Antigone/Medea

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 358-9:

These two figures from classical Greek drama are used to illustrate certain conceptions of ethics, and generally Žižek understands both as positive, as breaking with a deconstructive 'respect for the Other' that is ultimately only a way of deferring the (ethical and political) act. 'Such a (mis)reading of Lacan led some German philosophers to interpret Antigone's clinging to her desire as a negative attitude, i.e., as the exemplary case of the lethal obsession with the Thing which cannot achieve sublimation and therefore gets lost in a suicidal abyss' (p. 191). But, in fact, 'what gives Antigone such unshakeable, uncompromising fortitude to persist in her decision is precisely the direct identification of her particular/determinate desire with the Other's (Thing's) injunction/call' (p. 320). Beyond this, Žižek makes a distinction between Antigone and Medea (and Paul Claudel's Sygne de Coufontaine), in that with Antigone there is a particular exception made for which all else is sacrificed (for Žižek a 'masculine' logic of an exception generating a universality), while for Medea even this exception or cause itself must be sacrificed (a feminine logic of a not-all with no exceptions). And for Žižek this is the modern, as opposed to the traditional, form of subjectivity: 'The modern subject constitutes themselves by means of such a gesture of redoubled renunciation, i.e., of sacrificing the very kernel of their being, their particular substance for which they are otherwise ready to sacrifice everything' (p. 205).