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To deal with this ontology of immanent transcendence in [[order]] to show, for example, that genuinely ethical [[action]] is neither purely phenomenal (obedience to [[moral]] [[codes]]) nor a [[passive]], abject response to the call of an inscrutable Other, both Lacan and Derrida develop complex logics of contamination. As Žižek explains, to understand the [[logical]] structure underpinning Antigone’s act as an act of decision rather than proto-totalitarianism, one must develop a “[[spectral]] analysis” of the “other” as a [[three]]-fold [[concept]]. Th e [[imaginary]] Other names other people like me (my neighbour as my [[mirror]] [[image]]); the [[symbolic]] “big Other” refers to the impersonal codes that coordinate [[intersubjective]] co-[[existence]]; and “the impossible Thing” indicates an unfathomable, monstrous otherness in every person (“The Real of Sexual Difference”: 70).
Notably, this is aligned with Derrida’s contention that terms like “the other” cannot cohere, since they encompass incompatible senses, which can neither be reduced to one another nor ordered hierarchically. Instead, these senses are bound together in complex forms like the Borromean [[knot]] of circular opposition and interdependence. Here the linkage between [[them]] is such that each holds the other two together and apart in a tensioned relationship, and suspending one term engenders the collapse of the other two. To understand Antigone’s act, Žižek explains, one must first note that the monstrous [[Thing]] only becomes a “fellow human like me” through a [[third]], mediating [[agency]]: the impersonal [[Symbolic order|Symbolic Order ]] to which all of us are willing to submit. To suspend the functioning of [[the Symbolic]] Order, as Antigone did, is to collapse the border between knowable “friendly neighbour” and unfathomable “monstrous Thing” (''ibid''.).
Žižek argues that the ethical act, the [[moment]] of genuine decision, is made possible only when [[the symbolic]] order is suspended and the actual Antigone becomes [[The thing|the Thing]]. In this brief, passing moment of collapse, she herself becomes singular, unfathomable and inimitable. Th us she excludes herself from the networks that constitute communal [[life]], becoming the traumatic [[cause]] of her own framework of value. But the moment of decision is fleeting. Caputo articulates precisely this insight in Derridean terms, where he argues that justice slips our grasp. To pin justice to an event by drawing maxims from a decision, or to individuals by calling them just, is to lose what justice “is”, for in the former [[case]] justice is reduced to the application of rules, whereas in the latter justice is reduced to a knowable [[character]] [[trait]] in the friendly neighbour. Justice “appears” only “in a singular action in a singular [[situation]], and this only for the while that it lasts, in the instant of decision” (Caputo 1997: 138). This is just as well, for were this not the case no intersubjective life would be possible at all.
To re-establish intersubjective life subsequent to the decisive moment, the world’s Antigones and their communities must come to terms with (make sense of, codify) the traumatic reconfiguration of value, and therefore face again Creon’s kind of unprincipled pragmatism that the decision disrupted. Derrida argues that without this circular predicament, there would be no call for decisions, but only calculative application of laws under the [[illusion]] that we [[know]] enough, or the abdication of [[responsibility]] under the illusion that we know [[nothing]]. But it is because individuals can neither know for sure nor [[claim]] absolute [[ignorance]] that we are [[subject]] to the singularizing trauma of making decisions and taking responsibility for them. The “lesson of deconstruction” sounds rather a lot like the “lesson of psychoanalysis”.
