provides us with one answer to Steiner’s
question: If psychoanalysis had taken Antigone rather than Oedipus
as its point of departure it would have given rise to a more explicitly
politicized understanding of the psychoanalytic sexual subject. The
confrontation over the Antigone not only marked a crucial turning-
point in the history of psychoanalysis and its relationship to feminist
thought, it also raises important questions about the relationship
between ethics and politics in feminist theory more generally. The
debate about ethics and politics in the Antigone is also fundamen-
tally a debate about feminism’s relationship to the political.

lacan’s antigone and the ethics of

pure desire

Lacan’s reading of the Antigone appears within the context of his
seminar devoted to The Ethics of Psychoanalysis1. As Lacan
explains in his introductory session on the Antigone:

1 Lacan’s reading of the Antigone has recently attracted the attention of
several critics: see Patrick Guyomard, La Jouissance du tragique: Antigone,
Lacan, et le de´sir de l’analyste, (Paris, 1992); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
‘De l’e´thique: a` propos d’Antigone’, in N. Autonomova et al. (eds.), Lacan
avec les philosophes (Paris, 1991), 31; Philippe Julien, Pour lire Jacques
Lacan: Le retour a` Freud, (Paris, 1995); Philippe Van Haute, ‘Death and

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 123

I told you that I would talk about Antigone today. I am not the one who has
decreed that Antigone is to be the turning point in the field that interests us,
namely, ethics. People have been aware of that for a long time. And even
those who haven’t realized it are not unaware of the fact that there are
scholarly debates on the topic. Is there anyone who doesn’t evoke Antigone
whenever there is a question of law that causes conflict in us even though it
is acknowledged by the community to be a just law?2

Lacan thus places the Antigone at the centre of the history of moral
and political thought. But his language here is interesting. The
slippage in terminology between a politics and an ethics of the
Antigone will be crucial to Lacan. It will be this gap, this impasse
between an ethics and a politics of psychoanalysis which will be at
the centre of my reading of Lacan’s Antigone. Lacan’s conceptual-
ization of ethics consciously writes itself in and against a whole
tradition of ethical thought—stretching, as he puts it, ‘from Aris-
totle to Freud’.3 But his search involves a complex manipulation of
ethical, moral, and political discourse.

Lacan’s depoliticizing gesture is achieved through a reading of the
Sophoclean drama which places the figure of Antigone at the fore-
ground of the play. In Lacan’s version there is no room for any
further protagonists—this is the tragedy of Antigone and Antigone
alone. Creon finds himself utterly marginalized in Lacan’s interpret-
ation. In the Lacanian reading, it will precisely be the desire of

Sublimation in Lacan’s reading of the Antigione’, in S. Harasym (ed.),
Le´vinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter (New York, 1998), 102–20;
Lisa Walsh, ‘Her Mother Her Self: The Ethics of the Antigone Family
Romance’, Hypathia, 14.3 (1999), 96–125; Jean-Michel Rabate´, Jacques
Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (New York, 2001);
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New
York, 2000); and Cecilia Sjo¨ holm, ‘Family Values: Butler, Lacan and the
Rise of Antigone’, Radical Philosophy 111 (2001), 24–32. For some read-
ings by classicists see Nicole Loraux, ‘Antigone sans the´aˆtre’, in Autono-
mova et al. (eds.), Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris, 1991), 42–9; Paul
Allen Miller, ‘The Classical Roots of Post-Structuralism: Lacan, Derrida,
Foucault’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition (1998), 204–25;
and Jean Bollack, La Mort d’Antigone: la trage´die de Creon (Paris, 1999).

2 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar
of Jacques Lacan, tr. Dennis Portter (London, 1992), 243.

3 Ibid. 9.

124 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

Antigone, outside the political context of a struggle of law and
authority with Creon, which will provide the basis of Lacan’s elab-
oration of the ethical programme of psychoanalysis.

So Lacan begins by asserting: ‘What does one find in the Anti-
gone? First of all, one finds Antigone’. Or as the classicist Nicole
Loraux has put it: ‘It is indeed Antigone, and only her, that Lacan
encounters—‘‘the heroine and not necessarily the play’’, and I’m not
sure that theatre really gets a look in this exclusive encounter’.4
Entitled ‘Antigone sans the´aˆ tre’, Loraux’s essay on Lacan’s Anti-
gone can be read as a polite call to repoliticize psychoanalysis’s
appropriation of antiquity. I want to suggest that Loraux’s critique
of Lacan, her accusation that he leaves theatre out of the Antigone,
can be read as a criticism of Lacan’s lack of attention to the politics
of Athenian drama—when Loraux tries to put the ‘the´aˆ tre’ back
into Lacan’s commentary, she finds herself reintroducing the ‘city’
into the ‘psyche’ of Lacan’s Antigone.

So, if Loraux begins her analysis by praising Lacan for moving
away from the ‘pious discourse’ on the Antigone, she nevertheless
shrinks back from endorsing the outright rejection of the Hegelian
reading—Lacan’s primary target in his commentary. For Hegel’s
reading of the Antigone is absolutely central to understanding the
politics of Lacan’s commitment to an ethical reading of the Anti-
gone5. It is precisely against the dialectical reading of this play that

4 Loraux, ‘Antigone’, 42.
5 Hegel’s reading of the Antigone spans several of his major works
although the most important discussions appear in the Philosophy of
Right, the Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s writings
on tragedy are conveniently assembled in A. Paolucci and H. Paolucci
(eds.), Hegel on Tragedy (New York, 1962). The bibliography on Hegel’s
Antigone is vast. See George Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in
Westen Literature, Art and Thought (Oxford, 1984); Ciro Alegria, Trago¨ -
die und bu¨ rgerliche Gesellschaft: Motive und Probleme der politischen
Aufhebung des ‘Notstaats’ bei Hegel (Frankfurt am Main, 1995); Chris-
toph Menke, Trago¨ die im Sittlichen: Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel
(Frankfurt am Main 1996); Martin Donougho, ‘The Woman in White:
On the Reception of Hegel’s ‘‘Antigone’’ ’, Owl of Minerva, 21.1 (1989),
65–89; Judith Shklar, ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology an Elegy for Hellas’, in
Z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspec-
tives (Cambridge, 1971), 73–89; William Conklin, ‘Hegel, the Author and

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 125

Lacan’s analysis is written. Hegel’s seminal interpretation of Sopho-
cles in the Phenomenology of Spirit dramatizes a clash between
family and State, the individual and the polis. Hegel’s meditation
on the nature of Antigone’s ethical consciousness is crucial to
understanding the passage between ethics and politics in Lacan:
Hegel denies Antigone full ethical consciousness which aims at the
universal. For Hegel’s Antigone, in other words, there is no acces-
sion to the political. Lacan starts from a different premise. He
defines his project as a search for what he calls ‘le pur desire’,
‘pure desire’. And it is Lacan’s pur de´sir which is explicitly at odds
with the ‘morality’ of Hegel’s dialectical reading:

In effect, Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire. This line
of sight focuses on an image that possesses a mystery which up till now has
never been articulated, since it forces you to close your eyes at the very
moment you look at it. Yet that image is at the centre of tragedy, since it is
the fascinating image of Antigone herself. We all know very well that over
and beyond the dialogue and the moralizing arguments, it is Antigone
herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor. She has a
quality which both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us;
this terrible self-willed victim disturbs us.6

Lacan demands that his readers do not confuse his ethics of psycho-
analysis with pre-existing moral discourses: ‘We are now in a pos-
ition’, he tells us, ‘to be able to discuss the text of Antigone with a view
to finding something other than a lesson in morality.’7 As we saw
above, Lacan wants to prise apart his ethics from ‘la morale’, and it is
precisely in this space that he wants to construct his innovative
programme.

But as Loraux puts it:

Authority in Sophocles’ Antigione’, in L. Rubin (ed.), Justice v. Law in
Greek Political Thought (New York, 1997), 129–52. For feminist perspec-
tives see Butler, Antigone’s Claim, Shari Neller Starret, ‘Critical Relations in
Hegel: Woman, Family and the Divine’, in P. Mills (ed.), Feminist Inter-
pretations of G. W. F. Hegel (University Park, Pa., 1996), 253–74; and
Kimberly Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford, 2003).

6 Lacan, Ethics, 247.
7 Ibid. 292.

126 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

Assigning to Antigone this position beyond the limit, Lacan knows or wants
us to suppose, although he gets pleasure from not pointing it out directly,
is tantamount to forbidding any return to Antigone and Creon, a couple
which is Hegelian, for sure, but not purely Hegelian. Lacan is only
concerned with Antigone and prefers to exile the all too human Creon
from tragedy—from Antigone’s tragedy. . . . Its beautiful. . . . But this
would mean that one would have to stop reading the tragedy at the moment
of the heroine’s exit from the stage, or at the very least before the arrival of
the messenger so one could ignore the second passion of the Antigone, that
of Creon where the name of Antigone is not once spoken.8

So, as Loraux reveals, Lacan will have to do away with a good third
of Sophocles’ drama if he wants his interpretation to stick.9 The
almost complete absence of reference to Antigone’s tragedy in the
last 300 lines of the play makes a difference to Lacan’s reading of
Antigone’s ‘fascination’. More important than this distortion of the
tragic narrative, however, are the consequences of Lacan’s reading
for his ethics. Loraux’s interjection, ‘It’s beautiful’, has perhaps
more significance than her subsequent remarks allow. For the
whole project of Lacan’s reading is predicated on a fundamental
interdependency of ethics and aesthetics.10

The violent illumination, the glow of beauty, coincides with the moment of
transgression or of realization of Antigone’s Ate, which is the characteristic
that I have chiefly insisted on and which introduced us to the exemplary
function of Antigone’s problem in allowing us to determine the function of
certain effects. It is in that direction that a certain relationship to a beyond
of the central field is established for us, but it is also that which prevents us
from seeing its true nature, that which dazzles us and separates us from its
true function.11

8 Loraux, ‘Antigone’, 43.
9 Jean Bollack argues in his book La Mort d’Antigone: la trage´die de
Creon that Creon is the true subject of the Antigone’s tragedy. Lacan comes
under explicit attack on pp. 98–104.
10 See Pollock above and her discussion of B. Ettinger ‘Transgressing
With-In-To the Feminine’ in P. Florence and N. Foster (eds.), Differential
Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings (Alder-
shot, 2000), 185–209.
11 Lacan, Ethics, 281.

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 127

Lacan’s ethics are rather what Lacoue-Labarthe will characterize as
an ‘esthe´thique.’12 For what is at stake in Lacan’s heroization of
Antigone is precisely the beauty of her choice. A beauty which is not
assimilated to any particular good. In Paul Allen Miller’s words:
‘For Lacan, it is the beauty of Antigone’s choice of a Good beyond
all recognisable goods, beyond the pleasure principle, that gives her
character its monumental status and makes her a model for an
ethics of creation rather than conformity’.13

In order for Antigone’s choice to signify within the economics of a
Lacanian ethics, Antigone must be removed from any dialectic with
Creon. To see Antigone’s choice as pitting one value up against
another, one dike in conflict with another, would be fundamentally
to misunderstand the nature of her tragedy. As Van Haute puts it:
‘According to [Lacan], what is at stake here is not a conflict between
two contrary principles, each of which can make claim to equal justice
or injustice; it is in fact, says Lacan, a matter of a conflict between, on
the one hand, Creon, who makes a mistake, and on the other, Anti-
gone, who is found, as it were, jenseits von Gut und Bo¨ se.’14 Lacan
can, of course, rest his case on the notorious difficulty of constructing
a convincing discourse of Antigone’s familial piety. We know well that
Antigone’s differential treatment of her family members and her
uncomfortable hierarchy of family ties has made it difficult to assimi-
late her cause to a simple model of the dike of the oikos. Her speech at
905 ff. is, of course, at the centre of this controversy:

Never, had I been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in
death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city’s despite. What law, ye
ask, is my warrant for that word? The husband lost, another might have been
found, and child from another to replace the first-born; but father and mother
hidden with Hades, no brother’s life could ever bloom for me again. (Jebb)

Hegel’s well-known interpretation of this passage not only sets up a
dialectic between human and divine laws but also establishes sexual
difference as the basis of its moral thought:

12 Lacoue-Labarthe ‘De l’e´thique’, 31.
13 Paul Allen Miller, ‘The Classical Roots of Post-Structuralism: Lacan,
Derrida, Foucault’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5.2
(1998), 209.
14 Van Haute, ‘Death and Sublimation’, 111.

128 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

The loss of the brother is therefore irreparable to the sister and her duty
towards him is the highest . . . The brother is the member of the Family in
whom Spirit becomes an individuality which turns towards another sphere,
and passes over into the consciousness of universality [ . . . ] He passes from
the divine law, in whose sphere he lived, over to the human law. But the
sister becomes, or the wife remains, the guardian of the divine law. In this
way the two sexes overcome their (merely) natural being and appear in
ethical significance, as diverse beings who share between them the two
distinctions belonging to ethical substance.

Where for Hegel what had been at stake was a fundamental colli-
sion between the laws of the Gods and those of the polis,15 Lacan
exiles the gods from his tragic world. As Lacan phrases it, ‘It isn’t
simply the defence of the sacred rights of the dead and of the family,
nor is it all that we have been told about Antigone’s saintliness.’16
Lacan’s secularizing gesture removes his Antigone from the ethical
framework set up by Hegel. Far from representing a pious female
‘ethical substance’, for Lacan, the gaps in Antigone’s logic of the
oikos are tantamount to introducing the fundamental tautology of
her existence:

‘My brother is what he is, and it is because he is what he is and only he can
be what he is, that I move forward to the fatal limit’. So it is that Antigone
invokes no other right than that one, a right that emerges in the language
of the ineffaceable character of what is—ineffaceable, that is, from the
moment when the emergent signifier freezes it like a fixed object in spite
of the flood of possible transformations. What is, is, and it is to this, to this
surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed.17

In Lacan’s reading, Antigone’s choice to bury Polynices becomes the
ultimate ethical action precisely because it is disinherited of any
moral logic. But how resonant is this of the Hegelian Antigone?
For it is Hegel’s Antigone who is famously denied the ability to
understand moral logic, to make an ethical choice. In Lacan it is
the absolutist, tautologous, self-referential nature of Antigone’s

15 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford,
1977), 275.On Hegel, Antigone, and religion see Steiner, Antigones, and
Starret, ‘Critical Relations’.

16 Lacan, Ethics., 255.
17 Ibid. 279.

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 129

motivation—a motivation without motive—which is precisely what
makes it an ethics:

Because he is abandoned to the dogs and the birds and will end his appear-
ance on earth in impurity, with his scattered limbs an offense to heaven and
earth, it can be seen that Antigone’s position represents the radical limit that
affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, to
whatever good or evil Polyneices may have done, or whatever he may be
subjected to.18

But Lacan continues:

The unique value involved is essentially that of language. That purity, that
separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama that 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 presence of language
inaugurates in the life of man.19

In Antigone’s relation to her brother, Lacan’s ethics of psychoanaly-
sis bring us back to language, to discourse, to the splitting of the self
through man’s encounter with the symbolic. Many classicists have
also commented on the necessary interrelationship between lan-
guage and the politics and ethics of the Antigone.20 One could
think of how the discourse of dike becomes profoundly destabilized
in the clash of violent rhetorics of Antigone and Creon or how the
language of duty decomposes around the different models of polit-
ical and familial responsibility debated by Creon and Haemon. But
Lacan’s rejection of the Hegelian dialectic, of any kind of dialogue
between Creon and Antigone, indeed of any context for Antigone’s
discourse, makes his a vision of Sophoclean drama where language
rebounds in a self-referential echoing with no connection to social
or political debate. Lacan’s ‘Antigone sans the´aˆ tre’ is precisely an
Antigone removed from the theatre of language, from the politics of
drama.

18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

20 See Simon Goldhill, ‘Greek Drama and Political Theory’, in C. Rowe,

M. Schofield (eds.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political

Thought (Cambridge, 2000), 60–88; and Nicole Loraux, ‘La Main d’Anti-

gone’ Metis 1 (1986), 165–96.

130 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

Lacan’s anti-moralism, in founding his ethics of psychoanalysis
on the notion of ‘pure desire’, recalls a familiar discourse of struc-
turalism. For it is precisely this tendency of structuralist discourse to
make the ‘linguistic turn’, far removed from any social or ideo-
logical context, which has made it so suspect to its politically
engaged critics. Lacan would seem to perform this tendency almost
to its limits in his reading of the Antigone under the sign of an ethics
of psychoanalysis. For the ethics of pure desire would in a sense
seem to be the personification of a double rejection of politics by the
joint forces of structuralist and psychoanalytic discourse. But it is
precisely at the moment when a system professes purity that it is the
most vulnerable to political abuse. In other words, Lacan’s model of
a pure, contentless ethics can all too easily let in all kinds of dubious
ideological contents through the back door.

But not only does his reading leave itself open to dangerous political
manipulation, Lacan’s own discourse of pure desire is hardly a politics-
free zone. Even were one to accept Lacan’s distancing of the Antigone
from the moral plain, it hardly seems right, in the context of Sophocles’
drama, to claim that Antigone’s desire is entirely pure. In fact, it is a
paradox of Lacan’s reading that this psychoanalytic interpretation
pays so little attention to the continuing cycle of the incestuous narra-
tive of the house of Oedipus. Antigone’s decision to bury her brother
and accept a certain death is not just the performance of an uncondi-
tional ethics, it also represents a rejection of normative patriarchal
structures. Not only does Antigone as a woman stand up to the
authority of her guardian Creon, but her decision to die also denies
generational continuity through her marriage to Haemon. Simultan-
eously the daughter and sister of her father, Antigone rejects the
possibility of a return to normative genealogy by choosing her brother
above her husband. As Guyomard puts it: ‘A paradox emerges. The
Lacanian eulogy of Antigone is the application of his theory of desire
[ . . . ] but it is also at the same time a hidden eulogy of incest. Is the
pure desire which Antigone personifies an incestuous one? Is its very
purity the sign of incest?’21 As Guyomard goes on to demonstrate,
Lacan’s theory of incest is intimately bound up with his discourse of
female desire. So, Guyomard continues, this alliance between pure

21 Guyomard, Jouissance, 59.

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 131

desire and incest is an ‘uncomfortable conclusion which Lacan avoids;
he does, however, explicitly raise the question of incest, but it is an
incest which is forced upon the figure of the mother. In order to
maintain a theory of a unique and unifying signifier, so closely aligned
to his theory of the phallus that it is impossible to talk about
one without implying the other (a theory which is itself upheld by the
place of the father, and here that is to say Oedipus), the impurity, the
confusion, and the rupture are attributed to the mother and the ma-
ternal figure.’22 So, having identified Antigone as the incarnation of
pure desire, Lacan argues:

Think about it. What happens to her desire? Shouldn’t it be the desire of the
Other and be linked to the desire of the mother? The text alludes to the fact
that the desire of the mother is the origin of everything. The desire of the
mother is the founding desire of the whole structure, the one that brought
into the world the unique offspring that are Eteocles, Polyneices, Antigone
and Ismene; but it is also a criminal desire. Thus at the origin of tragedy and
of humanism we find once again an impasse that is the same as Hamlet’s
except strangely enough even more radical.23

In a swift gesture then, Lacan manages to exile all that is impure in
Antigone’s incestuous resolve to the crimes of the mother. The
mother as the origin of both creation and destruction. The mother
who gives birth inevitably also gives death to her children. In the
process, Oedipus becomes innocent, excused of his responsibility
for his own incest. The whole weight of the crime rests on Jocasta’s
shoulders. In an analysis which otherwise acknowledges the import-
ance of gender politics as a frame for reading Lacan’s discussion of
the Antigone, one of Lacan’s most recent critics, Jean-Michel
Rabate´, interestingly tries to dodge this difficult passage. So Rabate´
claims ‘The one problematic assertion made by Lacan concerns
what he sees as the origins of the tragic ‘evil’ or Ate, namely the
desire of the mother.’24 But after quoting the passage I cited above,
Rabate´ merely retorts: ‘We should not attack Lacan for unduly
blaming poor Jocasta!’25 and goes on to discuss another issue.
Why should one ‘not attack’ Lacan? Why does Rabate´ think this
is a sufficient commentary on a passage which he admits is central to

22 Ibid. 59–60. 23 Lacan, Ethics, 283.

24 Rabate´, Jacques Lacan, 83. 25 Ibid.

132 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

the construction of Lacan’s ethics? Rabate´’s coyness shows us,
again, how resistant many Lacanians remain to exposing the diffi-
cult ideological programmes that lie behind Lacan’s vision of the
ethics of psychoanalysis.

But as a literary critic, Rabate´’s complicity is all the more import-
ant for understanding Lacan’s investment in Sophoclean drama.
Lacan insists that his interpretation is supported by the Sophoclean
text—‘the text alludes to the fact,’ he retorts. It was certainly not
beyond Sophocles to dramatize the destructive force of female
desire: one need only think of the violent narratives of the Trachinae
or the Electra. However, Jocasta is nowhere portrayed in the Oedi-
pus Tyrannus as the active agent of Oedipus’ incest: the tragedy
takes form precisely in Jocasta’s and Oedipus’s mutual ignorance of
their actions. The Lacanian version, on the other hand, is predicated
on a radical disparity of agency and responsibility—for Lacan,
Jocasta has consciously acted out her desire on an unsuspecting
Oedipus. In Guyomard’s words:

Lacan identifies in an imaginary and symoblic way Jocasta’s desire—the
desire of the mother—with the origin, the origin of destruction. The bad
mother, the obscene and maternal figure of the super-ego comes to occupy
the tragic scene. The eternal threat of the feminine, the duplicity of woman,
the Oedipal hatred of the mother, the potentially destructive nature of
mother–daughter relations [ . . . ] all these are condensed, and take shape
without any hestitation or precaution, in this radical essential impurity
which makes the desire of the mother a criminal origin.

In other words, Antigone’s pure desire has its mirror image, its
supporting opposite in the impure desire of her mother. We are
back here with the most classic economy of misogyny. Antigone’s
pure, sexless desire to care for her brother is held up in opposition to
the active, dangerous, erotic desire of her mother Jocasta and her
original sin of incest. As Guyomard puts it: ‘The feminine sees itself
incarnated in its two most familiar traits: Eve, the temptress whose
diabolical desire seduces man and precipitates his fall and the virgin,
a new Eve, immaculate mother who saves man without either sex or
temptation by bringing a divine child into the world.’26

26 Rabate´, Jacques Lacan, 62.

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 133

The pure desire of Antigone, then, turns out to have a surprisingly
literal meaning. Despite his efforts to escape Hegel’s Christianizing
reading, Lacan posits a virginal martyr at the centre of his construc-
tion of an ethics of psychoanalysis. In introducing the concept of an
ethics of pure desire in his commentary on The Ethics of Psycho-
analysis the critic Julien is at pains to separate the notion of ‘de´sir
pur’ from that of ‘pur de´sir’. As he puts it: ‘This is not a pure desire
in the sense that one could make a judgement between pure and
impure desires.’27 For Lacan, he insists, there is no moral discrim-
ination of desires, no desire which would be more or less impure
than another. Julien’s reading, however, contrasts strikingly with
Lacan’s taxonomies of female desire in his Ethics. Lacan’s amoral
ethics is nevertheless predicated on a surprisingly traditional sexual
morality. His formulation of a contentless ethics, then, could not be
more disingenuous. When Lacan exiles politics and morality in the
name of anti-humanism it is only to return to the most pernicious
and exclusionary rhetorics of humanist discourse. The pure desire
of Antigone is complicit with the most traditional of humanist
fantasies. Man remains very much at the centre of Lacan’s world.

Lacan’s reading of the Antigone in his Ethics, then, raises many
questions about the political consequences of a Lacanian ethics of
psychoanalysis. And it is precisely in the context of this dialogue
over the Antigone that Luce Irigaray founds one of her most forceful
denunciations of the political blindness of the ethics of psychoanaly-
sis. By opening up a dialogue with Hegel around the Antigone,
Irigarary puts the politics of this play firmly back on the agenda
for psychoanalysis. Irigaray’s feminist critique of the phallocentric
edifice of psychoanalysis brings us straight back to the hidden
ideologies of the Lacanian reading.

irigaray’s antigone: the sexual
difference of the unconscious

Irigaray’s critique of the Hegelian Antigone will help us articulate
many of the questions which emerged from Lacan’s Ethics of

27 Julien, Pour lire, 107.

134 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

Psychoanalysis. For it is precisely against the apolitical paradigm of
the Antigone that Irigaray’s analysis is written. Irigaray makes this
agenda explicit in Thinking the Difference: ‘With regard to civil
rights and responsibilities, I would like to return once again to the
character of Antigone, because of her relevance to our present
situation, and also because she is used today to diminish women’s
role and political responsibility.’ She continues:

According to the most frequent interpretations—mythical, metaphorical
and ahistorical interpretations, as well as those that denote an eternal
feminine—Antigone is a young woman who opposes political power, des-
pising governors and governments. Antigone is a sort of young anarchist,
on a first-name basis with the Lord, whose divine enthusiasm leads her to
anticipate her own death rather than to assume her share of responsibility in
the here and now, and thus also in the order of the polis. Antigone wants to
destroy civil order for the sake of a rather suicidal familial and religious
pathos, which only her innocent, virginal youth can excuse or perhaps even
make attractive.28

In Irigaray’s version, Lacan’s beautiful virginal figure, seductive in
her innocence, is seductive precisely because she allows men to exile
her from the civil sphere. But as Irigaray goes on to claim: ‘Antigone
is nothing like that. She is young, true. But she is neither an anarch-
ist nor suicidal, nor unconcerned with governing [ . . . ] It suits a
great many people to say that women are not in government
because they do not want to govern. But Antigone’, she concludes,
‘governs as far as she is permitted.’29

But Irigaray’s appeal for the civil rights of women in Thinking the
Difference is based on her earlier reading of the Antigone in the
Speculum of the Other Woman—her doctoral thesis whose publi-
cation was responsible for her expulision from Lacan’s E´ cole Freu-
dienne. Here, through a rereading of Hegel’s Antigone, ‘Irigaray’, in
Chanter’s words, ‘retrieves Antigone from the role in which she is
cast by Hegel in his reading of Sophocles’ play, as the other of
reason, ethics and knowledge.’30 The focus of Irigaray’s analysis is

28 Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution,
trans. Karin Montin (London, 1994), 67–8.

29 Ibid. 68.
30 Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers
(New York and London, 1995), 81.

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 135

Hegel’s denial of Antigone’s ‘consciousness’; in the Hegelian ver-
sion, although Antigone acts ethically, she does not know, indeed is
congenitally incapable of knowing it. Irigaray places as an epigraph
to her reading of Hegel’s Antigone a passage of Hegelian sexual
biology:

On the one hand the uterus in the male is reduced to a mere gland, while on
the other, the male testicle in the female remains enclosed within the ovary,
fails to emerge into opposition, and does not become an independent and
active cerebrality. The clitoris, moreover, is inactive feeling in general;
in the male on the other hand, it has its counterpart in active sensibility,
the swelling vital, the effusion of blood into the corpora cavernosa and the
meshes of the spongy tissue of urethra. [ . . . ] On account of this difference
therefore, the male is the active principle; as the female remains in her
undeveloped unity, she constitutes the principle of conception.31

She will go on to show how Hegel’s notion of ethical consciousness is
inextricably bound up with this vision of the material sexual body. In
other words, Irigaray shows up the naturalizing discourse of Hegel’s
ethico-political thinking. The Hegelian reading places woman on the
side of nature, outside the civic sphere. Such a reading, however,
presupposes a deeply ideological reading of the ‘natural’. Hegel’s
assertion that the reason that Antigone ‘does not attain to conscious-
ness of [what is the ethical], or to the objective existence of it [is]
because the law of the Family is an implicit, inner essence which is
not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an inner
feeling’32 is predicated precisely on his vision of biology. In her
analysis of a Hegelian ethics, Irigaray reveals their profound impli-
cation in a self-contradictory logic of sexual difference.

We must go back to the decisive ethical moment which saw the blow struck
producing a wound that no discourse has closed simply. [ . . . ] A dark
potentiality that has always been on the watch comes suddenly into play
when the deed is done: it catches the consciousness of self in the act—the act
of also being, or having the unconsciousness which remains alien to it but
yet plays a major role in the decision consciousness takes. Thus the public
offender who has killed turns out to be the father, and the queen who he has

31 Hegel quoted in Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca,
NY, 1985), 266.

32 Hegel, Phenomenlogy of Spirit quoted in Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 89.