VVVICopjec turns to Lacan’s critical reading of Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone, to develop a notion of ethical autonomy characterised by a radical break with both the law of the self and the law of the community, as manifested in the superego. Lacan claims that Hegel mistakenly construes Antigone as a moral play about the inherent and tragic conflict between differing orders of law, between the law of the state, the human, man and the universal, as embodied by Creon, and the law of the family, the divine, woman and the particular as personified in Antigone. In Hegel’s account, both Antigone and Creon’s actions fall in line with one order of law, thereby violating the opposing order. Thus Hegel finds that Antigone and Creon are equally guilty of violating one law in favor of the other. Antigone, “acting on behalf of a particular individual, her brother…betrays the community and terrorizes the state, while Creon acts on behalf of the city-state and thus sacrifices Polynices and the values of the family” (Copjec, 14). Lacan rebukes this account of mutual culpability, and instead suggests that Creon plays the unethical actor and Antigone, the ethical autonomous heroine.
VVVIContrary to Hegel’s reading of Antigone as siding with the law of the family and the divine, Lacan claims that Antigone disregards both the law of the State, as manifested in Creon’s orders, and the law of the gods. Proclaiming neither to break any law, nor obey any law, Antigone simply establishes a place for herself that is beyond law (Lacan, 278). She refuses to consider the divine or the human order, claiming, “I’m not going to get mixed up in it; I’m not concerned with all these gods below who have imposed laws on men” (Lacan, 278). Antigone intends her ethical act, the burial of her brother Polynices, to neither accord with the law of the family nor the law of the gods, and most certainly not with the law of the State, as Creon has explicitly forbidden the burial of Polynices. Thus, in this instance, Antigone rejects all dominions of law and moves toward lawlessness.
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scholarship has focused on relational autonomy as a critical tool for subverting and resisting mainstream knowledge that sustain social violence, little attention has been paid to the fruitful engagement between feminist theories of psychoanalysis and conceptualizations of autonomy. I will draw on the productive potential of this engagement by turning to Jean Copjec's account of autonomy in Lacan's reading of Antigone and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's exploration of ego instincts. From these theories I will derive an account of autonomy in feminist psychoanalytic terms, as freedom from the law of the superego and the creation os a strong receptive ego.