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.
VVVICopjec and Lacan portray this place beyond the law as a realm of autonomy, and suggest that in refusing to concern herself with either the laws of the community or the laws of the gods, Antigone embodies a truly ethical actor. Antigone’s deed, the burial of her criminalized brother, is rendered ethical by the nature of its autonomy. Copjec reads the coercive nature of moral law as a hindrance to ethical action. The moral law that commands: “everyone must act in the same way…loses its ethical connotation,” as the must in the commandment of this law is “guided by, rather than independent of, external sanction” (Copjec, 17). Thus, acting in accordance with a moral law, either in the realm of the universal or the particular, renders the actor coerced, unfree, and unethical. For both Lacan and Copjec, it is precisely only the momentarily autonomous action that can surpass the coercive force of the law and become ethical.
VVVIIn burying her brother, Antigone rejects law and follows her desire. She does not genuflect to the superego, as an internalized version of this law. Antigone proclaims that she will bury her brother because he is essentially singular. She claims, “’if my husband had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother dead and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother’” (11. 908-912)(Copjec, 40). Copjec recounts Antigone’s sentiment as she attests to her brother’s irreplaceability: “There will never be another like him. His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no deity, none of the laws of the polis to sanction the deed she undertakes on his behalf” (2002, 40). Lacan and Copjec read Antigone’s claim about her brother’s singularity, as indicative of Hegel’s misreading of the play as a chronicle of the inherent tragedy underlying moral law. Lacan instead, claims, “Antigone’s position represents the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, to whatever good or evil Polynices may have done, or to whatever he may be subjected to” (Lacan, 279). Thus Antigone breaks away from the realm of law, and her actions are rendered uncoerced and therefore ethical.
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