Intro
When the mean ruler Creon refuses to honor Antigone's brother Polyneices with burial rites, this total rebel stages a protest that has resounded through the centuries.
In addition to gracing countless stages on several continents, Sophocles' Antigone has been read by everyone from G.W.F. Hegel to Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler.
So what's all the fuss about? Well, for one thing, Antigone is just about the strongest female lead imaginable. (And we know how your Netflix feed is always recommending movies with strong female leads to you.)
Antigone's defense of her brother's right to have a funeral leads to her execution. Creon puts her to death for defying his orders. But she remains undaunted right up until her death, and so her bravery has spoken to generations of women.
And Freud, as we've seen, nicknamed his daughter "my Antigone." (Which is truly strange when you stop to think about it, but moving on…) Lacan even placed Antigone at the center of his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where she is shown to make the ultimate refusal to "give ground relative to desire."
Huh? Allow us to explain.
Antigone's desire is to honor her brother, even when the state dictates that he be ignored. This desire leads to the grave, but Antigone follows it anyway. Never one to shy away from scare tactics, Lacan argued that we could all learn a lot from Antigone's example.
See, we need to be more willing to see our desires though to the end, even if this means taking enormous risks. Because some things are worse than death, you know? Like never really fulfilling any of your desires.
Quote
[Antigone to her sister, Ismene:]
Take heart; you are alive, but my life died
long ago, to serve the dead.
Analysis
Lacan's reading of Antigone hinges on the title character's position "between two deaths." What did Lacan mean by that?
Well, when Antigone speaks the lines above, she's still technically alive. But, as she says, the difference between life and death isn't that simple for her. Because a part of her died "to serve the dead": to honor her brother whose passing she insists on commemorating, even though that commemoration is against the law.
So after she goes through with her rebellious funeral, she's sort of post-death. She's experiencing something like a living death. And that state clearly connects to psychoanalytic understandings of the death drive.
Antigone not only possesses a death drive, she also explicitly acknowledges it. And yet, she's not preaching a gospel of kickin' the bucket here; she refuses her sisters' offer of solidarity, saying that she prefers to go it alone.
Not everyone can obey the laws of their desires. For example, Antigone doesn't think her sister, Ismene, is up to the task of sacrificing her life for a deep-seated desire. Which is pretty harsh thing to tell your sib, but it's also a loving act—she wants Ismene to live without death.