Antigone, in Her Unbearable Spl Charles Freeland

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.At that limit where a tragic, unspeakable dimension of human experience is brought to light, such splendor points not only toward the shadows of death and finitude, but also toward a way of transfiguring ethics through an encounter with the infinite that opens like a wound at the heart of thought, language, and desire.To conclude, two additional notes:First, the interpretative task for the following study shall not so much concern the possibility of situating Lacan's work historiographically.Rather, the task is to continue in the present a philosophically grounded and critical questioning of the ethical and political traditions of the classical and modern European Enlightenments, something that is already at work in Lacan's seminars, and, on this basis, to show how Lacan's teaching has helped to open contemporary philosophical thinking on ethics and politics to new directions and new possibilities of conceptualization.The crucial question now is to see how and in what ways Lacan's work has an important philosophical dimension and how his thought resonates with a philosophical effect—not despite all of his efforts to distance himself from philosophical reflection—and to show how this has been important and on what levels and in what ways Lacan's dialogue with philosophy has been enacted.Thus, the hermeneutic principle invoked for the following reading of Lacan's seminars and essays is similar to the one Lacan adopted for his own studies of Freud: the task is not so much to situate Lacan in the history of thought and ideas as it is to gauge whether the questions Lacan raises in his teachings concerning the ethics of psychoanalysis have or have not been superseded by the larger questions he raises and the perspectives he opens for contemporary philosophical concerns for the foundations and limits of ethics and politics more generally.3 In the most general terms, the questions Lacan raises concerning the classical philosophical discourses on ethics and politics—and not despite their pronounced “anti-philosophical” bias—are yet still philosophical insofar as they ask, what is this Reason, what is this thinking, what is this desire for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—what is this desire for human “happiness,” in short—that the classical philosophical tradition has placed at the center of the domains of ethics and politics? What are its limits and its effects? What are its dangers? How and why must it be challenged? Is this challenging not philosophical in both its letter and its spirit?Second, in this regard, it must be said that this ethic is an ethics of resistance.This is something that must be kept in mind in any reference to an alleged “anti-philosophy” at work in Lacan's thought.Throughout his seminars, his teaching takes the form of an ethic that ceaselessly sounds a warning against a persistent danger he keeps recalling to our attention.As Nietzsche's madman tells us in the parable of the death of God, God may be dead, but word of that death has yet to reach our ears.In other words, even if “God is dead,” certainly the demand for God, the demand for new masters, like the demand for happiness, have not yet died, and no doubt, never will.Hence, the resistance that unfolds in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is a resistance against all the new masters that might arise so as to fill-in the emptiness traced and left by their now dead predecessors.Lacan's ethic resists the return of the masters, resists the dominant shadow cast by all the old “absolute masters,” even that of death itself, “the absolute master,” death, whose role as a signifier in the contemporary ethics of finitude is always questioned by Lacan.We “modern men,” Lacan warns us, yet live on under the shadow of ever more ferocious fathers, imaginary and religious.Ever more cruel masters, they all have their role to play and their work cut out for them.It echoes in every promise they make to heal the wounds and overcome the pathos of human suffering, contingency, and finitude.These monsters are always there, waiting as though in the depths of every human longing for whatever irretrievably lost objects that may define the limits of human desire; they wait behind every hope for a happiness that seems always promised yet never attained.The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is, thus, a book haunted and stalked by such monsters.It bears witness to a forbidding and unforgiving reign of the Fathers, those “eminent personalities,” as Lacan calls them in a reference to the “Great Man,” the legislator, politician, and rationalist Moses, for example, foregrounded in Freud's Moses and Monotheism, figures who are far more powerful dead than they ever were when alive (S7: 142/173 and 173/205).There is also the dark allure of what Lacan calls—in reference to Freud—the “Thing” (das Ding), for example, and that insatiable, tortured love called “courtly love,” where something—a hole, a void, something impossible—is glimpsed but never touched.Here is where he shall situate the “splendor of Antigone,” as the numinous other side of the darkness of the unapproachable and forbidden.Through the prism of such darkly heroic and tragic figures, Lacan's Ethics focuses a beam of moral light, displays it in the spectrum of its many colors, and so hazards an ethics for “our time.” From under the illusory ideals of the European traditions in ethical thought, he brought to an always hesitant articulation something that that tradition had always approached but missed or misrecognized: the “gap” (béance), the wound, the failure, the lack, the crime and the truth that tears at the surfaces of human desire, as at the heart of the human condition itself.Lacan traces both the reign of the Fathers who command from high atop their proverbial mountaintops and the superegos and the moral laws that reign from within back to this gap.Week by week, his seminars thus unfolded a tragic and magnificent view of humanity.As piece by piece, bit by bit, the seminars unfolded a tireless probing of the truth of human desire, his hearers, readers, and subscribers were offered an unflinching look at the civilization and its discontents of post–World War II Europe.By turns humorous and grim, Lacan's presentation of the “human condition” was also deeply accented by his heroically imploring his audience against any giving up or “giving way” on desire.And while it may not at first seem to be much, it is also here that he leveraged the only remaining possibilities for human freedom and self-assertion in the face of seemingly implacable necessity.The product of an indefatigable critic and inventor of new ways of thinking, is Lacan's thought ever best summarized as being an anti-philosophy? Indeed, when he says he wants to demystify the European tradition of philosophy, to take it to that point where its eloquence stumbles and a new poetry can be heard, or when he tries to grasp from the stolid and predictable rhythms of the measurable something unexpected and immeasurable, does he not have something to offer our ever restless hunger for new beginnings and new ways of engaging and addressing philosophy's perennial questions: What can we know? What can we hope? What must we do?Such, in broad outlines, are the questions and perspectives that the following essays take as their starting points.Each of the essays in this collection takes up a theme, question, juncture, or conceptual setting in which the tensions of breaking and belonging between Lacan's teachings and the European philosophical traditions in ethical and political thought are explored [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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