Her Mother Her Self: The Ethics of the

Antigone Family Romance

LISA WALSH

This essay discusses the implications of Irigarays readings of the Antigone in the
construction of a feminist ethics. By focusing on the gaps and intersections between
Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology as formulative of Irigaray s
eventual call for an ethics of sexual difference, I emphasize the inevitability of rethinking the functions of historicity, femininity, and maternity in the formation of
new models of intersubjectivity.

A quelques ajouts 011 reductions prks, notre imaginaire

fonctionne toujours selon le schema qui se met en place 2
travers les mythologies et tragkdies grecques.
Luce Irigaray
Despite its chronologic circumstance, Jacques Lacans reading of Sophocless Antigone (1984a) as an enactment of an ethics of psychoanalysis, a magnificent, if at times maddeningly obtuse, staging of the fundamental structure
of the relation of self and Other, situates itself both between and beyond G.
W. F. Hegel and Sigmund Freud in its attempt to recreate the Sophoclean
drama as the expression of the uniquely human. In this comparative context,
the Lacanian take on Greek tragedy might be read as a failed effort to transcend its situation at this somewhat anachronistic point of convergence of the
psychoanalytic and the (Hegelian) phenomenological, both of which strive
to analyze tragedys symbolic structure, grounded in the dramas of myth, as
eternally and essentially Human and more or less disconnected from any sort
of historical, material, or ideological reality. Also working within and between
psychoanalysis and phenomenology, though she does not engage directly with
Lacan in addressing these questions, Luce Irigarays psychoanalytically inspired engagements with Hegelian ethics attempt to reinstitute a connection
Hypatia vol. 14, no. 3 (Summer 1999) 0by Lisa Walsh

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with material, and in particular, sexual reality, to call into question not only
the truth value of a thoroughly masculinized ethics but also that of the tragic
drama informing it. Though her reading would certainly not be labeled historical in the traditional, positivist sense of the term, her capacity to regard
the text with a sense of the physicality that undoubtedly suffuses the tragic
scene establishes a previously lacking continuity of form and matter, a continuity that should prove quite helpful in deciphering this curious intersection of multiple discourses of ethicity, and allows Irigaray to move beyond the
humanistic approach that Lacan quite rightly critiques but somehow fails to
surpass.
In this essay, I revisit the Lacanian, Hegelian, and Irigarayan analyses of
the ethical implications of SophoclessAntigone ( 1984a) to explore the radical shift in perspective introduced by the element of a historicized femininity
in the construction of an ethical model of intersubjectivity. Though Irigaray
most explicitly disputes Hegels reading of the Antigone, I have chosen to begin at what I see as the beginning: the psychoanalytic family of origin. For
while Irigaray refutes the traditional psychoanalytic refusal of femininity, and
perhaps even more importantly, maternity, the Lacanian model of subjectivity infuses her vision of Antigones plight and provides a significant point of
departure for a feminist understanding of the ethical. Lacans rather hermetic
engagement with the Sophoclean text introduces the vital thread that, to my
mind, allows Irigaray to move beyond the phenomenological destruction of
the feminine as a necessary defining moment in the pursuit of ethical subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, despite its obvious pitfalls with regard to feminism, returns us to an acute awareness of the emergence of the subject as always already psychically determined in relation to others and belies the masculine,
phenomenological myth of an autonomous, disembodied subjectivity.
Lacans Antigone, despite its odd refusal of sexual difference, provides not
only an incisive, introductory counterpoint to the more familiar Hegelian
approach but also situates us within an understanding of subjectivity, and of
maternity, that is conducive to a productive reading of a historically and socially contextualized interpretation of Irigarays ethics of sexual difference. By
examining the ways in which Irigarays psychoanalytically inspired refutation
of Hegel might illumine our thinking of a model of subjectivity incorporative
of femininity, recognitive of the maternal debt, I seek to contribute to the rich
ongoing dialogue in the domain of feminist ethics. I propose to approach the
question of a feminist understanding of the selflother relation from the vantage point of a psychoanalytically inspired understanding of individual subjectivity as modified by Irigaray through a reaffirmation of sexual difference as
constitutive of the human psyche. A historicized, psychoanalytic recognition
of the function of maternity in establishing an inevitable ethical origin at the
very core of the subject announces provocative new possibilities for exploring the symptoms of a terribly destructive denial of the maternal function-a

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function both beyond and before the violence and tragedy of attempts and
tendencies to negate the other as a means to affirming the self. Having traversed Antigones contentious relations to the ethical, via the maternal, we
might begin to consider the ramifications of an originary intersubjective connection-an inherently ethical subject-in our navigation of the fluid intricacies of the self/other divide.
From an aesthetic point of view, tragedy, for Hegel, represents the most
evolved of ancient literary genres because it has transcended the subjective
immediacy of the lyric as well as the external objectivity of the epic. The
author of tragedy has managed to exteriorize or mediate poetically his immediate individual experience and to contextualize it properly with regards to
objective reality. As a result of this dialectical mediacy, then, tragedy acquires
unique aesthetic access to universal human truth. For Hegel: . . . the dramatic poet must in the profoundest sense make himself master of the essential
significance of human action and the divine order of the world, and along
with this of a power to unfold this eternal and essential foundation of all human characters, passions, and destinies in its clarity as also in its vital truth
(Hegel 1962, 28). Though he characterizes Hegels reading of the Antigone
as a misinterpretation (as do most literary critics), Albin Lesky concludes
similarly as to the function of the tragic as fundamental dramatization of the
uniquely and forever human: . . . Sophocles drew his characters from the
pre-existing realm of myth, characters not in the psychological sense, but
great personal figures whose traits are attached to one central feature. Free of
all purely accidental and individual elements, they stand before us in their
great essential qualities, an imperishable heritage (Lesky 1966, 287). What
these readings of the tragic as universally explanatory of the essence of the
human condition fail to explore and recognize is the importance of the interactive relationship between the play as literary text and the historical context
in which it was created and received. While the limited scope of this discussion cannot pretend to a thorough historical analysis of the Antigone, even
the most rudimentary comprehension of the material reality in question on
the tragic stage presents a convincing counterpoint to the Hegelian myth of
tragic transcendence, a myth in large part conditioned by the theory of history outlined in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977) wherein Attic tragedy, or more specifically the Antigone, enacts the realization of the ethical
moment in the diachronic, teleological process of the actualization of Spirit.
In her introduction to History, Tragedy, Theory, Barbara Goff (1995) discusses recent relations between critical theory, in particular deconstruction,
and historical inquiry in contemporary readings of Greek tragedy. For Goff,
poststructuralist theory has provided a productive challenge to purely contextual readings claiming to access historical or authorial truths via the literary
work as historical document. As a result, positivist historicism, in which
History is invoked to ground and therefore control the possibilities of inter-

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pretation, has made way for a new historicism: I . . . a mode of inquiry

which in its most productive moments seeks to take account of the history
within texts as well as the textuality within history (Goff 1995, 7). In other
words, this new historicism rejects the so-called integrity of the text) as
indisputable bearer of meaning neither on the deconstructive grounds that
language is incapable of imparting (a) meaning, nor on the positivist grounds
that the meaning of any given text is easily delimited through historical investigation, hut rather on the grounds that the object of historical inquiry is
itself textual, and that its meaning has never been self-evident (Goff 1995,
8). This new historical approach obviously problematizes the Hegelian construction of history and his insertion of tragedy as an always already negated
moment therein. More interestingly, however, it calls into question Lacans
assumption of the tragic model in his theorization of an ethics of psychoanalysis. For while both the phenomenologist and the psychoanalyst find their footing in the supposed stability of the family structure, each turns a blind eye to
the obviously historical construction of the family in question and in particular, as Irigaray will argue, to the role of sexual difference in constituting the
role of family in the life of the state as well as in the identity of the individual.
For Lacan, as for Freud, tragedy can he read by psychoanalysis as an externalized acting out of the most basic processes of the human psyche. While
Lacan takes up Freuds reading of the Oedipus without substantial revision, he
interprets the childs necessary and altogether natural movement from the
immediate, material connection with the mother into the social, intersubjective arena of the father as contingent largely upon language acquisition.
And, for Lacan, as for deconstructionists, the discourse conditioned by the
subjects entry into the Symbolic takes on a hidden, or unconscious, life of
its own, and in effect remains substantively meaningless (in the traditional
sense of the term) and beyond the individual control of the speaking subject.I
It is not surprising, then, that Lacan does not seek historical recourse in taking up, albeit in a radically different form, Hegels positioning of the Antigone
as psycho-ethical paradigm. Lacan provides an erudite, meticulous reading of
the Antigone in its original language, along with an equally impressive historical account (and dismissal) of both philosophers and literary critics reception of the text. Lacan never, however, explicitly addresses the fact that this
literary work-an act of language and the Sophoclean unconscious (which
according to his theorization of the Symbolic cannot possibly be held as a
stable, immutable source of rational meaning)-has been set up, on his interpretation, as a virtually flawless pre-enactment of his own discovery)of
the human subjects uneasy relation to the absolute limit imposed by being
constituted as an intersubjective speaking being. For Lacan, myth is precisely
about the universal, individual subjects tortured relation to signification. In
Ethique de la psychanalyse (Lacan 1986), he defines myth as: . . . a signifying
structure, a sketch if you will, which is articulated in order to support the

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antinomies of certain psychic relations-and which, at a level which is not

simply one of individual anguish, nor is exhausted in any construction supposing the collectivity, but rather, takes on its complete dimension. We suppose that it is a question of the individual, and also the collectivity, but at this
level there is no such opposition. For it is a question of the subject insofar as he
suffers from the signifier (Lacan 1986, 172; italics added).*Myth and by extension tragedy metaphorically enact the limit of what Julia Kristeva terms k
thetique, the psycho-material rupture announcing the subjects entry into language, an entry associated with a shift from a maternal to a paternal frame of
reference.
In a revision of Freuds theories of sublimation, Lacan replaces the lost maternal body with the unconscious field of the Thing (das Ding), which through
its vacuous absence diverts the libidinal drives, renders their satisfaction impossible, and assures the continuity of unconscious structures, and consequently, of signification. Sublimation allows the subject to articulate indirectly the
object of his desire in the unconscious terms of the Thing through art, religion, and science (or philosophy) and constructs the subject as a mediating
conduit between reality and the signifier, and the human as . . . that part
of the real which suffers from the signifier (Lacan 1986, 150).4Accordingly
then, the work of art, in this instance tragedy or myth, necessarily finds itself
in search of the Thing, the unimaginable pre-object-the empty space around
which the text articulates the object of desire as veiled, uoilee. In a more general sense, the ethical order makes the real present in symbolically structured
social activities. Or in more traditionally psychoanalytic terms, the ethical
mediates between the conscious and the unconscious, the reality principle
and the pleasure principle. The unconscious, eternal search for an extreme
goodness held out as the subjects safely mediated desire for the Thing becomes ethical when it is posed as a socially relevant question: It [ethics] begins at the moment when the subject poses the question of this good which he
had been unconsciously searching for in social structures-and when, through
the same movement, he is led to discover the profound connection whereby
what is presented to him as law is tightly linked to the very structure of desire
(Lacan 1986,92).
Following Lacans reading, then, this relation becomes ethical in the Antigone (19844 when Antigone resolutely situates herself at this universal limit
that the curse of discursivity imposes. Her blinding beauty and inescapable
attraction with regard to nous (we), the spectators or, more aptly, the listeners (Lacan argues, in accord with Aristotle, that it is the auditory rather than
the visual that produces the primary effect on the theatrical spectator, in
particular as regards his engagement with the real),5 derives from her selfimposed, self-willed positioning at what Lacan calls the second limit of death
or lentre deux morts. Her status as object of our desire hinges on the ineluctability of the object of her own desire, an object that surpasses the bounds

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of signification and is therefore posited by Lacan as inhuman. Analogous to

the crucifixion image in the Christian tradition, Antigones liminal status
between life and death, her figuration as interminably suffering victim, places
her beyond both life and death, in the champs des dieux (fields of the gods), to
which, as inheritors of the Christian tradition, we no longer maintain access. For Antigone is not merely possessed of the Freudian death drive or a
feminine masochistic impulse, she seeks to inhabit the realm in between the
imaginary and the symbolic, the ex nihilo at the very limits of language, at
the site of the hinge between self and Other (1Autre).
So, how does Antigone accomplish this theoretical project? Well, for Lacan, her actions, or the tragic plot, quite literally express the trajectory of the
presence of the heroines desire through time-if our reading is to stick to the
human truth of the matter that is. For Lacan: The signifier introduces two
orders into the world, truth and event. But if one wishes to maintain the signifier at the level of the relations between man and the dimension of truth,
one cannot at the same time have it serve as the punctuation of event. There
is not, in tragedy in general, any sort of true event. The hero and his surroundings are situated in relation to the discrete objective of desire. What occurs:
these are collapses, the settling of diverse strata of the presence of the hero in
time (1986,308). In interpreting Antigones story, it is important if we are to
access the truth dimension of the signifier to read the non-events of her life as
the incidental, inconsequential fallout of her unfortunate desire.
Lacan, like the Sophoclean chorus, defines the object of her desire as the
Greek concept of At;, loosely translatable as suffering or unhappiness. In
the context of the Antigone, the familial At? comes to haunt Antigone as a
necessary torment to be visited upon the descendants of Oedipus. More precisely, and indicative of the radicality of Antigones desire, she seeks to move
beyond this At?,which Lacan interprets as the suffering instantiated as a natural human limit by the horizon of signification, the inevitable trauma of the
thetic break. As a result, the At? as obscure object of desire, arises from the
domain of the Other (le champ de IAutre), and Antigones situation at the
borders of signification, between the human of the conscious said and the
inhuman (or divine) of the unconscious saying, positions her, for Lacan, as
paradigmatic ethical agent.
In more practical terms, as a speaking, or human being, Antigone articulates and draws into symbolic existence the pure being (outside historic or
material contingency) of her slain brother Polynices. She moves beyond the
laws of the earth (which Hegel, as we will see, defines as the laws of society
or the polis), and determines her brother as uniquely human: she names him as
what he is above and beyond what he has done. Again, we witness the power
of the signifier to present the truth as opposed to the event. Antigone, for
Lacan, embodies (so to speak) this ethical potential of the speaking subject:
Antigone is presented as . . . pure and simple relation between the human

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being and that of which he miraculously finds himself the bearer, that is, the
signifying break, which confers upon him the unbreachable power of being, in
the face of everything and anything, what he is (Lacan 1986, 328). Antigones ethical existence turns on her intimate, unshakable embrace of her
potentially liminal position as a human, being within the symbolic order:
. . . as a result of her position, Antigone represents this radical limit which,
beyond all contents, all good and evil that Polynices might have done, all
that might be inflicted upon him, maintains the unique value of his being
(Lacan 1986,325).In other words, from the (Lacanian) psychoanalytic point
of view, Antigones capacity to lift her brother out of the lived reality of human contingency hinges on her function as representative of the thetic break:
This purity, this separation of being from all of the characteristics of the
historic drama which he [Polynices] has passed through, it is precisely here
that we find the limit, the ex nihilo around which Antigone maintains her
position. It is nothing other than the break instantiated in the life of man by
the presence of language (1986, 325). It is through the mediate relation to
the Other of language rather than the immediate, familial blood connection
that Lacan constitutes an ethics of psychoanalysis via tragedy. As a result,
Lacan more than restores the textuality in tragedy, for tragedy enacts and
reenacts the universal heros entry into the Symbolic and secures his (or her)
being in relation to the Other. And while this may have a certain historic
relevance for us,)as bewildered witnesses to the twentieth century death of
man,hor in more psychoanalytic terms, the splitting of the subject, we learn
as a result that this relation to being, and the consequent ethical relation to
the Other, maintains a necessary detachment from the contingencies of history. For Antigone, as tragic ethical heroine, remains by her very nature (or
function) suspended in ~ynchronicity.~
Though the family might have introduced a certain diachronic element to
Lacans reading of the Antigone, it takes up an interesting yet still ahistorical
role in the constitution of the hero( ine)s object of desire, the focal point, as
we recall, of the tragic spectacle. In an ethics of psychoanalysis, family organizes the tragedy in textuality. Lacan asserts that Antigones desire is a pure
and simple desire for death or At?; she is this desire. And this desire for death
signals the relationship between desire and the unconscious law of the Thing.
He questions, however, her lack of desire of the Other, a desire necessarily
grounded in the mothers desire (for the father). In the case of Antigones dysfunctional family drama, unfortunately, the mothers desire was incestuous and
therefore destructive of any and all who were innocently or otherwise tainted
by it. It leads to a structural impasse, evidenced by the deaths of Jocastastwo
sons, which can be mediated only through the extremity-the inhumanityof Antigones desire (poor Ismene is consistently read as somehow nonexistent).8 In discussing Antigones single-minded desire for death, or more precisely, for the space between life and death, Lacan writes: -what about her

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desire?Shouldnt it be the desire of the Other, and connect with the mothers
desire?The mothers desire, the text alludes to it, is the origin of everything.
The mothers desire is at once the founding desire of the entire structure . . .
but at the same time it is a criminal desire (1986, 329).
One might argue that Antigones desire is remarkably similar to her mothers. After all, they both act out: their despair through suicide by hanging; both
must seek death as a result of their refusal of the fundamental interdiction the
law of the unconscious imposes. But what Lacan seems to be getting at here is
that Antigone cannot ethically or legally establish identity with her mothers
criminal desire for her son (Antigones father/brother). Nor, as a result, will
her inhuman desire to transcend the family At2 correspond to her mothers
more humanly motivated desire to end her earthly existence. Though again,
one might argue that Jocastas incestuous desire also contains an inhuman
element in that this desire makes possible her sons acting out of his unlawful
(if unknowing) desire to create an immediate connection to the Thing. And
so, although Antigone repeatedly describes her desire as a desire to love (I
was born to join in love, not hate-that is my nature [Sophocles 1984a, 11.
1306-101) and not a desire to die, in an act of social defiance, she sacrifices
her human being to uphold some sort of family integrity, above and against le
Dire des dieux: It is inasmuch as the community refuses sacrifice that Antigone must make the sacrifice of her being to the maintenance of this essential
being which is the familial Ate-motive and true axis around which this entire tragedy turns. Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes, immortalizes this Ate
(Lacan 1986, 329). What the community is refusing here, through the voice
of the chorus, is the primacy of the criminality involved in the incestuous
mother/son relation, the dangerous blindness to the fundamental law constitutive of any and all human societies, the limit that bounds us as intersubjective, culturally determined beings.
Lacan isolates two distinct laws, or dimensions at play in the battle between Creon and Antigone for moral justification: the laws of the earth and
the commandments of the gods. What is at play, however, is not the choice of
the right one over the wrong one but the capacity to recognize and respect the
limit between the two (Lacan 1986, 322). For Lacan, as well as the chorus,
Creons downfall quite clearly lies in his confusion of earthly laws and the
Dire of the gods. Antigones situation, however, is far more ambiguous. Does
she, like Creon, fail to respect this fundamental limit in affirming the earthly
ties of sisterhood and thereby attributing a divine dimension to a material
relation?For Lacan, the answer is a resounding no, for not only does Antigone
respect this boundary, she personifies it in situating herself at the very borders
of signification, in this case represented by her desire to uphold and move
beyond the familial At?, the thetic break, the zone between life and death
(1986,326). Antigone, in upholding her traitorous brothers right to a proper
burial vindicates not her feminine, familial obligations to tend to the bodies

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of her kin, as Hegel would argue, but rather the incontestable humanity of a
being who exists in the domain of the Symbolic, one who has been thus conAntigone evokes no other right than
secrated in having been given a
this, which suddenly arises in the language of the ineffaceable character of
what is-ineffaceable from the moment when the signifier, arising suddenly,
arrests it as something fixed across any flux of possible transformations. What
is is, and it is to this, to this surface, that Antigones unshakable, unbreachable
position is fixed (Lacan 1986, 324-25). Antigone, Lacan argues, disassociates her stance from the saying of the gods, the unwritten, asymbolic laws, in
her affirmation of the signifying chain of being. This is not to say that she denies the existence of the divine, a legal order constructed on the basis of nothingness, around the unthinkable absence of the Thing (Lacan 1986, 324).
Rather, she asserts-as witnessed by her desire for death, her self-positioning
at the horizon constituted by the thetic break-that the divine is in fact divine and as such belongs to a law other than the symbolic one assuring our
synchronic existence as humans being across time and history. In assuming
the inheritance of her mothers desire, choosing a criminal act in support
of her criminal brother, Antigone upholds the tradition of the familial At?,
moves beyond its horizon, beyond the chain of signification, and is buried
alive. And in so doing, she becomes the ethical actor par excellence. For she,
like Lacans ethical order, expresses the human relation to the real, the oppositional mechanics operating between the unconscious pleasure principle and
the conscious reality principle to regulate the interhuman experience as such
and to render the real present therein.
Antigone, whom Lacan compares to a Sadean heroine, achieves this unenviable status of exemplarity in the ethics of psychoanalysis, as we have seen,
because of her unique relation to the pure being of her brother, her necessarily
inhuman lack of desire of the Other. She finds her natural home at the borders of the Symbolic, between life and death. She is beautiful; she is the object
of our desire. Here, Hegel and Lacan find common ground, for it is woman
who somehow occupies the space of that which does not move forward in the
historical progression of the social, who acts as the necessary, though untouchable, unspeakable, unthinkable support of the Other, as well as the pure being
of her brother (though as we will see, for Hegel, unlike Lacan, Antigones sex
identity is crucial to this positioning). Lacan writes in the afterword to his
essays on the Antigone: This relation to being suspends everything related to
transformation, to the cycle of generations and corruptions, to history itself,
and carries us to the most radical level of all insofar as it is suspended from
language (1986,331).Our ability to achieve this radical new ahistoric, asymbolic level (of ?) is easily traced back to the mothers desire. We desire Antigone because she is beautiful, because she desires the second limit of death,
because her mother desired her own son. The mother and her desire would appear to remain, like Creon, in the realm of the diachronic. She certainly has a

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temporal precedence with regard to the drama in question here. Yet she is also
written/read (neither seen nor heard) as originary moment in her incestuous
desire, the atemporal event, implied but unwritten, unspoken, unheard within
the text, which ultimately forces the tragic narrative off the linear tracks of
historical continuity. Yet Lacan does not elaborate on the more fundamental
relationship between this incestuous desire on the part of the mother and the
ethical martyrdom of the daughter. He constructs Jocastas radically destructive desire for her son Oedipus as the mediating force in the resultant struggle
between the two male offspring of their union, and it is Antigone who takes
up the side of criminality in choosing the side of Polynices rather than that
of her just brother. And it is because the community refuses to pardon this
criminality that Antigone must sacrifice herself to the pure being of this familial suffering and madness (Lacan 1986,329). Perhaps the connection between this particular version of maternal desire and ethicity is simply all too
clear and is not deemed worthy of explanation. Or perhaps psychoanalysis,
statically situated in the minds eye of the son, cannot contain the mothers
desire.
Lacan has identified maternal desire as the founding desire in the ethical
allegory he has just unraveled, and he concludes his analysis with a return to
this so-called origin. From his earlier positioning of the mother in the place of
the Thing, his situation of incestual desire as the essential human desire, a
desire whose repression constitutes our ability as subjects to speak, to exist as
intersubjective, ethical beings, it would seem that the satisfaction of incestua1 desire on the part of Oedipus would constitute the ultimate crime against
humanity, a pat refusal to accept the human condition. For the unconscious
only acquires its signifying structure, its law, in its repression of the maternal
Thing and the resultant diversions of the energies of the drives. If the subject
attempts to force access to the maternal Thing (Lacan gives the Sadean hero
as an example), he can only self-destruct. Lacan argues that the intimate distance from the Thing is the lieat the heart of the unconscious. This lie is
our most fundamental desire and only through this act of untruth do we maintain our status as subjects. The story of Oedipus the King (Sophocles 1984b)
would appear to play this theory out quite nicely, for as long as Oedipus and
Jocasta are able to give the lie to their blood connection, they manage to live
as husband and wife in relative peace. It is not until Oedipuss stubborn decision to seek the truth at all costs that tragedy befalls the couple, and of course,
their offspring. In at last learning the truth of his crime, Oedipus cries: 0
god-all come true, all burst to light! / 0 light-now let me look my last on
you! / I stand revealed at last-/ cursed in my birth, cursed in marriage, cursed
in the lives I cut down with these hands! (Sophocles 1984b, 11. 1306-10).
The revelation of the truth of the I is utterly unbearable and leads to Oedipuss self-inflicted blindness; he can no longer bear to see the metaphoric light.
Curiously though, Jocasta is only concerned with Oedipuss recognition of the

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truth of his identity; it appears that she (and the weight of structural coherence) might have been able to bear her own incestual desire, but not Oedipuss recognition of the truth of his desire. After begging Oedipus to cease his
mindless search for this truth, a truth of which she is evidently all too aware,
she warns: Youre doomed-may you never fathom who you are (Sophocles
1984b,11. 1172-73). So while Oedipuss relation to the truth of who he is, the
truth of the lie that is his most fundamental desire, contains a necessary element of criminality according to Lacans analysis, a breaching of the unconscious, and by extension the conscious law, the role of the mothers desire in
this ethical drama remains far more problematic.
With regards to the motherlson incest drama, it appears that the directionality of the mothers desire remains decidedly undetermined in the psychoanalytic reading. For though Lacan dubs this desire criminal, he implies that
her desire is Ye dkssir de lAutre, a desire constitutive of the human condition
and by no means related inherently to either incest or maternity (unless we
wish to stretch our reading a bit and equate this desire of the Other to the
mothers desire for her child as a desire for the phallus).12Furthermore, as we
have seen, what is at stake in terms of a determination of criminality appears
to be the sons recognition of the truth of his desire, both for himself and for
his mother. Jocasta kills herself not because she has recognized the reality of
her desire but because Oedipus will recognize the reality of his. And on the
Lacanian reading (as well as the Freudian one), incestual desire and taboo is
theorized as unidirectional-and unisexual; the mothers desire does not come
into play. She is merely a (pre-)object in the early psychic drama of the male
subject, a repressed object whose unconscious space will come to regulate
the law of the unconscious under the guise of the purely theoretical, vacuous
Thing. Perhaps then, what is being implied here is that maternal desire is criminal in its very essence. The mothers desire might be read as the only nonpathological expression of human desire that serves to subvert rather than to
uphold the intersubjective bonds of the social. For while desire necessarily
participates in the social as a function of its object, anothers desire, the mothers desire is figured as a static desire of the phallus that cannot and does not
respond to the childs demand for her love.13 According to the Lacanian scenario, then, the childs demand for his mothers love necessarily finds itself
alienated by her desire of the phallus. He therefore finds himself in the feminine position of wishing to be the phallus to fulfill his mothers desire and
thereby to attain her love. It is only through the mediation of his desire, through
the process of becoming a paternally identified, symbolic subject, that the
male child might move into the social wherein he establishes relations of desire with the opposite sex in which he has the phallus in the material form of
the penis. For Lacan, then, within the structure of the motherlchild dyad, the
mothers desire can only be figured in the negative. As Kristeva argues in His-

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toires damour: Let us remark now that the most archaic unity[. . . ]-an identity autonomous to the point of attracting displacements-is that of the Phallus desired by the mother. It is the unity of the imaginary father, a coagulation of the mother and her desire. The imaginary father would thus be the
indication that the mother is not all, but that she wants.. . Whom?What?The question has no response other than the one uncovered by the narcissistic void: In any case, not me (Kristeva 1983, 45). The mothers indeterminate desire creates the site at which the child begins to constitute himself as a
subject. Realizing that his mother is not-all, or lacking (the phallus), and
that furthermore what she wants is not-me, the childs first intimations of
subjectivity take form within this space of what Kristeva terms the imaginary
father, the object of the mothers desire. On my reading, Kristeva, following
Lacan, strikes the mothers desire with the mark of paternity as the only means
of signaling a pre-symbolic function within the motherlchild psyche, to be
superseded by the father of the Law with the onset of the Oedipal ~ o m p l e x . ~
Through the affirmative particularity of her enactment of sexual desire from
the position of the maternal function, Jocasta commits the ultimate crime;
her desire confuses the moment of the thetic break. And without this theoretical limit, the psychic structure cannot hold.I5The law-abiding mother, on
the contrary, remains trapped inside her maternity, outside desire and signification-an inhuman, prehistoric, nonsubject. For within the psychoanalytic framework, the mothers desire is inevitably criminal in its expression, and
her only potential access to the Symbolic is appropriated efficiently through
the apparition of the imaginary father. The mother qua mother is the enigmatic knot at the objectal center of the sons psyche, a knot that simultaneously
constructs and defies the intersubjective connection between desire and come
munication. And if, from this confined position of maternity, she attempts to
vindicate either her desire or her subjectivity, the ethical structure crumbles,
madness ensues.
Antigones criminality, however, though precipitated by her parents, serves
to reify and purify their fatal trespass and raises it to the level of symbolic
universality. Through her willingness to sacrifice her self as a martyr to the
eternity of the familial Ate, Antigone assures the recognition of the limit, the
validity of the crime, which must be neither breached nor disturbed. Antigone acts out o n stage the intimate, morbid connection between desire and
the law and maintains the perpetuity of this liminal space through the pursuit
of her own desire to sustain the authenticity of the inescapably painful human
condition as instantiated by the thetic break. We are left guessing, however,
as to the role of femininity in Lacans choice of Antigone as ethical paradigm.
Could a son have performed the same function, or does self-sacrifice to the
primacy of the phallus fall under the sign of the feminine?Though Lacan fails
to answer, or even to pose, the question, it appears that Antigones feminine

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identification might play a substantial part in the sustenance of her position

as symbolic support. For just as the mothers desire is figured only in negative
terms, so too is the acting out of womans desire. Her jouissunce, in particular
as regards the realm of signification, is figured under the sign of negation: she
is not-all. Significantly, Lacan argues that the not-all of feminine desire
does not set itself up as complementary to a masculine all, but as a supplementary en plus beyond the phallus. In Encore, Lacan explains womans exclusion from the nature of words: . . . if she is excluded by the nature of
things, it is precisely insofar as being not-all, she has, in relation to what is
designated as phallic jouissunce, a supplementary jouissunce (Lacan 1975,68).
If Antigone has chosen to situate herself at the borders of signification, and if
her desire seeks a space beyond the suffering instantiated through the moment of the thetic break, her consequent function as ethical stay would appear then to correspond quite nicely to femininitys role as support of the
Other.16
Is Antigone alone of her sex?What allows her to step out of her femininity
and to stand in for an arguably neuter human being in all its ethical purity?
Perhaps it is her staunch refusal of wifehood and maternity, the natural))fulfillment of the feminine condition. This refusal, moreover, finds its cause in
a self-conscious choice to follow her desire despite the consequences. In fact,
Antigone is able to transcend her womanhood while constituting herself as a
martyr to a markedly feminine desire because she is fully aware of what she is
doing and why. She, unlike the other members of her sex, knows her desire
and speaks it. For Lacan: There is no woman except as excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words. And it must be said that if there is
one thing that women themselves complain of at the moment, it is thissimply, they dont know what they are saying. This is all of the difference between them and me (1975,68).Like Lacan, as we will see, Hegel constitutes
women as somehow lacking in self-consciousness, as unknowing, and linked,
albeit circuitously, to the unconscious. But while Lacan seeks to ignore Antigones femininity in writing her as quintessentially human, again perhaps because her unusual cognizance has allowed her to transcend her sexed condition, Hegel argues that Antigone is all woman-unknowing, unconsciousand therefore a moment in the movement of ethicity that must be superseded.

HEGELS
READINGOF THE ANTIGONE
Though Hegels reading of the Antigone also shares with Lacans a certain
element of familial ahistoricity (though for quite different reasons), it differs
substantially from Lacans in its methods, its conclusions, and perhaps most
interestingly, in its treatment of the principal players sexual identities. In his
treatment of the Antigone as a tragic, dialectic enactment of the ethical mo-

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ment in the history of consciousness, Hegel situates the decisive battle between divine and human law in Attic Greece. But unlike Lacan, he believes
that human law, as enforced by Creon (representative of the masculine polis)
and his harsh repression of Antigone (representative of the feminine oikos),
has rightfully supplanted divine law and thereby ushered in a higher level of
moral consciousness. Refuting an accusation that the Hegelian dialectic has
seduced him, Lacan critiques Hegels reading of the Antigone as follows: According to him [Hegel], there is a conflict of discourses, in the sense that discourses involve the essential stakes, and, what is more, they move toward
some sort of conciliation. I might ask what could possibly be the conciliation
at the end of the Antigone. And also, one is stunned to read that this conciliation is subjective in the bargain (Lacan 1986, 292). The stupefaction induced here by the Hegelian interpretation fails to consider the far from arbitrary function it is made to serve within his larger project. But then again,
Lacan appears to be responding more to the irresponsablewho has criticized
his supposed adherence to the dialectic than to Hegel in this instance.
In this larger project, a descriptive analysis of Spirit as History, Hegels
Phenomenology of Spirit supplies a narrative account of the development of
human consciousness through the incessant disillusionment of self-consciousness. The teleological process of substance becoming subject, however, does
not proceed according to a linear notion of historical development as signaled
by the diachronic metonymy of the Lacanian signified or said, but rather
through the progressive circularity of perpetual negativity. The progress of
Spirit, alienated from the continuous, contiguous, material processes of life,
marks an epochal temporality that further and further distantiates it from its
supposed terrestrial truth.17In a discussion of the Hegelian dialectic, Irigaray discusses the discontinuity of natural life and philosophical systematicity:
The epochs signify a schism with nature. This schism is manifested as the
opposition of another temporality, a double temporality where the continuity
and communication between vegetative growth and social temporality is lacking (Irigaray 1987, 147). In other words, philosophic discourse does not enter into the life history of the gendered material world; it simply replaces it
with a bloodless, sexless surrogate, hence the periodic, sacrificial bloodlettings
that punctuate the closed circuit of the instant-eternity continuum of modern
philosophical historicity. Hegel encodes this historicity, as first played out on
the tragic stage, within the oppositional, triadic geometry of the dialectic: the
one comes into conflict with the always adversarial other or mirror image,
bloodshed occurs, a higher state of consciousness is achieved, blood ceases
to flow, and the process whereby nature is humanized and history constituted begins anew (Benhabib 1991, 134). With the onset of negativity, materiality momentarily reasserts its inevitable presence in the Hegelian movement toward immaterial Spirit. In other words, the Dialectic must incorporate

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these periodic purges if it is to maintain the conceptual elimination of the

material from each successive, sublative stage in the progression of human
consciousness.
This logic of stark oppositionality comes to an uneasy and eerie sort of rest
at the level of the Ethical Order, at precisely the moment when tragedy and,
not coincidentally, sexual difference conspicuously enter the scene. At the
site of the Greek polis occurs the historical moment when human and divine,
male and female, brother and sister, reach a fragile and somewhat utopic state
of equilibrium. The Ethical Order of the family reigns; blood pools. Sophocless Antigone (1984a) serves as the structuring paradigm for the ethical moment not only as a result of its chronologic situation and contextual conformity but also, among other reasons to be sure, through tragic dramas unique
capacity to externalize a universal and eternal notion of human subjectivity.
Recycling the Sophoclean drama, then, Hegel proposes a natural division of
ethicity whereby women represent the divine and men the human law, a binary structure whose ultimate sublation will result in the expulsion of the
feminine and the erection of a n obviously superior political moral system.
T h e Ethical Order finds its home in the natural immediacy of the Family,
the transitional site between nature and culture. T h e familial bonds that form
the basis of divine, or natural ethicity lie not in the love or desire that family
members share but in shared blood. Indeed, emotional attachment renders
the connection inherently unethical through the addition of a n element of
abstract contiguity. Woman, as active agent of the Family, takes on as positive
ethical act the burial of the dead, the bloodless: The Family keeps away from
the dead this dishonouring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and weds the blood-relation to the
bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality (Hegel 1977,
271). As Lacan contends, the outcome of familial burial, in the instance of
the Antigone (which is the only context in which Hegels argument really
makes sense), is the affirmation of the unique, eternal being of the deceased,
an affirmation of the symbolic or the social. As Kelly Oliver writes: Through
the actions of the family on the unconscious and abstract processes of nature,
man is transformed through the mixture of his universality and the individuality of the action taken into a particular individual. At death, the man is
freed from his individual reality, his sensuous body, and becomes a universal
(Oliver 1997, 37). Ironically then, while Woman, for Hegel, intuits divine
law at an unconscious level and remains connected figuratively to the earthy
darkness of the nether world, she is nevertheless entrusted to protect her family members from the very unconscious appetites that she, as alien to the
particularity of desire, embodies and ever threatens to enact (Hegel 1977,
275) . I * As Jacques Derrida argues, feminine desire in the Hegelian household
takes on a rather peculiar logic: If desire and pleasure are, for the woman or
for the mother, singular, it remains that, in the ethical household, in the

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house of ethicity . . . this singularity offers itself up to substitution. Without

which, there is perhaps family, but not ethical family. The latter wishes that
the woman no longer have relations with this particular husband or that particular child hut rather with a husband or children in general (Derrida 1974,
184). For Hegel, Antigone in her role as Polynicess sister represents the sole
possible instance of what Derrida calls une singularit6 singulike: the brother/
sister dyad stands at the very limits of familial ethicity as enacted in this interpretation of the ethical oikos, and will eventually exceed those limits. For as
Antigone (and Hegel) will argue (albeit contentiously), the heterosexual family relation in question here is not open to substitution. Polynices is not a
brother in general; he is uniquely irreplaceable.
Antigone is nevertheless capable of acting ethically, perhaps a little too
ethically, as a result of her lack of desire. For despite Lacans reliance on a distinctly Hegelian notion of desire in his dialectic of need, demand, and desire,
Hegel and Lacan differ significantly as to the status of Antigone as a desiring
subject. As we have seen, Lacan reads Antigones desire to uphold the authenticity of her brothers being as the motor of her ethical agency, the focal
point of the auditors captivated response. Hegel, however, argues that in
her ethical relation to her brother, Antigone experiences no desire, despite
the added element of sexual difference so conspicuously absent in Lacans account. Based on an implied assertion of the universality of the incest taboo
(an odd stance considering the family in question), a sister simply cannot and
does not desire her brother. Consenting to forego forever the substitutively
singular feminine roles of mother and wife, she simultaneously fulfills and surpasses the boundaries of family duty in a dubious exchange of her life, and
indeed the continuation of the Oedipal family line, for the preservation of her
brothers irreplaceable individuality. Based on the Sophoclean model, Hegel
accordingly designates the brothers sister as the ultimate ethical agent because, he argues, her duty toward her brother remains absolutely untainted by
desire and therefore lacks contingency: They [brother/sister] are the same
blood which has, however, in them reached a state of rest and equilibrium
(Hegel 1977, 274).O So, though the male/female, public/private opposition
necessary to the dialectic is maintained, the material unrest that might he
brought into play through the element of feminine desire (and, as we recall,
the tragedy might never have occurred had it not been for Jocastas none too
ethical desire-a desire that remains unspoken in Hegels account) is entirely
eliminated, and the particularity of the blood relation is thereby universalized. In other words, Lacans Antigone is able to neutralize and thereby to
universalize the unspoken feminine particularity of her desire through transcendence, while Hegels feminized Antigone is divested of any desire, or selfconsciousness, whatsoever-she is female by default.
Antigone, then, serves as Hegels evidentiary model of the universally divine potential of the brothers sister as instigator of familial ethicity. Though

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Hegel represents woman as incapable of human reasoning, he not only accepts but also adopts Antigones somewhat twisted formulation of her willful refusal of human law.21Having twice buried Polynices against Creons orders, thus explicitly flouting the laws of the public sphere to affirm those of
the private, Antigone explains herself as follows: 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 (Sophocles 1984a, 1. 1000). Despite the introduction of this
not terribly convincing logic of substitution into the nuclear family structure
(explicable only perhaps by the fact that Antigone is theoretically abandoning a husband and children who she knows will never exist), the erotically
tinged corporality of the mother and wife relationships nonetheless renders
them incompatible with the universal purity of ethical action. Feminine logic,
then, assuming universal orphanhood, constructs the nostalgic ethical paradigm of a gendered, familial link forever unmixed by the restlessness of blood
and sexual desire that, as a result of its supersession, ultimately sustains the
logic of Hegelian ethical orderaZ2
As man and woman follow their naturally predestined paths, however, Hegels shakily devised gender dialectic breaks down when the actors ethical trajectories cease to mirror each other, and inevitably the feminine must be sacrificed at the altar of the masculine law of the father. Ethical action should
move theoretically from either conscious or unconscious adherence to human or divine law to the commission of an ethical deed, the consequent recognition of the correspondent oppositional law (or negation), and finally to
the sublatory state of a self-consciousnessable to comprehend simultaneously
both laws: the deed is brought out into the light of day, as something in
which the conscious is bound up with the unconscious, what is ones own
with what is alien to it, as an entity divided within itself, whose other aspect
consciousness experiences and also finds to be its own, but as the power it has
violated and roused to hostility (Hegel 1977, 283-84). The equation works
quite nicely on the male side: Creon, conscious uniquely of human law, acts
morally to punish Antigone when she breaks it. The divine law of which he
was unconscious then avenges itself through the suicidal agency of his wife
and son (Antigones husband to be). Again, blood has been shed, synthesis
achieved. On the female side, however, the moment of recognition is a bit
more problematic. Antigone, the ethical actor, is quite conscious of the human law she disobeys (despite her womanhood, which, for Hegel, places her
squarely on the side of the unconscious) and therefore does not undergo the
moment of recognitive negation that would allow her to raise herself to the
level of sublated self-consciousness.z3Furthermore, her lack of desire assures
that she cannot attain self-consciousness through her relation with an independent other.24She does not achieve the ethical individuality that would
stand above the pathos of the ethical substance and allow her to withstand

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the wrath of the hostile power of the Other law. In the end, only human law
might rightly persist, leaving the guardian of Familial blood to a bloodless
entombment well outside the confines of the polis. For both Lacan and Hegel,
despite their substantial differences-and similarities-Antigone most valiantly performs the ethical resurrection of her brothers eternal symbolic individuality through the sacrifice of her own being to the reign of the symbolic or
social order.

MATERIALIZING
HEGEL
Irigarays first essay on Hegelian ethics begins with an epigraph from Hegels Philosophy of Nature (1970):
This effusion of blood in man corresponds with womans menstrual losses. In this way, what is received by the uterus (as mere
receptacle or container), is in man split into productive cerebral substance and into the heart which externalizes it. As a
result of this differentiation, man is the active principle while
woman is the passive principle, because she remains in her undeveloped unity. Generation should not be reduced to the ovary and the male semen, as if the product were merely a reunion
of their forms or parts. But rather, the material element is in
the woman and subjectivity in the man. Conception is the
concentration of the entire individual into simple unity, which
abandons itself there, in its representation: the semen is this simple representation itselfpoint like the name and the self in its
totality. (Irigaray 1974, 266)25
Irigaray penetrates the Hegelian dialectic, not surprisingly, via the mythic

sernbkmt (sang blanc) of the traditionally gendered body and the red blood
(sang rouge) that flows out of or through it. Once again recycling the production of femininity as undeveloped immediacy, Hegel in this epigraphic instance maintains a nominal connection to the fluid materiality of the human
body, distorted though it may be. Through an incessant replaying of this connection with its obvious contradictions and structural repetitions throughout
the dialectic (as) process, Irigaray unearths the bloodless corpse of the Hegelian ethical order and attempts a transfusional resurrection of Antigones
cadaver. As a matter of strategy, in refusing the traditional position of the
philosopher, Irigaray attempts to avoid recapture in the metaphysical systems
that define and limit discourse by engaging in an openly amorous, pathosladen exchange with her philosophic object of inquiry. In the course of this
dialogic interchange, she also calls into question the supposed coherence of
the historico-material identity of the family, in particular as relates to the
recognition of sexual difference therein. In taking up the designated feminine

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Hypatia

role of mimetic reflection (le semblant) and reasserting the elsewhere of matter (ailleurs de la matiPre), of sung rouge-of feminine desire: It is to submit
oneself-from the side of the sensory,of matter . . . -to ideas, notably of
her [woman], elaborated inlthrough a masculine logic [ . . . 1. It is also to
unveil the fact that, if women imitate so well, it is because they are not
simply resorbed in this function. They remain elsewhere: another insistence
of matter, but also of jouissunce (Irigaray 1977, 74). By entering into the
tragic structure, by replaying the scenes of the crime(s), Irigaray seeks to uncover the distortions of Hegelian ahistoricity and its artificial grounding in
the exclusion of femininity and the perversion of nature. She seeks to disrupt
the inner workings of a dialectic fueled by violence and destruction and ultimately to refigure it, both materially and spiritually, from a time-space of
sexual differentiation.
Though Hegel explicitly figures sexual difference as essential to the ethical
stage of substance becoming subject, Irigaray argues that, to the contrary, the
Hegelian dialectic reduces the two sexes to the unity of the (male) one and
imposes a violent schism at the very core of the nature-spirit continuum,
thereby condemning the evolution of Spirit to lifeless finitude and empty abstraction. According to the logic of the dialectic, the two sexes necessarily
stand in direct opposition to each other. The one is the negation of the other
and cannot truly affirm itself without this negating force. In the struggle for
ethical predominance, masculinity comes into direct conflict with femininity.
The masculine prevails, of course, and through the negation of the feminine
attains to a sublated moral phase in its evolution. The resultant absence of a
sexed dialogue creates an arterial clot at the very heart of the dialectic, which,
though periodically cleansed by purgative blood baths, obstructs the material
flow of life, the potential spiritualization of the (almost) silenced elsewhere of
matter. For Irigaray, the Ethical Order, as chiasmic union of particular and
universal, public and private, self and other-masculine and feminine-represents the historical site at which patriarchy subsumes matriarchy. Maternal
genealogy and its respective divinities are subsumed under the name of the
Father, epochal temporality and its history supplant previous forms of ancestral continuity, and the erotics of necrophilia replace the now enshrouded
unconscious jouissunce of a mutually conceived desire. At the ill-fated site of
familial hemostasis between the tragic sibling couple, mutual self-recognition,
and therefore the development of two individual self-consciousnesses, becomes unthinkable, not only because according to Hegel self-consciousness
is Desire and this couple is devoid of desire, but also because the relationship
cannot realize reciprocity. The unconscious sister cannot fulfill the role of
self-conscious other with regards to her brother (or anyone else for that matter); and in Antigones case, the brother is dead and her desire therefore seeks
the tomb. Irigaray explains Antigones sepulchral attraction as an indication
of her rejection of the socially sanctioned erotic options open to her under

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Attic law: . . . her attraction to the gods below or her jouissance is, no doubt,
recognized even more so because through this adherence it escapes the inventions of men (Irigaray 1974, 271).
Antigone also defines her ethical obligation as driven by eros: I was born
to join in love, not hate-that is my nature (Sophocles 1984a, 1.590). Creon,
forced by the dialogic discourse of tragedy to acknowledge, at least at some
level, this stated motivation, replies: Go down below and love, if love you
must-love the dead! While Im alive, no woman is going to lord it over me
(1984a, 1. 592). He suggests similarly to Haemon, his son and Antigones
fianck, who not incidentally is also driven by eros to defy the law of his father and eventually to avenge Antigones death by committing suicide: Let
her find a husband down among the dead (1984a, 1. 730). In the end, Antigone accepts the inevitably bloodless consummation of her desire: 0
tomb,
my bridal-bed-my house, my prison cut in the hollow rock, my everlasting
watch! Ill soon be there, soon embrace my own . . . (1984a, 1. 978). Thus
even if, as Irigaray wishes, Antigone is attempting to affirm an alternative
to her designated position in the Athenian family, she, like Creon, remains
nonetheless unable to figure this alternative as other than that which she
might seek to escape. Metaphorically at least, Antigone becomes a bride. Eternally sexless, childless, forever devoid of the realization of erotic, maternal
pleasure, Antigone, the Hegelian paragon of divine sisterhood, joins the ranks
of those unconscious desires from whose threat she so selflessly protected her
brother. A curious model for the blissful moment of gender equilibrium, but,
as Irigaray argues, . . . this moment, of course, is mythical, and this Hegelian
dream is already the effect of a dialectic produced by patriarchal discourse
(Irigaray 1974, 269).
For Irigaray, within the utopic substantial unity (unitesubstantielk) of the
Ethical Family, the discursive semblance of the Hegelian dialectic precludes a
vital, harmonious intermingling of brother-sister, masculine-feminine eros.
An oppositional bifurcation of the natural and the spiritual is artificially induced through the mediacy of a sexually indifferent philosophical myth wherein the feminine is merely a moment to be negated and subsequently forgotten.
If the ethical woman is fortunate enough to escape entombment and thereby
remains physically alive within the walls of the polis, drained of blood, amputated from her maternal ancestors and her own gods, confined to the unspiritualized immediacy of the oikos, her ethical individuality can connect neither
materially nor spiritually with that of an other, and vice versa. For Irigaray,
a truly ethical relation between the two sexes, what she terms a dialectic of
the couple, is necessarily predicated upon a heretofore impossible spiritualization of nature. Without two distinct sexes (as opposed to one sex and its
negative/affirmative mirror image) and their respective genealogies and divinities, the resultant sterility merely reproduces this repetitive finitude of
a bloody past, a bloodless future: That natural immediacy is almost always

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Hypatia

sexed, this remains unthought as moment of spiritual supersession. Natures

sexed immediacy falls back into the natural realm of reproduction and is not
elaborated as a spirituality of body, of flesh. The natural immediacy of the
couple is thus not spiritualized (Irigaray 1987, 149-50). The truly ethical
relation emerges only from a space of irreducible alterity, a recognition of the
fundamental difference of the two sexes. For even in their original unity, each
sex always already contains a materially motivated element of distinction:
They have, in them, a duality which would already permit them to apply a
new method. Each man and woman is physiologically hisher sex and the production of this sex (Irigaray 1987, 153).26The sexed body, from the very moment of conception, simultaneously (and diachronically) should incorporate
the particularity of ever-shifting loci of intensely physical pleasure via inter/
intracorporeal exchange, as well as the universality of a transcendent access
to the unbounded sphere of its own gods. As mediation between the natural
and the spiritual, the material and the divine, sexual difference, the site of
the universal particular, allows for the spontaneous recirculation of blood
and lymph, the reintroduction of continuous, infinite time, the recollection
of ancestral and sacred connections, and the consequent revolution of a sexually charged notion of ethics. The individual, collective, historical becoming
of gender would be the site, the penetrating link of spirit into human nature, the
moment of passage of the infinite into the finite, insofar as each gendered
individual is finite and potentially infinite in hisher relation to gender (Irigaray 1987, 154). Irigaray thus rewrites Hegels abstract individual, a formal
concretization of Spirit, as mediation between particularity and universality,
and proposes in its place the potentially infinite materiality of the universal
as mediation: the divinization of sexual difference.
This spiritualization of the sexed body accesses the multidirectional horizons of genealogical pasts and deific futures, and engages gendered individuals
in the process of a corporeally infinite becoming. Poetically surpassing the
silent exhaustion of epochal history, the violent semi-solidity of the dialectic, the forced identity of man and woman, man and God, love and hate, the
Irigarayan dialectic of the couple thaws the hemostatic waters of the bounded and isolated self and effuses the natural flow of blood and lymph within
and between differentiated, though permeable, desiring bodies. These living,
breathing bodies and their fluid exchange and interchange depose the culture
of death, la culte du mort et la culture de la mort, as foundational moment of
the ethical order: . . . the pleasure of an endless exchange with the other in
a touching that no privileged identification might hinder in its resorbtion.
Neither one nor the other being taken as terms, any more than is this excess
of their passage into each other-which is nothing: what is lacking in the
circularity of a movement turning back on itself, the gap which always already
refers back to another (Irigaray 1974,291).Temporality, no longer subject to
the bloody temporality of the dialectical progress of Spirit, now permits a sen-

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sually inspired means of transcendence: . . . a temporalization which passes

neither through destruction nor the aufhebung, but rather through an attention, a knowledge, a culture of the sensible as such and through an access to
levels of intensity and a contemplation of nature in the self, of the self, of the
self and the other. . . (Irigaray 1987, 159). This undammable constancy of a
newly conceived historical flow renews the possibility of individual, ethical,
copulative growth from within the material spaces of palpable carnality. Forward movement need not take the form of intergenerational annihilation and
substitution. Celestial metonymy lends a logic of circulation between sexually
differentiated gods and their ancestral incarnation; the mucous permeability
of the vital, substantial divinity, a god carried by the breath of the cosmos, the
song of poets, the respiration of lovers creates the opening to a transcendental sensible coming to pass through us, and of which we would be the mediators
and the bridges (Irigaray 1982,124). As site and link in perpetual becoming
between the two halves of the natural and spiritual world (1982, 124), Irigarays ethics of sexual difference supersedes the congealed positionality of its
oppositional predecessor and opens into a fearless, never-ending process of
mutual questioning within and between the two sexes.
Irigarays notion of the transcendental sensible returns us to the underlying
problem of historicity as proposed in the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis
and Hegelian phenomenology. Both Hegel and Lacan fail to take into account the material, gendered nature of the universe in constructing their histories of the ethical subject and therefore remain mired in a thoroughly masculinized history of a theoretically neuter socio-symbolic order. For Hegel, the
realm of Spirit transcends the contingencies of the progressive cyclical movement of human history whose end might be seen as some sort of consciousness
of divine purity. For Lacan, on the other hand, it is the metaphoric synchronicity of the symbolic saying, the space of a pseudo-divinized Other, which
provides humanity a certain level of transcendence with regard to the metonymic diachronicity of the more material said. While Irigaray appears to be
calling for a solution grounded in the logics of both the dialectic and the
psychoanalytic, neither of these theoretical frameworks might attain the mark
of divine transcendence without a prior recognition and incorporation of
the fundamental, material distinction between the two sexes-let alone the as
yet unthinkable revolution in consciousness this remembrance implies.
As we have seen, the Hegelian dialectic fails on this count in its positioning of the feminine as mere negative affirmation of the masculine and its consequent burial of woman, and the material world of the body that comes to be
associated with her, as a moment whose supercession lies on the path to the
self-actualization of the masculine subject. For Irigaray, this refusal of feminine subjectivity betrays the very logic of dialectical progression toward absolute purity: The absolute knowledge of a subject, a gender, is really a sign that
the work of the negative has not been accomplished. An incarnated, sexed

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god more completely speaks the acceptance of the work of the negative, the
necessity of embodiment in becoming divine, acceding to perfection. A god
as couple speaks it, or would speak it, even more completely? (Irigaray 1987,
124). In other words, by making the feminine disappear at the moment of the
Ethical Order (and, incidentally, refusing Antigone her maternal genealogy),
Hegel establishes a sexual unity that according to his theory would necessarily
be inferior because it is less complex, underdeveloped. With her notion of the
transcendental sensible Irigaray proposes a dialectic more dialectical than the
Dialectic-a dialectic whereby thoroughly sexed subjects act as mediating
movement between their respective masculine and feminine materialities and
divinities. Only through the constitution of feminine alterity can the truly
ethical encounter between self and other (as opposed to self and its specular
negation) occur. Woman must negotiate the spaces of her own ethicity, the
spaces between the specificity of her body and the horizon of her gods, before
an ethics of sexual difference might become thinkable.
And just as divinity and materiality necessarily take on a new face in this
process of sexuation, so too does the human psyche as well as its relation to
the symbolic Other at the heart of the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis. If
the nascent subject is figured as boy or girl, rather than child, whose occupancy of his or her sex entails material and spiritual connections as grounding
moments in the construction of the imaginary and the symbolic, the Oedipal
shift into the symbolic becomes completely nonsensical, as does its obsession
with castration and incest. Primary repression, erasure of the mother-her
consequent figuration as the absent presence of the Thing-erection of the
Other under the sign of the Phallus, gives way to the admission of maternal
desire and maternal debt as other than criminal disaster and, not insignificantly, reestablishes intergenerational bonds that might constitute the beginnings of a historicity grounded in genealogy and its connective potential.
For in his refusal of Antigones femininity, his criminalization of maternal desire, all in the name of an absolute sacrifice (of femininity?) to the synchronic
eternity of a being engendered through the moment of the thetic break-a
moment through which the mediation of the specter of incest coincides with
a supposed installation of sexual difference-Lacan positions the sphere of
the Other as the vertical dimension whereby the events of the positive, contingent historicity of the horizontal dimension might be understood as subordinate to the transcendent axis of the divine. Lacan might be seen to be heeding the call of the new historicists avant la lettre by taking into account the
textuality within history, by according the vertical dimensionality of the
symbolic order to the horizontal movements of a text, as well as a text within
a text, and elevating this process to the status of mythic universal. He does
so, however, through the necessary excision of femininity, and perhaps more
tellingly, the criminalization of the maternal (as) origin.

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The question remains, then, as to exactly what Irigarays dialectic of the

transcendental sensible might look like, how it might occasion a less flawed
ethical framework. But to approach the question of ethics, the problem of
historicity, on both the psychic individual and the social collective levels,
first must be rethought in terms of sexual difference, in terms of genealogygenealogy as that which most visibly, vocally evokes the inevitable connection between the material, the psychic, the social, and the divine (most succinctly defined, in Irigaray, as a transcendent, sexed horizon, the objective at
the end of and beyond the passage of our individual be~oming).~
The determination of history on the basis of genealogies requires first and
foremost a reconnection to, a recognition of the maternal, a heretofore repressed acceptance of maternal debt and maternal desire, most significantly in
the case of the mother-daughter relation. If, as Antigone, girls (following the
masculine paradigm) reject or sacrifice their maternal origin as such to gain
entry into the masculine, social order, they alienate their own sex, their own
past, their own divinity, their own history, and as a result are never allowed
the possibility of truly becoming themselves. Though Irigaray fails to discuss
the effects this acceptance of maternity might have on men, it would appear
that a masculine relation to a feminine genealogy, as instantiated through the
initial connection with the maternal body-and later the mother herselfwould set into play a dialectic rapport between the burgeoning masculine self
and a full continuum of otherness that would similarly allow men to become
themselves in a more authentic and multi-dimensional manner. This genealogical connection to the mothers mother, and so on as historical configuration instates the horizontal dimension of diachronic temporality yet also
contains within it-though no longer as geometrically perpendicular to itthe transcendent dimension of divinity, both of which necessarily maintain
their fundamental grounding in the materiality of the human body and the
natural world. Within this historical context, the development of the individual/collective psyche (the distinction cannot maintain its former structural differentiation) no longer claims as its necessary outcome the erection of
a transcendent symbolic, paternal order-an ill-disguised, post-Christian replacement of God-the-Father.
The ethical implications of this revised historical landscape lie far beyond
notions of traditional, positivist history, and even beyond those of new history, for both temporality and textuality are called into question by the instantiation of sexual difference. With the dethroning of the symbolic comes
not only the unbalance of the synchronic element of Lacanian historicity but
also the defining rubric of poststructuralist notions of textuality. Irigaray often
argues that a symbolic engendered of sexual difference is impossible to conceptualize, above all because the only available tools of conceptualization are
determined in and by a masculine symbolic. It might, however, be argued that

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this admittance of a present untenability of feminine, and of course maternal,

expression implies a tacit acceptance of the reality of the Lacanian model of
the human psyche and the transcendent nature of the Symbolic order that
inescapably bounds o u r conscious and unconscious experience. This implicit
assent to the truth-value of the Lacanian model seems not only unnecessary
and insufficiently explained but potentially dangerous in terms of an attempt
to think through a feminist revision of psychoanalysis. For if we are to concede the supremacy of the Symbolic and a consequent inability to express ourselves authentically from our inevitable positioning therein-except though
hysterical outbreaks that only our analysts might understand-we negate existent feminine and maternal discourses and relegate genuine, untainted femininity and maternity to an abstract, unthinkable future.
Ethicity, in turn, is relegated to the realm of angelic abstraction potentially accessed through a presently nonexistent communication among and
between the sexes. For until self and other, masculine and feminine, are constructed as such, an ongoing dialectic (in the Irigarayan sense), dialogic, respectful exchange cannot begin to take place. And while Irigaray certainly
does advocate practical political action within the current masculinist system, her inability to envision a way out of the Lacanian psychic model poses
certain ethical limits that her genealogical divinization of the maternal connection would not seem to allow us to surpass.
And if, for all this, we were to begin at the beginning. With the mother.
Her uniqueness and her femininity. Her womanhood and her desire. And the
enormity of our debt to her. If we were to refuse the Lacanian supposition that
the mother qua mother exists only in the psyche of her (male) child, as the
criminal origin of his interminable suffering, and instead were to assume that
she is and always has been a much richer presence to herself, to her son or
daughter, and to the many others in her life, her unique role as forbidden
Thing would cease to function as an unconscious black hole and would render
the supremacy of the Phallus theoretically invalid.
The psychic drama of ethicity sheds its tragic proportions once the motherdaughterlmother-son relation is recognized as a truly intersubjective connection between two desiring, social beings as well as a thoroughly material and
sensual exchange between two animal bodies. And while the mother might
now be read as our common point of entry into a more broadly conceived
realm of ethicity, she does not do so as a conceptual space or time emptied of
human subjectivity; she is neither pure body nor divine abstraction. This understanding of mothers as women, as historically, socially implicated beings,
implies that we, of woman born, are always already ethically situated in this
world. And in acknowledging our very first experiences as intersubjectively
mediated in some sense, mightnt it be more fruitful to ask what happens to
this original connection, how does it shift and transform across time and subjective space? Must it be severed in a violent process of socialization, the

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so-called movement i n t o t h e paternal order? In recognizing our mothers as

selves, ethicity no longer depends upon t h e strength of our adherence to a lie
t h a t refuses maternal desire as criminal, but rather u p o n our acceptance of
maternal love as beautiful, flawed, ambiguous, and h u m a n . We may manage
t o discover, or recover, through this initial amorous exchange a powerful antidote t o t h e violent, suffering, isolated self forced upon us i n the psychoanalytic, philosophical mirror.

NOTES
1 would like to express my sincere thanks to Kelly Oliver for her invaluable and
generous advice and critiques of earlier versions of this article. 1 would also like to
thank Mary Beth Mader for her always helpful comments and the referees at Hypatia
for their insightful remarks. Finally, I wish to thank Christine Coquard-Rambeau for
the many wonderful late night discussions that refined and clarified my reading of
Lacan.
I . For Lacan, the processes of the unconscious lend language its continuous/contiguous structure whereby thought might become conscious and the subject (consciously) present to herself. Only via the intersubjective experience is the speaking
subject able to glean, through the discourse of her interlocuter, or speaking object, the
unconscious structures controlling the formations of her conscious thoughts and perceptions. The subject, however, remains ignorant of the inner workings of the unconscious, in particular with regard to the maternal Thing constitutive of its law. It is this
very ignorance, or repression, that conditions her ability to speak.
2. This translation, and all French to English translations, are likewise my own
unless otherwise indicated.
3 . See Kristeva (1974,41-43).
4. At the beginning of her essay on abjection, Kristeva similarly defines sublimation: Sublimation. . . is nothing other than the possibility of naming the pre-nominal,
the pre-objectal, which in fact are only a trans-nominal, a trans-objectal. See Kristeva (1980, 19).
5. The secondary effects of the visual aspect of the spectacle appear to engage
only our third eye: The merits of staging are great, I always appreciate them,
whether at the theater or the cinema, but lets not forget that they are not so important except insofar as, if youll permit me some liberty of language, our third eye isnt
hard enough-we jerk it off a little with staging (Lacan 1986, 295). In other words,
the visual merely adds a masturbatory element for those of us who need a little stimulation to keep our third eyes sufficiently erect.
Nicole Loraux also affirms the tragic primacy of the ear as opposed to the eye,
though for different and far less anatomical reasons. For Loraux, we must imagine the
Athenian spectator as a listener (un auditeur) whose acute sensitivity to the words of
the text the contemporary reader would do well to emulate: . . . we must credit this
all-powerful listener with an attention which at the very least must not float much,
with a memory of which we have lost all memory, and with an astonishing capacity to

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place the long duration of work on the signifier at the heart of the short time of theatrical representation (Loraux 1985, 10-1 1).
6. This death of man might be said to lead to a certain death of history as
defined in traditional terms. For while the diachronic events of our lives as speaking subjects may constitute a recountable chronology, our relation to the symbolic
that ultimately constitutes the foundation of our being lends a certain primary synchronicity to our seemingly historicized lives, which in effect establishes a certain
temporal rift in our interactions with a historically conceived world. As we will see in
Lacans reading of the Antigone, it is, in the end, our synchronic dimension that transcends all else, especially as regards our identities as ethical, intersuhjective, human
beings.
7. For Lacan, . . . Antigone, opposite Creon, situates herself as synchrony
opposed to diachrony (1986, 331).
8. Rosalyn Diprose argues that Hegels omission of Ismene from his discussion of
the Antigone is a result of his constitution of the ethical struggle as a battle of the
sexes. Diprose suggests that accounting for the relationship between the two sisters
would allow us to make a feminist critique of complementary difference in addition
to one of sexual difference. See Diprose (1991).
9. Loraux reads hanging as a form of death associated in tragedy with the feminine (as opposed, for example, to a virile death o n the battlefield). She argues, moreover, that for the tragic woman, death constitutes a certain equivalency with marriage, and suicide thereby reaffirms her traditional societal role: This does not mean
that tragic women are not wives. But they are wives in death-and only in death, it
seems, because only their deaths belong to them and it is there that they achieve
marriage (Loraux 1985, 57).
10. Elizabeth Grosz writes: In introjecting the name-of-the-father, the child (or
rather, the boy) is positioned with reference to the fathers name. He is now bound to
the law, in so far as he is implicated in the symbolic debt, given a name, and an
authorized speaking position. The paternal metaphor is not a simple incantation but
the formula by which the suhject, through the construction of the unconscious, becomes an I, and can speak its own name (Grosz 1990, 71).
11. Antigones desire appears to have a closer relation to what Lacan calls the
prehistoric Other (1Autreprehistorique): . . . this first stranger to whom the subject
must refer himself (Lacan 1986, 67).
12. The mothers relation to the laws of desire is a peculiar one for Lacan, as is
her relation to/identity as the Other. Initially, as we have seen, the child has as its sole
object the mother in the guise of primordial Other: the one who is able to satisfy all of
the childs needs and whose love the child demands in his articulated requests to have
these needs met. Because the objects that the child demands do not correspond to
what he really wants (his mothers love), the element of desire is introduced dialectically into the equation as a means of mediating the gap between need and demand.
Desire addresses itself to the Other atlas the site of the symbolic and situates the
burgeoning, subjective I therein. Like need it is unspeakable, and like demand it is
insatiable.
It is within this context that Lacan argues that the desire of the mother is the
phallus (le desire de la mere EST le phallus), and therefore the child thereby wishes

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to be the phallus to attain his mothers love. The dialectical relation between the
childs demand for love and the mothers desire of the phallus will ultimately, with the
introduction of the law of the father, determine the childs successful entrance into
the symbolic order and his relation(s) of desire to other speaking subjects through the
repression of the maternal body and the establishment of the veiled phallus as the
signifier of the desire of the other. See Lacan (1971, 103-15).
13. For Freud, of course, the mothers desire for her male child is an expression of
penis envy. As lrigaray remarks: The desire to obtain the penis will be replaced with that of
having a child, the latter becoming, following an equivalence analyzed by Freud, the
substitute for the penis. We must add that womans happiness will only be complete if
the new-born is a little boy, bearer of the coveted penis (Irigaray 1977, 41).
14. Kelly Oliver argues that Kristevas notion of the imaginary father is a screen
for maternal love, which sets up a maternal connection to the symbolic before the
onset of paternal law. See Oliver (1993, 69-90).
15. Grosz gives a concise and accessible account of Lacans theory of desire. See
Grosz (1990,58-80).
16. This [feminine] jouissance which is experienced and about which we know
nothing, isnt this what puts us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret
one face of the Other, the God-face, as supported by feminine jouissance (Lacan
1975, 71).
17. I borrow this phrasing from Simone de Beauvoirs reading of myth, in particular the myth of Woman. See Beauvoir (1989, 260).
18. As Oliver remarks: Womans role in the burial ritual is an example of her
paradoxical relation to man. Through nature, woman protects man from nature. She
protects his body against the impulses of the body (Oliver 1996, 73).
19. For an account of Lacans notion of desire as essentially Hegelian, see Slavoj
Zizek (1993, 120-24).
20. I t seems a bit odd that Hegel rules out the possibility of incestuous desire
considering Antigones family history.
21. In an attempt to explain the highly controversial line of reasoning used in
Antigones most well-known speech, Lesky argues: This is the expression of a basic
trait of Greek character: some intellectual reason has to be found for the feelings of
the heart (Lesky 1966, 282).
22. The obvious question remains of course as to how platonic the brotherrelation is in this instance. Cynthia Willett, for example, proposes that Antigones
intense love for her brother contains heavy overtones of both sexual and maternal
desire. While her argument tends to discount Hegels, it once again subsumes feminine desire under the rubric of the masculine libido. See Willett (1990, 277).
Helen Foley also addresses the . . . disastrous implications of Antigones almost
incestuous rejection of marriage. See Foley (1995, 140).
23. Hegel argues to the contrary: Ethical self-consciousness now learns from
its deed the developed nature of what it actuaEly did, as much when it obeyed divine
law as when it followed human law (Hegel 1977, 283). Although the emphatic actually might indicate that the difference between male and female ethicality hinges
on qualitative rather than quantitative knowledge of the oppositional law, this fails
to explain the contradiction inherent in a selfsconscious subject acting consciously

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according to the dictates of the unconscious, and then undergoing a second coming to
consciousness whereby she is now really conscious of the ethical reality of her actions.
As lrigaray remarks, the structure forms a vicious circle for Woman, Where the unconscious, while remaining unconscious, is assumed to know the laws of a consciousness which can be unaware of it (Irigaray 1974, 277).
24. For Hegel, self-consciousness is assured through the moment of desire in the
encounter with an other: . . . self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life; selfconsciousness i s Desire (Hegel 1977, 109). Hegels equation of desire and self-consciousness is remarkably similar to Lacans formulation of desire as constitutive of
subjectivity.
25. The English translation of the Hegelian epigraph is my own rather literal
translation of the French translation Irigaray uses.
The English translator of Speculum takes her translation of the epigraph from
Hegels Philosophy of Nature (1970, 175). Curiously, though, the English translation
omits the latter half of the epigraph. See Irigaray (1985, 214).
26. In her essay Quand nos lkvres se parlent, Irigaray lyrically prefigures this
division of the subject as a call to the other: Before any representation, we are two.
Allow this two that your blood has made you, that my body recalls to you-living.
You are always the touching beauty of a first time, if you dont get congealed in reproductions (1977, 215).
27. In Femmes divines, Irigaray writes: All men (according to Feuerbach) and
all women, must imagine a God, an objective and subjective site or path of a possible
gathering of self in space and time: unity of instinct, of heart and knowledge, unity of
nature and spirit, condition of dwelling and saintliness. Only a God can save us, safeguard us. The feeling of a positive existence, objective and glorious, of our subjectivity, is necessary to us. As a God who assists us and guides us in our becoming, who
of our relation to infinitude, which
keeps the measures of our limits-women-and
inspires our projects (1987, 79-80).

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