Ethics and the Splendor of Antigone. An Encounter with Charles Freeland, "Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A curious little book": this is how Charles Freeland characterizes Jacques Lacan's seventh seminar, published as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960.The size, however, does not prevent Freeland from fully recognizing its tremendous richness and importance for modern ethical theory.Each of the collected essays in his Antigone, in her Unbearable Splendor brings out that significance.This is the latest of many commentaries on the seminar since its appearance in 1986.Nevertheless, this is not to say that we should allow Freeland the last, definitive word about what is at stake in Lacan's seminar.On the contrary, Freeland's volume shows how the seminar is still far from being well understood.More generally, Freeland's volume turns out to be one of the many commentaries that reveal the deplorable state of the reception of the Lacanian oeuvre.Freeland rarely avoids an interpretive trap many have fallen into before him.In what follows, I will briefly analyze the first pages of the first essay in order to show where Freeland's interpretation misses the point or goes wrong, letting this stand as exemplary for the book as a whole.Then I will add a few comments on Freeland's central essay about Antigone's splendor.There, I permit myself to briefly summarize what I think is at stake in Lacan's thesis on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." 1 I. The Ethics of PsychoanalysisAlthough Freeland's volume introduces itself as a comment on Lacan's seminar on ethics, the first chapter, "Towards an ethics of psychoanalysis", refers only rarely to the text of that seminar."What is the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".