Abstract

This article is an attempt to frontally pose a question queer theory gravitates around, yet never effectively spells out: what is a togetherness of those who have nothing in common but their desire to undo group ties? First, I consider the take-up of Lacan’s ethical experiment in Seminar VII, the Ethics of Psychoanalysis by queer theorists. I contend that queer theory has not given Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone its full import, which demands its placement in the philosophical tradition of the West brought to its highest fruition in Kant. I further contend, however, that to do so does not quite offer a solution to the queer problem, for, as contemporary debate on the political import of Antigone shows, the purity of her desire does not immediately translate into a sustainable politics. Lacan himself was faced with the problem of translating his ethics into a politics after his “excommunication” from the psychoanalytic establishment, and came to falter before it. Nevertheless, Lacan’s efforts allow us to pose the undoubtedly queer question of how to group together those whose only attribute is to undo group ties. Responding to the unanswerable demands of a theory and a practice that allows us to answer that question, I propose the figure of the smoker’s communism, as elaborated upon by Mladen Dolar, as a preliminary queer suggestion as to how we might go about mitigating the gap between Lacan’s ethical brilliance and his admitted political failure.

Highlights

  • What is the sociality of those who have nothing in common but their opposition to identity? Queer theory appears to skirt around this question, without thereby posing it directly

  • If it is undisputable that such a community has existed and has been a political force to be reckoned with, much recent queer literature can be construed as the anxious chronicling of the slow disintegration of queer modes of sociality

  • We find confirmation of this from Antigone herself, who justifies her intransigence before Creon by recourse to the law of the gods

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Summary

Introduction

What is the sociality of those who have nothing in common but their opposition to identity? Queer theory appears to skirt around this question, without thereby posing it directly. Reproaches Butler for conforming exactly to the scripts of futurity, always premised on a heterosexualised view of the self-reproduction of the socius, rather than asserting Antigone’s paradoxical dignity as abjected, as an internal outside to the social order, the obstacle the prevents the totalisation of heteronormativity into a seamless whole While these views could be mapped onto the usual queer dichotomy of social utopianism/antisocial negativity (Caserio, 2006: 819), with Butler advocating for the future as an indispensable battleground in any politics, and Edelman refusing any such assurance, the queer framing fails to place Antigone in the context Lacan ascribes her: as answering to the Kantian ethical revolution in strictly psychoanalytic fashion

39 Pure Desire
42 The Analytic Institution
Conclusion
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