Well, did Antigone die for that stupid reason? or for another stupide one
like pride? or dignity? or moral?
The extra-ordinary passion which transports death into life and life onto
death arises in certain artworks, in certain tragedies, from some kind of
knowledge of the irreplaceable. The unique and irreplaceable presence that
constructs the desire of Antigone, claims Lacan, is that of having shared
the maternal womb (Lacan, L'ethique de la psychanalyse). And through that
idea of the knowledge of the irreplaceable beauty (Kant) is put together
with suffering pain and fear (Sade). A disappearance in appearance, the
zone of trespassing the bounds of death in life creates the effect of
beauty which results from the rapport of the subject to the horizon of life
where object is a power of suffering that sigmnifies a limit, from
traversing to "the second death". But what is the surface that allows the
emergence of the image of a passion, asks Lacan. This surface, and here we
should think of the screen of Vision in art in analogy to a screen of
phantasy, is an horizon that belongs to the order of some kind of a hidden
law that is not developped in any signifying chain because it is out of the
field of exchanges, of replacements, of substitutions - and for Lacan is
therefore out of the order of human relationships altogether - a non
formulated law of that which IS, of the unique, the irreducable and
irreplacable. Such an horizon, I propose, is singular but not necessarily
"belonging" to separate individuals. Such an horizon can be
trans-subjective and in that sense it is a part of an-other order of human
relationship in the feminine - and not out of it - in a borderspace that
can be partially shared - the matrixial boderspace. If the surface of
passion is such a unique value, only beyond the limits of the image,
transgressing to where life is potentially lost, one can approach life as
what is already lost and thus "the effect of beauty is the effect of
blindness", indicating for us the place of the rapport to one's own death -
but also to the death of a matrixial non-I.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger
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