Fifteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

The Oresteia’s foundational relationship to the Symbolic order through the institution of secular Law is known. What has not been recognized is that the key concepts of the opsis, image; symbolon, ‘symbol’; and graphê, writing, are construed by Aeschylus to work together to disrupt the pagan order in a formation of seminal importance to Lacanian studies. In the first intimations of a conception of the imagination in history, underlying Lacan’s Imaginary, Helen’s opsis, acts independently, hypostasized. Menelaus’ imaginary experience is effaced as the opsis evades the vain grasping of the metaphorical hands within his mind, passing into the inward oblivion of trance; in the physical register, the opsis, engine of war, effaces the boundary of within and world without, transposed from the imagination through physical hands put to oars, passing outwardly through the palace gates (visible on stage) driving ships to war. This imagination of the opsis is perceptible only, however, once the spectators have been led to phigeneia’s sacrifice in their vicarious imaginary, enthralled, participation. By dint of an exquisite ambiguity, they are shaken loose from their trance in seeing that those who participated in the sacrifice had been blinded by Iphigeneia’s stigmatizing gaze. This moment is effected as an ambiguity on the word symbolon―in which Artemis’, the god’s, apparent sanction of the sacrifice is revealed rather as her abhorrence of it―disrupts the theocratic symbolon in the instauration of the secular Symbolic, prefiguring Lacan’s Symbolic. The ambiguity hinges on the material written graphê in the register of the Real.