Neither fear nor pity

But was it necessary to be a hero? Above all, if one is/was born a girl.

“Have I cried enough for being a girl!”

To which Ismene, in “true” girl fashion, replies: “You desire impracticable things”.

Daughter of her father, Antigone shows him after death what the Law is, the true Law.

Under the pretext of the gods, she buries Polynices, “her good”, her incestuous double, because “he is her brother”. That’s all.

No. He is also her nephew, the trace of the fault: affected blindness of her father before the predictions, a mother’s blind love for her sons, all her sons.

“This victim, so terribly wilful” is never mute before the astounded Creon: “… of we two, it is she who would be the man if I allowed her to win with impunity”. As inflexible as her father, roars the Chorus.

Difficult to conceive as woman, and yet she is (one), recognizing it only on her way to death,

lamenting being neither lover nor mother.

Besides.

Haemon can only join her in that outside place of the sexuation that imprisons her.

False Narcissus she looks at him in her lakes.

Wouldn’t there be a desire that must be ceded in order not to cede one’s desire?

Extracts cited from Sophocles’ Antigone and Seminar VII of Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, lessons XIX and XXI.

Translated by Susan Schwartz