Abstract
This paper will focus on Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone and will be devoted to comparing the views of two groups of thinkers and their perspectives on the leading woman character Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, in the play: those thinkers who are oriented towards psychoanalysis, the Lacanians in particular, and those outside that discipline, Judith Butler being the most brilliant exponent among them. Both groups of thinkers offer their interpretations of Antigone, which can be distinguished as “Lacan,” as Joan Copjec suggests in the subtitle of her book Read My Desire, against the latter group as “the historicists.” Therefore, this paper attempts at a brief examination of the formation of a feminine subject using the case of Antigone, because in contemporary feminist discourse Antigone is commonly exemplified as an ideal image who can fight against masculine power and thus be endowed with subversive or revolutionary essence within the patriarchal society. By means of psychoanalysis and its exploration of sexual difference, this paper will follow from Lacan’s concept of the object-cause along with the mapping of desire and demand as to the occurrence of the effect of jouissance in man and woman. Through the re-examination of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, this paper is directed against those who bear their interpretations of Antigone merely on the historicist position that the opposition or conflict of the laws is the crucial motivation for the catastrophe in the play itself and that such a fact must be conceived entirely in a historical context. Judith Butler’s elaboration of Antigone’s act is based on the Hegelian idea of conflicting laws, but she makes a further claim that Antigone’s resistance to Creon’s command consists in her appropriation of Creon’s position, considering Antigone as being “manly.” Butler here apparently involves Antigone with what Freud called a masculinity complex, thus obscuring the different path by which a woman will approach her desire and ignoring the condition which makes Antigone’s act against Creon possible. It is Butler’s elision of the Lacanian concept of the real that Joan Copjec argues with and points out the significance of the superego in terms of the sexual difference. Copjec’s elaboration of Lacan’s graph of sexuation in her essay “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason” makes a brilliant critique of Butler’s continuing argument with the Lacanian real and paves the way for us to an exploration of the feminine superego. Furthermore, with Catherine Millot’s inspiring essay “The Feminine Superego,” the question of the superego in Antigone’s case may be considered as an “intrapsychic instance,” located in the object of love as the Other qua the real (father), which may be assumed as the cause of demand for love.