It is precisely this temptation to read Euripides’ redeemed and divine Medea against Pasolini’s nihilistically secular heroine that should be avoided, primarily because Pasolini’s conclusion is itself hardly lacking a ‘divine’ dimension. The statement, “Nothing is possible anymore” should here be interpreted literally, not only because the film text essentially conforms to the command and ends – thereby negating any further ‘possibilities’ – but because the statement complicates the logical causality of earthly expectation (namely the spectator’s premonition that Pasolini’s earthly Medea will be punished for her deeds and will suffer for her transgressions). Unlike her mythical counterpart, the filmic Medea does not escape Corinth in a chariot, but rather appears beset by a variety of all-too human problems: two dead children, a confrontation with her husband (who swears revenge), a burning house, the wrath of Corinth’s inhabitants, banishment or death. However, this earthly dimension of crime and punishment (Jason’s revenge, Medea’s persecution and surrender to the supremacy of the Law) is precluded by Medea’s prophetic assertion: “nothing is possible anymore” means precisely that – Medea will neither ascend into the heavens on her grandfather’s chariot nor be dealt her earthly comeuppance since both options are equally impossible, and imagining such extra-diegetic epilogues under either divine or earthly governance is one of the many potentialities vitiated by the film’s final utterance. What remains is not possibility as a positive attribute or gesture in empirical reality, but total abyssal cessation. In Pasolini’s adaptation, Medea does not escape the Law or suspend ideology, but rather casts them into the void along with everything else rejected by her statement’s radical finitude: reconciliation, remorse, family, and subjectivity. In short, what occurs ‘after’ Medea’s proclamation is not merely in opposition to, but incongruously outside the Law, not against ideology but beyond it, and not barring but in excess possible anymore because I have effectively lost everything, all my symbolic support; I have rejected my family and my ancestral ties to Colchis, been estranged from my husband, exiled from Corinth, and murdered my children. In short, because I have killed my children, I am finally able to see that I cannot take refuge from this act in other worthwhile aspects of my life, since the murder has dissolved their symbolic consistency and efficacy.’ The crucial (and no doubt contentious) distinction to be drawn here is between the relative worth of ‘everything’ qua the murder; it is not that Medea’s life and symbolic ties (history, ancestry, erotic and familial love) were always irretrievably absent and ‘impossible’ and that infanticide was merely the condition that illuminated their relative meaninglessness, but rather that the murder was directly responsible for the symbolic dissolution of Medea’s life. The murder has transformed the very symbolic contours in which it occurred, thereby ‘de-ontologizing’ everything that preceded it, casting Medea into the “void of self-relating negativity” (Žižek 2001, 158), and retroactively reinscribing life, love, family, and history as meaningless and impossible. In other words, what is witnessed in the concluding sequence of Pasolini’s film is a full-scale dramatization of the Lacanian Act.