accompanied by the fracturing of the loved object, as “the beloved is always slightly different from or more than herself” (Copjec, 42). The beloved object is thus drawn into a relation characterised by the presence of ineffable excess.
VVVICopjec’s account of autonomy, given through the portrayal of the loving Antigone, exhibits receptive and critical capacities. Antigone is responsive and loving, and although “her love for her brother does not depend on any of his qualities,” and thus she is autonomous and free from dependence upon her brother as a loved object, “she is not indifferent to them; she accepts them all, lovingly” (Copjec, 41). The feminist potential inherent in this conception lies in its capacity to reject and replace a model of autonomy as self-contained indifference, while simultaneously proffering a mode of being that acts to discard the oppressive and dominating laws of the community and their internalised existence comprising the superego.The unique presentation of autonomy offered here disavows law, the “nomos” aspect of “auto-nomy.” While the property of the “auto” or self, remains in a weakened form in Copjec and Lacan’s accounts, “nomos” slides away from the connotative meaning of autonomy in this context. In this sense, “autonomy” cannot be easily translated here as “self-law.” Copjec claims that it is only because Antigone “has first been able to unloose herself from the fundamental law of her own being,” “that she is able to undertake such a fundamental break with the existing laws of her community” (Copjec, 42). Love, in this sense, always entails openness to unpredictable relational fluctuations and potential self-shattering.
VVVIThe loosening from the law of the self occurs precisely through the act of loving. As the drive fragments and the loved object splits in the processes of loving, so too does the loving subject. “Fractured through the drive’s repetitions,” (Copjec, 42) the loving self tears and morphs into something slightly alien to the original self. Lacan describes this rupture and metamorphosis as it occurs in Antigone. She appears to mutate and take on an avian existence, attested to by the “bird-like cries that” she “emits on learning that her brother’s body has been re-exposed after the first burial” (Copjec, 43). For Lacan it “is this wild tearing away from herself, this inhuman rather than heroic metamorphosis,” (Copjec, 43) that illustrates the ethical nature of Antigone’s action. She acts in accordance with Lacan’s ethical imperative, to never give “ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan, 321). Rather than sacrificing the near satiation of her desire, through the sublimation inherent in loving, for “the good,” Antigone persists in desiring and remains free from the tyranny of “the good.” Antigone is ethical because unlike Creon, who attempts to serve “the good,” the ideal form proffered by the community, Antigone rejects the pursuit of the good and continues loving and morphing. She attests to the understanding of ethical action as “a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself” (Copjec, 43). Thus, the notion of autonomy presented here in terms of ethical action is a radical reformulation of the concept. Rather than characterised by self-rule, detachment, and individuation, this reconceptualisation of autonomy attests to the ethical necessity of lawlessness, self-rupture, and love.
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