An Idiotic Act: On the non-example of Antigone

Antigone, Medea, Selma Jezkova, Mary Kay Letourneau, Andrea Yates... Zizek has over the years utilised a number of characters, both fictional and existent, and usually female, to illustrate various aspects of his Lacanian-derived conception of ethics. The contexts in which these characters are to be located and the actions they engage in determine them, for Zizek, as suitable ethical examples. This article will focus on one such example, perhaps the most obvious: Antigone.…