ABSTRACT
This final chapter returns to the ethical-political questions at stake in the configuration of child, image and nation that were posed at the beginning of the book. It does so by extending the motif introduced in Chapter 11 as formulated by the psychoanalyst Lacan-of the subject as positioned ‘between two deaths’—to apply to the problematic of ‘developments’. While Sophocles’ play Antigone has been taken to pose the key question of the ethical relation between the individual and the state, the practical, legal and emotional constraints of her position as young woman, or girlchild, not only establish the antiquity of the motif of the child as prototypical subject but can also prompt some rather different reflections upon this. This chapter draws on the philosophical discussions of Antigone to discuss models of development and the relationship between reason, ethics and desire, ending by revisiting the three key terms-child, image, nation-of the subtitle of this book, as explicated anew via the ways these arise within psychoanalysis.
