This is a study on the homology of psychoanalysis and aesthetics especially from the viewpoint of the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Lacan opened his Seminar Ⅶ, The Ethics of psychoanalysis, by drawing attention to the psychoanalytic experience attempting to restore to favor in the strongest possible way the productive function of desire as such. He returned to Freud with Kantian perspective on the ethics and the beauty in his Critique of Judgement.
Lacan proposed the concept of sublimation as the ethics of psychoanalysis defining it as “the satisfaction of the drive with a change of object, that is, without repression.” With a change of object, an object can be raised up to the Thing. Lacan’s sublimation is dialectically articulated between desire in the symbolic and drive in the real. The real is that which resists symbolization; it is the traumatic kernel at the core of subjectivity and the symbolic order. The real is thus associated with the death drive and jouissance as the ultimate, unspeakable, limit of human experience with the failure of our desire - and it is through fantasy and the object a that the subject sustains himself in this impossible scenario
Lacan praised the splendor of Antigone related to the sublimation. She shows the ideal image by her act according to the ethics of psychoanalysis. The paradox is in that it is the ethics of transgression. It is related to the death drive beyond the pleasure principle. Lacan regards the notion of the death drive as a creational sublimation. Psychoanalysis and aesthetics can meet in the dimension of absence that indicates the necessity of the creation ex nihilo.
According to Lacan’s explanation, the appearances of the beautiful creates two things that go together: the something and the void, the emptiness inside it. With every creation, the space in-between gets created. This is why in relation to the phenomenon of the beautiful Lacan speaks of the fantasy which he formulates in terms of a beauty that must not be touched. The splendor of beauty is a kind of shield that the artist and the spectator raise at the very point of das Ding. This shield is made to stop desire: desire, as it were, stops at beauty and remains with it, not wishing to go any further. It is not that the desire for the beautiful is suspended, but rather that desire is suspended, frozen within the realm of the beautiful. This is the effect of beauty on desire.