I don’t know about you but for me, Oedipus at Colonus has always been the most striking and unsettling, even distressing, of all Sophocles’ plays. I would even say that it is the most terrifying of all ancient Greek plays that I read. It might seem puzzling at first if you consider that this is also the least dramatic of the old Greek tragedies. There is hardly any action here, hardly any conflict, and for sure not the usual tragic conflict between duty and destiny. Everything here has long been decided. So why bother then about the resignation of an old man who is just sitting on a stone all the way through waiting for his sure, predetermined death? But nevertheless this play is like none other addressed to us, since it is all about Oedipus’ curse.

It was noticed long ago that

In fact, the intensity of his curse reaches all the way to our modern notion of subjectivity by lending a structure to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The order in which Sophocles wrote his tragedies inspired by the Oedipus myth does not reflect the inner chronology of the mythical events. Oedipus at Colonus, although written after Antigone and Oedipus Rex, depicts the events which happened in the time gap between the events represented by these two preceding tragedies. Post factum, it provides a logical link between them. But this dramatic linkage between Antigone and Oedipus Rex, restoring the mythical chronology was hardly Sophocles’ goal in itself because both tragedies are perfectly accomplished and self-sufficient works which include all the necessary references to the events of the underlying myth in the reports of their characters.

Being Sophocles’ later work, Oedipus at Colonus rather represents the author’s retrospective reflection on his previous work and is created to add some nuances to his earlier interpretation of the myth.
In contrast to Antigone and Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus could not exist as an accomplished work on its own. Its meaning is in the extension of two other tragedies and is dependent on them in that it provides a conclusion to the tragic conflict of Oedipus Rex and a foundation, or a preface, to the conflict of Antigone.

Oedipus at Colonus is a tragedy about Oedipus’ curse which appears in its dual hypostasis as the cursed subject and the cursing subject. In this tragedy the gods remove the curse initially bestowed on Oedipus and crown his end with a redemption, but at the same time, Oedipus, now redeemed and excused by the gods, bestows in his turn a curse upon his sons, thus ensuring the further tragedy of his kin group. Past and future events, symbolically anchored in this tragedy, allow for the complexity of its meaning as both a benediction and a curse of mankind, represented in the figure of Oedipus.

The time when Sophocles writes his tragedy is the time when the “reality” of myth undergoes a strong transformation into the “imaginary” space of the artistic reflection. Myth is banned on the stage and presented to the public in the “imaginary” space of the tragic performance as reflected through the dramatist’s “symbolic” interpretation. Myth is being lived in the theater in the symbolic hypostasis of language.

I think that in creating Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles reflects this symbolic importance of language in his adaptation of myth. He creates a focusing point at which Antigone and Oedipus Rex meet so that instead of two independent and only remotely connected tragedies we encounter a structure, and even more - a moving symbolic structure of signifiers, represented in the continuity of Oedipus’ curse.

Lacan’s interest in the trilogy, in contrast to Freud’s particular focus on Oedipus Rex, goes back to this structuration and mobilization of the myth which Sophocles established by means of Oedipus at Colonus. We can even see here a remote analogy to Lacan’s criticism of the dual cause-effect structure of Anna Freud’s ego concept in favor of Melanie Klein’s complex structure of the symbolic mobility of the subject.

According to Lacan, speech functions as a signifying chain without a fixed signified. In “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” he speaks of “points de capiton”, or “sutures,” defining the points or moments of meaning in the floating signification process. I see Oedipus at Colonus as such a “suture” where the meaning of two preceding tragedies is momentarily fixed.

In contrast to Antigone and Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus does not have such a clear conflict as that of Antigone who has to choose between her duty to bury her brother or to yield to the prohibition of the funeral for Polynices announced by her uncle Creon; or as that of Oedipus Rex who must, as king of Thebes, find the criminal, the cause of the plague in the city, which finally leads to his discovery of his own guilt.

Oedipus at Colonus is a tragedy about Oedipus’ death and Oedipus’ curse. It articulates death as a moment intrinsic to the continuity of human existence. The reconciliation between Oedipus and Gods is expressed in the restoration of the enigma which Oedipus once solved by surpassing the wisdom of the Sphinx. Now it is his own body which bears enigma and blessing for those who possess it; but this enigma is now re-estimated. The enigma of Oedipus’ sacred body has the meaning of benediction in contrast to the destructive mystery of the Sphinx. His enigma is unsurpassable and interminable because nobody will know where Oedipus’ grave is located, and nobody can address the carrier of the wisdom who disappears, leaving us only an idea of enigmatic nothingness and dispersed eternity of an ever-advancing curse.

Oedipus at Colonus creates a concept of the subject which is easy to read in Lacanian terms. Lacan’s subject is characterized by the awareness of a gap, a lack of being, when subject perceives itself as being out of joint, as excluded from the order of things. This is exactly the situation of Oedipus at Colonus when Oedipus learns about the benediction bestowed on him by the gods only after his experience of loss and humility. “So, when I am nothing – then am I a man?”

Another feature of the Lacanian subject is its awareness of its object character, of the very fact that at a different level, from another perspective it is only an object. Thus, Oedipus appears in this tragedy first as the object of the gods’ curse and then as object of their benediction. The presence of Oedipus’ body has a different character in Oedipus Rex and in Oedipus at Colonus. In the former tragedy, it was the body of the subject, the active body which sinned and suffered punishment, whereas in the latter Oedipus is present as a passive body which is claimed by everybody (including himself) as the object of blessing.

Only in the curse scene, Oedipus’ conversation with Polynices, does he appear as a speaking subject, in an active role of transmitting a curse on the further generations. Let us look closer at the curse scene from the position of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

This scene immediately precedes Oedipus’ death as if by pronouncing the curse for his sons he finally exhausted his life substance. In this scene Oedipus is present as a body and as the cursing word; as body he is deemed to disappear leaving behind our awareness of nothingness; as word he will live further as the reminder of the disastrous primordial miasma remaining with human beings.

The scene opens with the chorus lamenting about the limits of human life and suffering intrinsic in human existence. The chorus also voices the apotheosis of death which frames human life and is there to save human beings from numerous disasters and sufferings of life. Here we see anticipated the problematic of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle which Lacan saw paralleled in Oedipus at Colonus.

Thus, the chorus circumscribes the point at which the meeting between Polynices and Oedipus takes place as the limit of Oedipus’ life when Oedipus-body is going to turn into Oedipus-word, a word of blessing towards Theseus and a word of curse towards his sons. According to Polynices’ description, Oedipus’ body is already in the process of turning into earth.

Oedipus’ condition described here recalls Martin Luther’s announcement of modern subjectivity. In contrast to the humanist tradition, Luther conceived of the human being not as the crown of creation, but as “the excrement who fell out of God’s anus.” Lacan, following this tradition of thinking, conceives of the object a as a fundamentally lost or missing object, the representative of lack. The object a is an important part in Lacan’s conception of the subject. He develops the notion of object a from Freud’s part-objects, objects, which are separated from the body and invested with erotic interest. Lacan adds to the list of Freud’s part-objects (the breast, feces, the phallus) the voice and the gaze. The desire for Oedipus’ body on the part of the characters in the tragedy, and the very idea of the blessing which his deserted body should provide can, in my view, be interpreted along the lines of this Lacanian conception of subjectivity.

The insecurity and mystery intrinsic in the question of human identity, which we saw, first, articulated in Oedipus Rex, is transmitted onto further generation. The incestuous and indiscriminate nature of desire has the potential to undermine and endanger the stability of the social norms and orientation marks. Thus, Polynices, introducing himself to Oedipus, has to make a correction when voicing the question of his identity:

Another significant moment of the curse scene is Oedipus’ silence and Oedipus’ speech. As said above, Polynices encounters his father as a body, and being such, Oedipus, first of all, stays silent towards his son. Oedipus refuses talking. We discussed Oedipus’ situation in Oedipus at Colonus as a situation of a traumatized psyche. Indeed, Oedipus’ reaction towards Polynices, in whom he now tends to see the cause of his misery, recalls the silence as psychological reaction to the trauma, as a sign of repression. One of important tasks for Polynices in this scene is to make his father speak. Antigone gives him a suggestion very much in the style of psychoanalytic praxis by encouraging Polynices to address Oedipus despite his silence so as to trigger Oedipus’ response:

This suggestion succeeds in provoking a response, in setting into movement a chain of signifiers. Polynices speaks about the trauma of being outcast, he calls to Oedipus’ memory of the repressed past.

Unfortunately, the flow of speech which Polynices provokes turns out to be a curse which Oedipus bestows on the following generations of his kin group and on us. A curse by its nature is a word which has a real influence on the physical existence of human being, a word used as a weapon to produce a very concrete physical wound. Oedipus at Colonus, this homo sacer par exellance, conjures up in his curse his sons’ death by producing a moving word which slides ever further, a death-dealing word. It has caught up with us today as a key word to our understanding of life.