ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a new reading of Seminar VII is offered by means of a close scrutiny of its treatment of evil. In the first half, evil is discussed with respect to Lacan’s updating of the Freudian assessment of human nature as related to the Thing, Lacan’s own tentative delineation of jouissance, and the key role he assigns to the contradictions of Christianity in order to shed light on the Thing and jouissance as “malignant”. In the second half, particular attention is given to Lacan’s investigation of evil through Sade and Kant, specifically highlighting how he seems to believe that a certain overestimation of Evil (as either absolutised into a first principle or mistaken for the Good) explains Sade’s and Kant’s comparable and failed modern endeavour to construct human nature as a Thing on the basis of the moral or immoral Law. The chapter concludes by arguing that Antigone, her “criminal desire” as opposed to Creon’s “criminal good”, assumes an ambivalent pre- or proto-ethical function precisely with reference to the traversal of the insidious and resilient fantasy Sade calls “supreme Being-in-evil”. Antigone is not an ethical model for psychoanalysis. Instead, Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire requires our acknowledgement and overcoming of Antigone’s own tragic “holocaust”, her paradigmatic embodiment of the antinomic status of the human condition as such at its point of in-difference. On the one hand, her desire is a “pure desire” for difference. On the other, such a pure desire is without any mediation a “desire for death” or indifference.
