Abstract: Through analyzing Sophocles’ Antigone and Paul Claudel’s The Hostage, Lacan develops and enriches a new dimension of modern ethics, and he did so by replacing the moral “service of goods” with the “beauty of desire” and redefining the central concept of his psychoanalytic ethics. It should be noted that thinking about ethics is not much different from thinking about texts. Lacan’s interpretation of ethics depends on the use of literary texts (in this case, these two tragedies) which suggests a suspicious act of “reconstituting” or “concealing” of the nature of literature. It is therefore necessary to come back to the literary texts and reflect upon the use of them in order to explore how psychoanalytical ethics may coexist with literature after breaking up the mystery of goodness, avoid a conversion of the text into an inflexible desire-model, and return to humans once again.

Key words: Antigone, The Hostage, the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan, desire