Abstract
This chapter discusses the two variations of Sophocles’ Antigone, Moira Buffini’s play Welcome to Thebes, and Nikos Koundouros’ film The Photographers, drawing on two key Baudrillarian ideas, impersonal will and impossible exchange, and aligning them to Lacan’s death drive. Lacan and Baudrillard converge on the limits of presence/absence in a scene that holds ‘me’ in its gaze as much as I hold ‘it’ in my gaze. The ‘happy ending’ of the play and the film confront the spectator with a difficult question—‘Isn’t that what you wanted’—the answers to which, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, accentuates the difficulty of choosing without being haunted by what is lost in the alternative.
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Notes
- 1.
Lacan does not suggest forgetting Antigone but putting aside everything we have read about the play, especially Hegelian readings. There is a slight ‘creative misprision’ on my part, in the vein of Baudrillard ’s argument.
- 2.
The play opened at the National Theatre in London, 2010.
- 3.
- 4.
For a discussion of the false identification of the spectator’s eye with the camera see Wees (1992: 25).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Levin notes that the uncanny (unheimlich) today is not an encounter between two fully constituted subjects but a situation in which ‘novel beings emerge from an encounter saturated with enigmatic signs’ (Levin 1996: 153).
- 8.
The drive in Freud is an instinctual force which has the following characteristics: it directs the organism towards an aim, the elimination of tension. The source of the drive is always a bodily stimulus, and its object always refers to the erogenous zones of the body (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988: 214–217). Sublimated in Freud originally meant inhibited in its aim and object. Freud talks about the desexualisation of the drive and its change of object. Lacan emphasises the drive as movement around a missing object (object a ) and redefines sublimation as the only satisfaction available to the drive (see Lacan 1991: 161–173).
- 9.
Hailing from the erogenous zones of the body, that is the eyes, the mouth, and the anus, which predate the penis and the vagina of the genital order, the drive is a circular outwards and backwards trajectory, the aim of which is to gain satisfaction by reaching out to an object (object a ) which remains unattainable. As a constant force, the drive appears meaningless from the point of view of organised social life. ‘Constant’ means non-progressive and undialectical rather than “natural” (Lacan 1991: 163). The drive always only reorders its elements around its own impossible aim. It therefore represents the inherent surrealism of our existence, the permanent practice of a different ordering. Lacan uses the following example of a surrealistic montage to make the point: ‘the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful’ (1991: 163). The image does not become any more meaningful if one rearranges its parts, argues Lacan.
- 10.
In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan describes Antigone and other tragic heroes like Ajax as being between two deaths—death being there from the beginning (1991: 271), inherent in their being and atē, and completed by the biological end of life. A deferral of death is, in that context, a travesty of the tragic concept of death.
- 11.
The process of symbolic interpretation is often accompanied by a feeling of anxiety, due to the dissolution of the symptomatic formations that held the subject, the unconscious and the Other together. This may also be a liberating moment in which the Other ‘meets its limits’ (Verhaeghe 2001: 101) and the subject is finally set free from the symptom.
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Voela, A. (2017). Forget Antigone?. In: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Myth in Contemporary Culture. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48347-8_4
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