As headless as this crazy child may be: Antigone is aware of her own precision. Consistently she overhears Ismene’s voice, representing the general doxa. What speaks through Ismene is established reason. Ismene knows nothing but caution, contemplation, comparison. Antigone, however, verges on the delusion of the subject. Her beauty, as Jacques Lacan described it, lies in her insistence and her idleness, leading towards the threshold of her life.

More than merely its end, this edge marks the evidence of the antigonist subject. Lacan addressed it as Antigone’s reverberation, as éclat, which might be translated as glamour and scandal. What is essential is that a boundary is overstepped, initially that of the law represented by Creon, which prohibits the burial of her brother Polynices. And yet, this transgression cannot lead into a positive realm beyond the edge. Antigone in no way exemplifies the subject of a romanticism of transgression, which successfully eludes the established rule of law in order to exist in virtually full autonomy: we know that a dismal rock cut tomb awaits Antigone. By responding to Creon in his own language, the „language of the state“, or as we may say, reality, Antigone’s politics is, according to Judith Butler, „not of oppositional purity but of the scandalously impure.“ She „asserts herself through appropriating the voice of the other, the one to whom she is opposed; thus her autonomy is gained through the appropriation of the authoritative voice of the one she resists, an appropriation that has within it traces of a simultaneous refusal and assimilation of that very authority.“ If autonomy exists – an infinitesimal quantum of autonomy – then only as a claim in the midst of real heteronomy.