Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor New Essays on

Jacques Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

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that has been lost, that shall be forever sought but never found or
fully attained. The idealizing classical European philosophical
tradition might have called this the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
But, guided by the Freudian hypothesis of the unconscious, Lacan
began to think of it as the price, the gatekeeper's fee that had to be
paid for this very coming into being of the subject. He has a term for
this “lost object”: he calls it objet petit a, and in various other guises
and formulations that we shall be examining, he calls it the Thing
(das Ding) and the Real, objects of fantasy and foreboding. In any
case, it is the key to understanding human desire and the essential
horizons of human moral and ethical life. The following essays thus
ask whether or not Lacan's teachings on ethics so obviously and
directly constitute an “anti-philosophy” or whether they succeed in
putting the philosophical questioning of moral and ethical life on a
wider stage.
A couple of notes regarding the text: These essays were first
presented as lectures given over the course of three seminars, the
first of which was held at Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand,
in 2006; the second, a three-day seminar to which I was invited by of
the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of
New York at Buffalo in October of 2007; and the third, another
seminar that again convened at Thammasat University, Bangkok, in
December of 2008. The participants in those seminars, Krzysztof
Ziarek, Ewa Ziarek, David Miller, and David Johnson, to name just a
few, provided much valuable criticisms and questions that helped
enormously in the development of this project. I especially thank
Distinguished Professor Rodolphe Gasché, not only for his part in
organizing the SUNY Buffalo seminars, but also for his
encouragement in getting these lectures rewritten for their eventual
publication as a book.
Because I do not take Lacan to have been a systematic thinker, I
have decided to present my readings in the form of a collection of
essays rather than as chapters in a continuously and systematically
developed narrative. Each essay takes up the question of the
philosophical or “anti-philosophical” dimensions of Lacan's ethics of
psychoanalysis in terms of certain key concepts, sources, and texts
to which he returned again and again over the course of his
seminars. An overall chronological approach has been adopted in
the order of presentation of these essays. The first essays concern
the earlier seminars, especially Seminar VII, and the later essays
deal with seminars and essays from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The essays try to develop working definitions of some of Lacan's
terminology as it is pertinent to the perspective under discussion, so
readers unfamiliar with such terminology might benefit by reading
these essays in the order of their presentation. Readers more
familiar with the Lacanian discourse may read the essays in any
order they wish.
Please also note that references to Lacan's published seminars have
been given in the text and not as endnotes. The references appear
in the following example: (S7: 35). The “S” refers to “Seminar,” the
number to the numbered book of the seminar. In this case, S7 refers
to Lacan's seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The
number(s) following the colon refer to the page number. I have used
the standard English translations for Lacan's seminars where they
are available. In some of these translations, the pagination in the
French text is also given. Where the French pagination references
are available, I have also given them. For the convenience of the
reader, references to Sophocles' plays are also given in the text.
I have also chosen to italicize the word jouissance to show that it is a
foreign word, in this case, a French word. I realize that many English
translations of Lacan's terminology do not do this, but I have chosen
to do so because there is no exact English translation for this
overdetermined French word, and so I have left it as a French word
and have accordingly italicized it.
Finally, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the editors and
staff at SUNY Press, Albany NY, for all their efforts and patience in
working with me in the preparation of this volume. If the devils are in
the details, then it took the angels at SUNY Press to help me find a
way to overcome them.
 ABBREVIATIONS OF WORKS BY JACQUES
LACAN

S1: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud's Papers on

Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques Alain Miller,
translated by John Forrester. New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1988.
S2: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud's
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli.
New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988.
S7: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller,
translated by Dennis Porter. New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1992.
Le Séminaire, livre VII, L'éthique de la psychanalyse. Texte établi par
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1986.
S8: Le Séminaire, livre VIII, Le Transfert. Texte établi par Jacques-
Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2001.
S11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York
and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.
S17: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller,
translated by Russell Grigg. New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2007.
Le Séminaire, livre XVII, L'envers de la psychanalyse. Texte établi
par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1991.
S18: Le Séminaire, livre XVIII. D'un discours qui ne serait pas du
Semblant. Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions
de Seuil, 2006.
S20: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, On Feminine
Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973.
Edited by Jacques Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. New
York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.
Le Séminaire, livre XX, Encore. Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller.
Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1975.
 INTRODUCTION

There is a yearning (Sehnsucht) that seeks the unbound (Ungebundene).

—Hölderlin, “Mnemosyne”

Antigone, in her unbearable splendor: My title speaks from the heart

of this book. These words, taken from Lacan's seventh seminar, The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, not only comprise the title to one of the
central essays in this collection, they are also the words, the image
and the enigma, the epiphany, one might say, to which my thoughts
kept returning as I attempted to understand the direction and ideals
of Lacan's teachings on ethics. Rather than contemporary clinical
case studies, why did Lacan instead place this tragic yet electrifying
image, drawn from classical, literary sources, at the climax of his
famous seminar? Was Lacan merely emulating Freud's adaptation of
the sufferings of the son of Laius? Or was there some other, perhaps
darker, purpose at work in this “splendor”? Is a tragic dimension the
key to understanding Lacan's ethics?
Understandably, Lacan does not portray Antigone as darkened by
mourning and melancholia over the death of her brother. His
Antigone is neither muted nor defeated in the finality of the dark
silence of the tomb that awaits her. In his reading of the play's final
scenes, we see instead an Antigone bathed in transgressive and
defiant colors. She becomes an unappeasable force crushing the
pale of human law. It seems indeed something larger and more
explosive is being brought to center stage in this evocation of her
“unbearable splendor.” Is there a link between Lacan's ethics of
psychoanalysis and the sort of transgressive ethics one finds in the
writings of Georges Bataille, a latent complicity perhaps with the
Bataille who described himself as being not a philosopher, but a
mystic or a madman? But such a solar Antigone, eloquent in the
grips of an impossible desire, would certainly have darkly and
dramatically shaded the project of a psychoanalytic ethics. Would
this not end up promoting an unspeakably violent and singularly
transgressive act as an ethical paradigm? Why, indeed, this death-
stalked poetic climax to Lacan's seminar? Would not all that is here
“unbearable” also be unspeakable? What would the consequences
of this be for an ethics presumably rooted in speech and speaking?
What new directions in ethical thought might be heralded by this
recourse, elaborated at length in Lacan's seminar, to the ancient
tragedy of Antigone? But what is the upshot of all this? What new
ways of thinking emerge from the shadows of this “unbearable
splendor”?
Such are the questions and perplexities to which the following
essays are an attempted response and elaboration. Allow me now to
briefly survey four main perspectives that shall be taken up in this
regard.
The first of these concerns the overall critical relation between Lacan
and the classical philosophical tradition. In terms of such great
themes as those of “death,” “truth,” and the “good for a human
being,” the following essays question and examine the critical
relationship between Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis and the
classical European traditions of ethical and political philosophy. The
term “philosophy” names an essentially classical Greek tradition of
ethical and political thought, the tradition that defined itself by posing
and sustaining such fundamental questions as: “What is the being of
a human being?” “What is True and the Good for a human being?”
Regarding this tradition we shall ask, is Lacan an “anti-philosopher”?
Lacan makes many efforts and many statements that would seem to
support this position. Especially his insistence on the unconscious as
a dimension fundamental to human experience would seem quite
enough to distance his psychoanalytic ethics from the horizons of the
classical European philosophical tradition. Throughout his seminars,
he often seems to be searching for a way through philosophy, a way
toward its limits, its outside, its “Other,” or its “after.” But Lacan never
simply rejects philosophy outright. He seems rather to be attempting
something more troublesome and paradoxical: a philosophy of “anti-
philosophy,” the effect of which is to enlarge philosophy and to
possibly enrich it. What is Lacan's strategy here? While it is a
strategy that looks for moments, angles, questions, dimensions of
thought and experience that question and indeed tear at the
philosophical canvas, the critical effect of all this is to offer
philosophy a new language and new ways of thinking the being and
the limits of human language and experience. Lacan thus enlarges
philosophy rather than rejects it. His position with regard to the
classical traditions of ethical and political thought can perhaps be
thus characterized as both inside and outside that tradition, a relation
of both belonging to and separation from “philosophy.” Lacan's anti-
philosophy is thus a position that is both intimate and yet also “ex-
timate” to philosophy. It is both within philosophy and, at the same
time, it is a movement to its limits, its “outside,” its “Other.”
If Lacan is an anti-philosopher, he is so in terms of two key
assertions. First, he asserts the truth of the unconscious; and from
this he develops his second important assertion: a human being is a
“speaking” being. His conceptions of the human bearing toward
death, his definitions of truth and of the human good all arise from
the fundamental way he conceives the structure of both the
unconscious and speaking being. Setting aside the dimension of the
unconscious, it would seem that with all its privileging of the voice
and speech, the classical tradition has a place already cut out and
prepared for such an ethic as this. But, it is his way of formulating
speaking being as a structure—a generalized structure of language
linked with bodily, sexual needs and desires—that also distances
Lacan's ethic from that tradition. It is along these general lines that
Lacan's ethic is both “Greek” and “anti-Greek.” The question of a
possible “ethics of psychoanalysis” indeed seems the place or the
scene where Lacan's relation with “philosophy” is best presented,
where his critical questioning of a philosophical tradition unfolds and
where it is most crucially tested, and, too, where all the risks, the
stakes, and the exciting new possibilities for such a position are most
acutely felt. And if we were to put a face on this anti-philosophy, or
better yet, a mask as worn in the performances of ancient Greek
tragic dramas, no doubt the mask of the tragic heroine Antigone—
Antigone in her “unbearable splendor”—would be one of the most
daring and far-reaching.
Second perspective: Antigone is the central figure linking Lacan's
anti-philosophy to the classical Greek tradition. Thus, it is not only
his reading of Plato's Symposium in his eighth seminar, but also and
most spectacularly his reading of Sophocles' Antigone in his famous
seventh seminar that shall situate for us Lacan's ethics vis-à-vis the
Greek ethical tradition extending from Socrates through Plato and
Aristotle. While the eighth seminar—where Lacan takes up an
extended and detailed reading of Plato's Symposium, and does so in
order to formulate his conception of the psychoanalytic transference
—indeed offers not only a plethora of references to the classical
Greek traditions, but also its own intriguing and important ethical
dimensions, dimensions pursued in the last of the essays in this
collection, nonetheless it is first his reading of the play Antigone in
the seventh seminar that is most captivating, and where his early
ethical positions are most engaging. It is here that he holds up
before the tranquil, paternal countenance of Aristotle's kalos
kagathos the wild grimace of Sophocles' Antigone, “in her
unbearable splendor.”
Arising anamorphically across the surface of his seminar, Lacan's
Antigone thus emerges as the tragic image of a woman whose
doomed desire has carried her beyond the limits of life and death.
Nothing like it has ever before appeared in any other book on ethics.
From the midst of a very measured discourse, a discourse on
“ethics,” which, after all, in a traditional and very Greek way, is itself
a discourse on the measure of life, on the measured life and the
good and beauty that measure brings, in the midst of this, at this
limit-point, something immeasurable is brought forth, traced by her
splendor. She surpasses everything the ancient Greek philosophers
had said about the beautiful, happy life. She makes the old
philosophical-ethical heroes, especially the Greek aristocratic
gentleman, the famous kalos kagathos, seem pallid ideals, beautiful
illusions, whose dreams of self-knowledge and self-mastery served
more to mask and to impede access to the truth of desire than to
reveal it. No doubt, Lacan's portrayal of Antigone in her
immeasurable and unbearable splendor was precisely his way of
shattering such beautiful illusions. Antigone thus exemplifies and
embodies the ethical force of his teachings. She spearheads his
guiding task, which was to demystify the illusions of the classical
European philosophical ethical tradition.
There is thus an important critical link between Lacan's ethics of
psychoanalysis and the fifth- and fourth-century BC Greek
“Enlightenment,” especially the tradition of “the care of the soul,”
current from Socrates through Aristotle to Epicurus and Epictetus. If
Lacan is an anti-philosopher, it is this tradition that he especially
targets. This tradition seems a guiding dimension of Lacan's thought.
It is the touchstone to which he continuously returns in the course of
his seminar. But it is also a tradition he strenuously resists. How,
through his reading of the tragic drama Antigone, for example, does
he seek to question it and to suggest a whole new orientation for any
philosophical reflection on the interrelationships between ethics,
politics, and aesthetics?
In the Socratic-Aristotelian tradition, ethics was seen as a way of
curing the sicknesses of the human soul, and it did so by orienting
the ethical measure of human life on the transcendent Beautiful and
the Good such that “taking care” of the soul always meant “taking the
right measure” of the soul, finding its proper balance, a balance that
is both Good and Beautiful. This was the true path to human
happiness and well-being, one that led from the semi-darkness and
confusion of Plato's cave upward to the sunlight of the True, the
Good, and the Beautiful. As a psychoanalyst, can Lacan not also
seem to be a philosopher-priest, confessor, and healer? Is he not a
“doctor” of the human soul? But here the ethical path does not have
a transcendental bearing. It is not an ethic that turns the soul upward
away from the world and toward the supra-mundane triumvirate of
the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Rather, Lacan's ethic unfolds
across the surfaces and folds of three interlaced and very worldly
fields: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. A new domain and
strategy for ethics emerges here: neither the ideality of the summits
nor of the hidden mysteries of the depths, rather, this is an ethic of
surfaces, the surface of language, of images, of bodies and desire;
the surfaces of a voice; surfaces that are acoustic, that are felt,
touched, and embraced; surfaces that double and twist, that turn and
tangle one upon another. While it is said that splendor arises from
the heart, Antigone's very Greek “splendor” is the scintillation of a
surface. Lacan is a Greek in the Nietzschean sense: superficial out
of profundity.
Thus, one of the most original and truly powerful moments in Lacan's
seminar lies in the way it evokes Antigone's beauty, calling it
“unbearable,” because it is the beauty and splendor of diremption
and destitution, the beauty of a jouissance, as Lacan shall call it, a
jouissance that shimmers across a surface of word and flesh, a
jouissance that is the paradoxical knowledge (savoir) of the truth of
desire.1 However she may be a figure drawn from the repertoire of
classical Greek theater, however she may have been a
contemporary of Socrates and Plato, for Lacan, she is as much anti-
Socratic as she is “pre-Socratic.” Her pathway in life leads not to the
Platonic sunlight of the Good, but to the darkness of the tomb. Her
desire is not for salvation, but is described as criminal. Her beauty is
not a reflection of an Eternal, Ideal Beauty, but a paradoxical surface
that is both a lure and a barrier unto evil.
Such an ethic cannot promise falsely to heal the human soul when it
has come to know too well the yearning for the impossible that binds
human life and death in a torsion always torn, open, infinite. In
Lacan's reading of the play, Antigone's splendor is the radiance of a
desire not for a healed soul but for something lost, the tender
surfaces of an object lost because cutaway and forbidden,
something that can be recovered only through dreams and
disguises. After Freud, Lacan shall call this object, “the Thing,” (das
Ding). And in the course of the seventh seminar, Sophocles' tragic
drama then becomes the romance of Beauty and the Beast of das
Ding, a romance set “outside” the philosophical ethical and political
theater of the Good.
Bound by the law, Antigone yearns for the unbound. And while her
desire for a “lost object” may recall the Platonic reminiscence, the
philosophical and erotic desire for a dimension beyond the stars that
the human soul desires to recover from within the limitations of its
incarnate finitude, she must be seen instead as the crucial point of
resistance to all of that. For Lacan, Antigone embodies a drive not
toward the transcendent eternality of the Good, but toward death, the
death that is always at work in the heart of human life. This is
Antigone's impossible desire and her tragedy. It is also the
generalized tragedy of our human situation: bound with death, yet,
always seeking the unbound; always hoping for the eternal life that
shall defeat death, yet never gaining insight into the nonduality of life
and death that is as fundamental to the Buddhist vision of samsara
as it is to Sophocles' plays. His refusal to pursue either the ideality of
the summits or a hermeneutics of the depths, his acknowledgment of
the tragic dimension of human life and its desire for the impossible,
thus emerge as the key dimensions of Lacan's seventh seminar.
A third key perspective in the following essays: the figure of Antigone
also situates Lacan's ethic vis-à-vis Hegel, Kant, and Sade, the
tradition of the European Enlightenment and the dialectics of
negativity, death, and transgression. Particularly the Hegelian
dialectic sought to inscribe her as but a moment in a nomic conflict of
universality and particularity, of law and subjectivity that would find
its eventual reconciliation in the dialectic of Absolute Spirit. As in
Hegel's Phenomenology of Absolute Spirit, or even in Hölderlin's
“Notes on Antigone,” Lacan's evocation of Antigone also seems to
heroize her. But for the way she resists all reconciliation in the
Lacanian ethical and political theater, she perhaps plays the role not
just of an anti-philosopher, but of an anti-hero, as well. Her act is
heroic insofar as it is singular and transgressive, a violent and unholy
union of god and woman, anticipated in Sophocles' play by the figure
of the goddess Niobe and furthermore linked in Lacan's seminars
with the figure of the goddess Diana, who, for Lacan, is the very
lethal personification of Truth.
Indeed, Lacan's more general “anti-Hegelianism” crucially turns on
this denial of dialectical reconciliation and healing. Thus, his refusal
of a key ideal of late eighteenth-century German Idealism, the ideal
of a union with totality, a union that achieves the overcoming of time,
particularity, and finitude, the overcoming of ethical and political
culture in a culminating union with nature. Hölderlin's tragedy,
Empedocles, is a prime example of this ideal given dramatic form in
the self-immolation of its hero. Lacan's reading of Antigone gives this
a new direction by placing its heroine, Antigone, not on the stage of
dialectics but rather on the stage of linguistics and psychoanalysis.
She is a woman, but she is first a signifier and an image of the death
drive. Unlike Hölderlin, where tragedy is a metaphor of an intellectual
intuition that realizes this union with nature, tragedy for Lacan
promises neither union nor the resolution of dialectical oppositions.
Rather, the tragic heroine is a rending image of the death that stalks
language and desire. For Lacan, these are dimensions fundamental
to human ethical life that cannot readily be resolved in or reinvested
back into a dialectic of Absolute Truth.
It is along these lines that Antigone's “unbearable splendor”
becomes one of the ways Lacan approaches the starting point for his
seventh seminar: a deeply human need for transgression, a
transgression that knows no reconciliation. Transgression is a
dimension both approached and distanced in the Greek and German
philosophical tradition extending from Socrates to Hegel. Indeed,
Lacan might have been satisfied with calling this transgression “a will
to destruction,” except that he resists using this term, Wille, precisely
due to its inscription in a philosophical heritage of the Wille that
culminates in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Thus, he prefers to
speak the Freudian language of the drives, Trieb (pulsion), in
particular, defined as a drive beyond any destination in pleasure,
beyond any instinct for a return to an initial state of unity, of
equilibrium and measure. More than a “yearning,” the death drive is
a drive unbound and immeasurable, a drive that defines human life.
In excess of the resources of philosophical language, Lacan thought
it was perhaps best approached by way of poetry and drama. In the
Lacanian theater, Antigone is, thusly, a woman who is “not one,” for
she is first of all a work of poetic art. Since the days of Schelling,
poetics has been called the highest art. As a work of poetic art,
Antigone's work is thus the work of truth, where truth in this case is
the truth of desire, the death drive. Lacan's reading of Antigone,
which never loses sight of the poetic dimension, shows the play's
heroine—like desire itself—as situated along the surfaces and folds
of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. She is both word and
image. Not only word and image, in the Lacanian universe of
discourse, Antigone is more properly speaking a signifier, and in this
she is an image of the death drive, a “drive” Lacan situates not so
much in “nature,” but in the “historical domain” as something that
obtains at the level of signifiers and the symbolic (S7: 211). From the
standpoint of classical philosophical discourse, Antigone's
transgressive beauty and splendor thus comprise what may also be
said to be a “zero point” of word and image, a point where the word
equals zero, where signification stumbles and comes to a halt, where
someone, the hero—or the heroine, as in this case of Sophocles'
Antigone—must die, and not just once, but twice, a heroic “double
death,” as it were.2 Such beauty and splendor, such a double death,
have no productive role to play in the Hegelian dialectic, for they
mark a moment of unemployable excess, a moment that cannot be
reinvested back into the production of the dialectical reconciliation of
opposition promised by Absolute Truth.
Fourth, and finally, via Lacan's extensive use of tragedy there is a
theory and a practice of “catharsis” at work in his ethics. However
much Lacan might have wished to distance his concept of tragedy
and the “tragic” sharply from that found in both the Greek and
Germanic philosophical traditions, there are nonetheless elements
from especially the Greek understanding of tragedy that survive in
his work. Especially one of these elements is crucial for the question
of ethics: the Greek medical notion of Katharsis, most prominently
brought into service in Aristotle's Poetics, is still pertinent in Lacan's
readings of tragic drama and in his considerations on ethics. Lacan's
audience at the 1960 seventh seminar was mostly made up of
analysts. There were even a few philosophers present. Through his
evocation of Antigone in her tragic splendor, Lacan might have
wished to purge them of any desire as analysts and philosophers to
maintain the philosophical and psychological ideal of the “care for
the soul.” Not only because he harbors deep suspicions regarding
the existence of a human “soul,” but also because he might, in this
regard, have wished to purge them of any illusions they may have
held about bringing a healing unity and reconciliation to the wounds
and the tragic dimension that he always maintained as essential to
human experience.
Lacan's engagement with tragic drama, especially with the play
Antigone, and the way he linked it with new critical readings of Kant
and Sade and the whole classical European philosophical tradition of
ethics from Socrates to Hegel, thus comprises a crucial moment in
the legacy of his seminars, a moment of catharsis, perhaps, that
defined the purpose of his projected ethics of psychoanalysis,
namely, to purge the fear and pity that the highest ideals and the
ultimate promises of that tradition had instilled in the philosophical
spectator.
In his later seminars, Lacan goes beyond the death-bound and
transgressive figure of Antigone, which he eventually came to see as
an impasse. Yet, his reading of the play remains a pivotal moment in
his seminars. It was the initial shock, the daring experimentation and
interpretation that not only took the classical treatment of Sophocles
dramas but also the tradition of philosophical ethical and political
thought to a new level, one that both deepens that tradition and
critically opens it to new directions and possibilities. His efforts in this
regard constitute a body of work and reflection that philosophical
ethics cannot ignore without depriving itself of some of the most
fertile ways and means necessary for its creative transformation.
Thus, the little phrase “Antigone, in her unbearable splendor,” seems
a vision and a poem, a work of art and thought. It also marks a limit-
point where the ethical measure and the measure of ethics are
transgressed, where the immeasurable arises. At that limit where a
tragic, unspeakable dimension of human experience is brought to
light, such splendor points not only toward the shadows of death and
finitude, but also toward a way of transfiguring ethics through an
encounter with the infinite that opens like a wound at the heart of
thought, language, and desire.
To conclude, two additional notes:
First, the interpretative task for the following study shall not so much
concern the possibility of situating Lacan's work historiographically.
Rather, the task is to continue in the present a philosophically
grounded and critical questioning of the ethical and political traditions
of the classical and modern European Enlightenments, something
that is already at work in Lacan's seminars, and, on this basis, to