Antigone In Her Unbearable Splendor

With its privileging of the unconscious, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic thought would seem to be at odds with the goals and methods of philosophy. Lacan himself embraced the term "anti-philosophy" in characterizing his work, and yet his seminars undeniably evince rich engagement with the Western philosophical tradition. These essays explore how Lacan's work challenges and builds on this tradition of ethical and political thought, connecting his "ethics of psychoanalysis" to both the classical Greek tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to the Enlightenment tradition of Kant, Hegel, and de Sade. Charles Freeland shows how Lacan critically addressed some of the key ethical concerns of those traditions: the pursuit of truth and the ethical good, the ideals of self-knowledge and the care of the soul, and the relation of moral law to the tragic dimensions of death and desire. Rather than sustaining the characterization of Lacan's work as "anti-philosophical," these essays identify a resonance capable of enriching philosophy by opening it to wider and evermore challenging perspectives.

Praise for Sun Yung Shin: Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award "[her] work reads like redactions, offering fragments to be explored, investigated and interrogated, making her reader equal partner in the creation of meaning."—Star Tribune Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home. What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered.

A study of Lacan’s engagement with the Western philosophical traditions of ethical and political thought in his seventh seminar and later work.

Examines Antigone’s influence on contemporary European, Latin American, and African political activism, arts, and literature. Despite a venerable tradition of thinkers having declared the death of tragedy, Antigone lives on. Disguised in myriad national costumes, invited to a multiplicity of international venues, inspiring any number of political protests, Antigone transmits her energy through the ages and across the continents in an astoundingly diverse set of contexts. She continues to haunt dramatists, artists, performers, and political activists all over the world. This cutting-edge, interdisciplinary collection explores how and why, with essays ranging from philosophical, literary, and political investigations to queer theory, race theory, and artistic appropriations of the play. It also establishes an international scope for its considerations by including assessments of Latin American and African appropriations of the play alongside European receptions of the play.

Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling between modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression.

Liberal democracy today, having aligned itself with capitalism, is producing a generalized feeling of weariness and disillusionment with government among the citizenry of many countries. Because of a decades-long march of globalized capitalism, economic oligarchies have gained oppressive levels of political power, and as a result, the economic needs of many people around the world have been neglected. It then becomes essential to remember that our ability to change society emerges from our power to formulate different questions; or, in this case, alternative understandings of democracy. This book draws together a variety of alternative theories of democracies in a quest to expose readers to a selection of the most exciting and innovative new approaches to politics today. The consideration of these leading alternative conceptualizations of democracy is important, as it is now common to see xenophobic and racist rhetoric using the platform of liberal democracy to threaten ideas of plurality, diversity, equality, and economic justice. In looking at four different models of democracy (utopian democracy, radical democracy, republican democracy, and plural democracy) this book argues that encounters with alternate conceptualizations of democracy is necessary if citizens and scholars are going to understand the constellation of possibilities that exist for inclusive, plural, economically equal, and just societies.

This book argues that while current scholarship on Antigone tends to celebrate work that takes Antigone out of her classical roots and puts her into contemporary frameworks, we do not need to place her in a new context and setting to appreciate what her insights offer. We can simply listen to her whole story and learn from what she learns from her father, Oedipus. While other works boldly claim to be progressively moving beyond the scope of tragic themes of mortality, Antigone Uninterrupted demonstrates that reading the Theban Plays in the order of Antigone’s biography (so to speak) expands our understanding of what Antigone could tell us about contemporary issues. This demonstration involves Hegel’s discussion of Antigone in his Phenomenology of Spirit, responses to Hegel on this point, and the author’s assessment that Antigone makes arguments in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus that ought to be illuminated in contemporary scholarship. This book examines the three Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) in the order by which Antigone’s story is a continuous development of character and age, a unique approach for reasons the author identifies, but one she argues would be beneficial to future scholarship. Providing illuminating readings of both Sophocles’ tragedies and some key modern interpretations of the plays, this book holds broad appeal for those interested in subjects such as political science, gender theory, queer theory, literary criticism, theology, and sociology, to name a few.

What does it mean to be called "human"? How does this nomination affect or effect what it means to be called "divine"? This book responds to these related questions in intertwined explorations of the passionate trials-examinations, tests, and ordeals-of Antigone and Jesus. Impelled by her love of the impossible, Antigone crosses uncrossable boundaries, transgresses norms of kinship and mortality, confounds distinctions of nature and culture, and, in the process, unearths and critiques the sexism implicit in humanism. Antigone thus disrupts humanist traditions stretching from Sophocles to Martin Heidegger-traditions that would render her subhuman or inhuman. She survives these exclusions and engenders a new mode of humanity, one that destabilizes classic oppositions of life and death and affirms mortal finitude in the face of the future's unforeseeability. This new mode of humanity offers a new way of considering Jesus, whom Christianity identifies as human and divine. Building on his reading of Antigone, the author, through a close reading of Mark's gospel focused on Jesus' cry of abandonment from the cross, shows that to refigure humanity is also to refigure divinity and their relation. In the first extended treatment of Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus in English, the author draws on the theoretical insights of Jacques Derrida and Nancy to propose an innovative account of Jesus' humanity and divinity-one that can contribute to religious understandings of embodiment and prayer and can open avenues of inquiry into tragedy, sexual difference, posthumanism, and politics. By pairing Antigone and Jesus and engaging the work of Judith Butler, Simone Weil, Jean-Louis Chr tien, and Dominique Janicaud, this book constructively participates in interdisciplinary conversations at the nexus of religious, philosophical, literary, and gender studies.

Friedrich von Hardenberg, who later became known as the poet Novalis, kept a journal between April and July 1797 that captured his moods, thoughts, and observations following the death of his fifteen-year-old fiancée Sophie von Kühn and his dearly loved younger brother Erasmus. The journal's short, day-to-day entries allow a frank and candid glimpse into the inner life of the maturing poet, and are complemented by selections from Hardenberg's letters. Taken together, and read in conjunction with the fragments written before, during, and shortly after this period of time, the journal and letters shed light on a process of self-discovery during which Hardenberg became convinced of his poetic vocation and acknowledged this conviction in an act of self-christening, as the poet Novalis.

In Eros and Ethics, Marc De Kesel patiently exposes the lines of thought underlying Jacques Lacan's often complex and cryptic reasoning regarding ethics and morality in his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960). In this seminar, Lacan arrives at a rather perplexing conclusion: that which, over the ages, has been supposed to be "the supreme good" is in fact nothing but "radical evil"; therefore, the ultimate goal of human desire is not happiness and self-realization, but destruction and death. And yet, Lacan hastens to add, the morality based on this conclusion is far from being melancholic or tragic. Rather, it results in an encouraging ethics that for the first time in history gives full moral weight to the erotic. De Kesel's close reading uncovers the real scope of Lacan's criticism regarding the moralizing ethics of our time, and is one of the rare books that gives the reader full access to the letter of the Lacanian text.