Antigone

Sophocles sets the action in Thebes, where two brothers have killed each other at the gates and the city must decide what to do with the bodies. Creon, newly in power, grants one brother full burial and forbids the other on pain of death. His niece breaks the edict; her sister refuses to share the act. The confrontation with Creon, and then between Creon and his son, hardens instead of loosening, and the blind prophet's warning reaches the household after the fact.

Hegel read the tragedy as a collision of two rights, family law against the law of the city, each blind to the other's claim. Lacan gives a long stretch of Seminar VII to the same figure, placing her at the limit where an ethics can be thought. For a clinician the play stages what a subject holds to when every reasonable voice counsels otherwise, and what the demand to bury, to name, to mark the dead exacts from those left alive. Position, not outcome, carries the weight.