The alternative is a radical negative and antinomian stance against the established legal order. Refuse to engage the system and negate legality itself.

Explaining her refusal, after escaping to the North, to purchase her freedom from the man who continued to claim her as his slave, Jacobs writes, “I knew the law would decide that I was his property, and would probably still give his daughter a claim to my children; but I regarded such laws as the regulations of robbers, who had no rights that I was bound to respect” (155). This opposition of a natural or moral law to the written law of the state establishes the basis for every form of antinomian practice. It subtends, as a consequence, resistance to law by the right and the left alike. As Rebecca Hill writes in an analysis of John Brown’s abolitionist fervor, “Scholars writing about John Brown in the 1970s connected his disturbing use of violence to the revolutionary left. Today’s historians are just as likely to compare the ‘antinomian’ Brown to right-wing evangelical Protestant militants, as represented by the anti-abortion terrorist Paul Hill.”72 The tension that elicits these seemingly antithetical historical comparisons is at least as old as Antigone, the text Lacan discusses in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis to illuminate the relation of drive and jouissance to the law.73 Antigone’s refusal of Creon’s decree that her brother remain unburied expresses, for Lacan, a tension between the state law wielded by Creon and the chthonic law, the law of the earth, that Antigone calls the unwritten law of gods more ancient than Zeus. Lacan explains as follows: “These are no longer laws, νόμοϛ [nomos], but a certain legality which is a consequence of the laws of the gods that are said to be αγραπτα [agrapta], which is translated as ‘unwritten.’ . . . Involved here is an invocation of something that is, in effect, of the order of the law, but which is not developed in any signifying chain.”74 This imperative, pertaining to “the order of the law” but unwritten, unarticulated, and unacknowledged within the order of signification, launches Antigone into “the field of the Other,” beyond the limits of the human.75 She thus fully assumes her responsibility to the Kantian moral law, whose requirements can never be satisfied by mere obedience to codified rules. Moral law remains αγραπτα because it is unspecified in advance—and all persons must formulate maxims to embody its categorical imperative. In this they become responsible both for it and to it at once. Such a law, as Kant understands it, drives the subject beyond itself, beyond, that is, the self invested in its formal coherence, its aesthetic unity, and toward the “immortal” self that sees such self-interest as pathological. If Lacan construes the death drive as leading us out of aestheticized selfhood, then that drive performs an education in the etymological sense of the term (from educere, “to lead out”) that opposes itself to the program of Schiller’s aesthetic education. It offers a radically different lesson in the subject’s relation to freedom, one it never ceases to repeat because one we can never learn. Insisting on the division between reality and the Real, the division that generates them both, the drive propels the subject beyond its imaginary coherence, beyond the limits of its desire, and so beyond the law of the state that regulates the good of the self in terms of the collectivity. Like the slave woman Jacobs describes as invested in a law superior to the president’s, Antigone appeals to an absolute authority, a Truth, beyond that of the state; and as the slave envisions the “queen of ’Merica” drawing her sword on the president, so Antigone opposes Creon’s law in the name of one unwritten.