This paper attempts to elucidate the ethical meaning of Antigone`s act of burial of her brother by examining two opposite readings--Lacan`s and Butler`s--of it. The two theorists` readings are different in three major points. First, Butler objects to the concept of the Symbolic central to Lacanian psychoanalysis in that it is universal and ahistorical, and thus cannot be open to specific historical changes. Lacanian notion of the Symbolic is certainly not free from this charge, but what Lacan tries to reveal is not so much the contingent historical `construction of subjectivity` as the `constitution of subject.` The latter is different from and irreducible to the first because in the latter the subject is understood as being split between being and language, and having unconscious excess. The unconscious excess, called the Real, constitutes the core of the subject, preventing its complete subjection to society. Butler erases the Real and reduces the subject to the effects of society. Second, while Lacan sees Antigone`s act of burial as the realization of her desire for the Thing, which goes `beyond` the Symbolic law of Creon, Butler sees it as her "promiscuous obedience" to the law, that is, both her objection and resistance to the law. Butler criticizes Lacan for supporting the complete separation from the Symbolic, which, she argues, is idealistic and lacking politics. However, Lacanian ethics of desire represented by Antigone is political enough to deconstruct Creon`s law and reconstruct the order of the polis. Third, while Lacan sees Antigone as a mourner, who lets go of the object yet still keeps the desire for it, Butler sees her as melancholic, who refuses to lose the object and identifies with it. Butler makes strategic use of melancholia in order to formulate the model of subject shaped by and open to the other. But this melancholic politics excludes the possibility of the free movement of the subject`s libido without being fixated on a specific object. As a mourner Antigone keeps the object a in the Lacanian sense while losing the object.