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.
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 This element of critical self-removal from the jurisdiction of law also appears in Young-Bruehl’s account of the receptive ego. Young-Bruehl presents the ego as something endowed with a certain amount of autonomy, capable of rejecting an adherence or fixation on law, predictability, and hyperactivity. In her explication of the ego’s natural receptivity and the cultural refusal to acknowledge this receptivity, Young-Bruehl attests to the need to focus on the notions of affection and ego-instinct as sources for understanding the processes that strengthen the ego.
VVVILike Copjec and Lacan, who note the ethical nature of lawlessness and the imperative to reject the commands of the community, should they demand the sacrifice of desire, Young-Bruehl suggests that the ego, which is nourished by the affectionate and receptive current of love, acts as a bulwark against the rules of a sociality that denies the primacy of receptivity. Young-Bruehl suggests that the receptive ego, “this amae core is lost to a worldview that denies altogether that a need to be loved is the foundation of re
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