12 Antigone with(out) Jocaste

Abstract The chapter is the third in a series of essays the author has dedicated to Antigone, starting from 1996. This chapter deals with the mother‐and‐daughter matrixial web, and more specifically with the question of the psychic scars left inside the particular Jocaste‐with‐Antigone matrixial web. As a result of tears in this (Jocaste‐with‐Antigone) particular web, the womb‐space turns into a grave‐space. The chapter addresses Lacan's Seminar VII on Ethics and Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim. The author argues that this foreclosed maternal instance stands for the foreclosure of traces of child abandonment (of Jocaste's abandonment of Oedipus). This leads to further elaboration of what Ettinger has elsewhere named the Primal fantasy of the Abandoning Mother. This Primal fantasy is placed in relation to what she has seen as the two other Primal fantasies concerning the maternal figure: the Devouring Mother and the Not‐enough Mother. This chapter examines the possibility of the resultant feminine sacrifice (Antigone's burial alive and Jocaste's suicide: a mother‐and‐daughter destruction, to the glorifying of the death drive, etc.) being transformed into psychic feminine solace in the service of Life. Ettinger elaborates the potentiality for an analytical working‐through of transgenerational trauma in the case of Jocaste‐with‐Antigone.