Abstract
In this paper, I will attempt to read the traces that have been left by Antigone on the cultures of South Africa, Nigeria and Northern Ireland, in an effort to allow those traces to put into question, and re-inscribe, the traces that Antigone has left on a western canon that ritually cites ancient Athenian culture as its origin, embracing Antigone as a tragic hero, without attending to the system of chattel slavery that facilitated her heroic status. In Sophocles, mythical Thebes stands as an Other to Athens, a culture rife not only with incest, but also, I am suggesting—though these traces have been less well read—one in which the precarious boundary separating those who are free from those who are slaves is allowed to appear in all its fragility. This Thebes, counterpart of Athens, thus functions as a literary repository onto which can be projected the deep and abiding anxiety of Athenian, adult males, concerning the legitimacy of their own right to freedom, citizenship, and inheritance, their right to stand, unambiguously, on their own two feet, while requiring others to crawl on all fours, under the blows of torture, thereby returning them to a state of infancy—a fate from which Hegel, along with the continental philosophical tradition, has desperately tried to help the heroes of Greek tragedy to definitively escape. This evasion leaves in its wake an excess, washed up by the tides of Aufhebung/repression, on the shores of philosophy/psychoanalysis, an excess that goes beyond that of sexual difference, an excess that still remains to be thought beyond the Oedipus of Hegel and that of Freud, beyond Derrida’s explorations in Glas, and beyond Antigone’s feminist reclamations: the traces of slavery that the dominant interpretive annals of Antigone’s tragedy have attempted to entomb, along with Antigone. Just as the ‘hostility’ of ‘other communities’ rises up, according to Hegel, when their altars are ‘defiled’ by the birds and dogs, when the body is not returned to the earth, in accordance with the ‘sacred right’ of burial, so the traces of slavery return to haunt us, sometimes erupting violently, when representation banishes them to a ‘mute unconscious’ undercurrent to which an outlet of expression is denied.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The argument I develop in this essay, which I explore at greater length in Chanter (2011), is as much a reworking of my own earlier readings of the figure of Antigone as it is of interpretations of others.
- 2.
Heaney establishes an affinity between Antigone and the hunger strikers Bobby Sands and Frances Hughes, held as terrorists in ‘[h]er majesty’s prison at the Maze, better known in Northern Ireland as the H blocks.’ (Heaney 2009, p. 122)
- 3.
Heaney adopted a three-beat line for Antigone’s fevered, opening exchange with Ismene, an ‘alliterating four-beat line’ for the chorus, and iambic pentameter for Creon (Heaney 2009, p. 135–8).
- 4.
Heaney describes how the body of Francis Hughes, who died in 1981, was treated: ‘before the remains of the deceased could be removed that evening from Toome, they had first to be removed from a prison some thirty or forty miles away. And for that first leg of the journey the security forces deemed it necessary to take charge and to treat the body effectively as state property.’ (2009, p. 123)
- 5.
Whatever one had done in life, whoever one is, in death, one deserves to be honored by those by whom one is loved. Whether Antigone follows this insight through all the way to the end is in question, given her distinction of Polynices from a slave.
- 6.
References to Glas are to the left hand column unless followed by ‘b.’ As Simon Critchley says in his essay on Derrida’s Reading of Hegel in Glas, ‘Antigone’s death should bring the system, history and the movement of cognition to a halt, and yet speculative dialectics incorporates this crypt within itself, making Antigone a moment to be aufgehoben. For Derrida, Antigone’s death should exceed the Hegelian system and make spirit stumble on its path to Absolute Knowledge, and yet Spirit barely loses its footing for an instant and relentlessly continues its ascent.’ (1999, p. 13–14)
- 7.
Citations to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will be given in the text in parentheses as PhS (to the English translation) and PhG (the German original), followed by page numbers (see abbreviations for full publication information). For a discussion of this intuition, presentiment, premonition or foreshadowing (Ahnung) of the ethical that is not (yet) conscious see Derrida (1986, pp. 149–50), Weber (2004, p. 137) and Critchley (1999, pp. 11–12).
- 8.
The family is a necessary resource for the state in that it provides soldiers who must defend the state. Since Polynices, in Creon’s mind, is a traitor, he has undermined the relation of authority that should obtain with regard to family and state. Hegel says, in a discussion that implicitly refers to Polynices and Eteocles, who have ‘equal right’ to government, but from a ‘human’ point of view ‘the one [Polynices] who has committed the crime is the one who, not being in actual possession [of the state], attacks the community at the head of which the other stood, while, on the other hand, he [Eteocles] has right on his side who knew how to apprehend the other merely as an isolated individual, detached from the community, and, taking advantage of his powerlessness, banished him; he has struck only at the individual as such, not the community, not at the essence of human right. … [T]he government [Creon] will punish him who already proclaimed its [the community’s] devastation on the walls of the city, by depriving him of the last honour. He [Polynices] who wantonly attacked the Spirit’s highest form of consciousness, the Spirit of the community, must be stripped of the honor of his entire and finished being, the honour due to the Spirit departed [the honor of burial that Antigone insists on according Polynices]’ (PhS, p. 286; PhG, p. 338–9). Yet the family is also a necessary resource in another sense, one that Hegel does not pursue. The family is the crucible of legitimacy and inheritance, and it is the rules of inheritance—not just nature—that determine the ‘equal right’ that Polynices and Eteocles have to kingship. Not only wealth is inherited, but also the legitimate claim to rule over a city. At the same time it is through one’s lineage that one’s identity as a free or enslaved is established.
- 9.
Hence Suzanne Gearhart comments that Antigone ‘becomes the undecidable character’ of the family’s ‘affect.’ (1998, p. 165)
- 10.
See Thompson, who shows how dialectical logic constricts difference, by shaping it according to the requirements of teleological necessity, which privileges the logic of contradiction in such a way that ‘“difference … is already contradiction”’ (1998, p. 241). The quotation Thompson provides is from Hegel’s 1812 Science of Logic (Hegel 1974), a quotation that Derrida cites both in Positions (1981a: 101 note 13), and Dissemination (1981b, p. 12 note 5). In this case the natural ‘diversity’ (Verschiedenheit) is that which pertains between the sister and the brother, which is raised from the indeterminacy of nature, to the determinacy of ethics, or raised to a higher level of consciousness, and becomes an ‘antithesis’ (Gegensatz) between the two sexes—such that natural ‘dispositions and capacities’ come to be endowed with ethical determinations (PhS, p. 276; PhG, p. 327). Diversity here is already constrained by the law of sexual difference, which apportions, for example, to men the destiny and potency of becoming virtuous citizens (see PhS, p. 269; PhG, p. 320), while apportioning to women the duty of burying the dead, whether or not the dead are judged by the government to be virtuous. On the question of how sexual difference intervenes in the relation between brother and sister, ostensibly a relation that is, for Hegel, ‘devoid of desire,’ (PhS, p. 275; PhG, p. 326) Derrida poses the question, ‘why brother/sister and not brothers or sisters?’ (1986, p. 149), thereby indicating the suppression of sexual desire. Not only is it a question of suppressing natural diversity, but also ‘natural’ (heterosexual) desire.
- 11.
At the same time, as we have seen, the crucial role of war drives the dialectic forward, so that the downfall of the immediate Spirit of ethical community is as much a result of its mediation through other communities, as it is of the internal conflict of values. Nature intervenes in the outcome of war, such that its outcome is contingent, and as such, it fails to ground ethics is anything essential.
- 12.
It is, perhaps, in this context that Derrida’s observation that ‘it falls to the married woman to manage, strictly, a corpse.’ He goes on: ‘[w]hen a man binds himself to a woman, even were it in secret (marriage does not depend, according to Hegel, on a formal contract), it is a matter of entrusting her with his death.’ (1986, p. 142)
- 13.
Another way of putting this is to focus on the status of self-consciousness as the ‘infinite middle term,’ as ‘the implicit unity of itself and substance’ which ‘becomes that unity explicitly and unites the universal essence and its individualized reality’ (PhS, p. 266; PhG, p. 315). Although at the end of the section on ethical Spirit Hegel asserts that ‘the life of the Spirit and this Substance which is self-conscious in everyone is lost’ (PhS, p. 289; PhG, p. 342), this is the point at which he has introduced the naturalness of war, to which the ethics of the nation is reduced. Thus it can be read as referring just as much to the warriors of war, who confront death as a result of the government, who ‘shakes’ independent associations ‘to their core by war’ (PhS, p. 272; PhG, p. 324) in order to prevent the community breaking up into isolated units, as it can to the forms of consciousness that are split into divine and human law.
- 14.
For two reconstructions of Derrida’s understanding of the way in which the brother-sister relation in Hegel does not conform to the struggle for recognition in the master/slave relation, see Critchley (1999, pp. 11–12) and Thompson (1998, pp. 249–51). As Critchley says, ‘Derrida suggests that the sister’s presentiment of the essence of Sittlichkeit cannot be contained within the limits of the system. Because Antigone and Polynices constitute themselves as free individualities that have not ‘given to or received from one another this independent being-for-self [Fursichseyn]’, and because they do not engage in a ‘struggle for recognition,’ their relation somehow exceeds the system of which it is a part’ since it is not based upon dialectical structures of recognition (1999, p. 12). Critchley quotes from PhS, p. 274; PhG, p. 325, and is referring to Derrida’s claim that Antigone and Polynices are ‘the two sole consciousnesses that, in the Hegelian universe, relate to each other without entering war’ (1986, p. 149). As Thompson says, Derrida reminds us that ‘Hegel’s own investigation of the structure of recognition had shown that truly mutual recognition is only possible given the confrontation of two self-consciousnesses such that each ‘comes out of itself’ (Thompson refers here to PhS, p. 111; PhG, p. 141). In this moment, each consciousness becomes other to itself in and through its confronting another consciousness. However, insofar as either consciousness attempts simply to eliminate or destroy this self-othering before the other, its own ‘being-other (Andersein),’ (PhS, p. 111; PhG, p. 141) it falls back to the level of mere consumptive desire, engaging in a merely natural and self-defeating conflict. Here, no genuine recognition is possible. Yet if, in this very moment of confrontation, each consciousness sublates its being-other, returning thereby into itself, such that in so doing each ‘lets the other be free [entlässt also das andere wieder frei],’ (PhS, p. 111; PhG, p. 142) then the level of natural desire is transcended and genuinely free mutual self-recognition occurs. True recognition thus presupposes a moment of simple confrontation—a stage of immediate self-assertion that inherently gives rise to some form of conflict, taking the form perhaps even of a life and death struggle. But the mutual recognition of brother and sister arises precisely without this moment of initial encounter and pursuant conflict. Brother and sister do not depend upon one another for their being-for-self nor do they desire one another. They are, it would seem, Derrida says, ‘two single consciousnesses that, in the Hegelian universe, relate to each other without entering war’ (1986, p. 149). This crucial and decisive bond is thus the inadmissible (Derrida 1986, p. 151), ‘a relation excluded from the speculative genesis of Geist.’ (1998, p. 250) While both Critchley’s and Thompson’s discussions are illuminating, my effort in this paper is, in part, to advance the discussion, by taking up the difference between the master/slave dialectic and the brother/sister relationship that Derrida considers in the context of the family and in relation to Antigone, by focusing upon the question of self-consciousness, and by thinking this in relation to the importance of war in Hegel’s discussion of the human and divine laws in relation to Sittlichkeit. At the same time, my suggestion is that the wars with other communities that the loyal citizen-soldiers of the poleis (city-states) undertake, wars that include a ‘trial by death,’ (PhS, p. 278; PhG, p. 330) such as the mortal combat Polynices and Eteocles engage in, but which might have resulted in the slavery of a captive had it not been mutually mortal, forms an important, implicit, but neglected backdrop to Hegel’s and Derrida’s discussions. The ‘free individualities’ that the brother and sister constitute are not equal individualities, in the sense that the sister remains in the family, while the brother goes out into the community, and risks his life in war. So the struggle does not involve the sister, only brothers. Due to the inherently unequal status of sister and brother, while the brother’s free individuality will be developed by Hegelian dialectic when it is sublated into a legal subject, the sister’s ‘free’ individuality will remain in the family/household—or, in the case of the ‘representation [Vorstellung]’ (PhS, p. 287; PhG, p. 339) with which Hegel is engaging throughout his discussion of human and divine law, Antigone will go to her death. So, while the brother-sister recognition as such, as Thompson says, quoting Derrida is ‘outside “the horizon of war,”’ (Thompson 1998, p. 255, and Derrida 1986, p. 50) the sister who ‘never becomes citizen, or wife, or mother’ is ‘[d]ead’ and ‘transfigures herself in this character of eternal sister.’ (Derrida 1986, p. 150) Yet this sister, Antigone, goes to her death for the sake of burying her brother, and in this burial of him as free, as opposed to a slave, she recognizes him as human, and by the same token conforms to the non-recognition of slaves as human (or the recognition that slaves are not truly human), since had her brother not been free she would not have buried him. Or, perhaps more pertinently, in burying him, she makes him not a slave.
- 15.
- 16.
The implication here is that woman’s duty in general is to take care of the family, while the particularity of individual family members only comes to the fore in the duties of burial.
- 17.
Derrida suggests that Hegel’s idea of the irreplaceability comes from the ‘mouth’ of Antigone (1986 165).
- 18.
While Hegel says that the law of the Family remains an ‘inner feeling’ he also insists, that insofar as the relationships are not based ‘on feeling but on the universal.’ (PhS, p. 274; PhG, p. 326)
- 19.
Insofar as the ethical action of the family finds its proper expression in burial, Hegel also points beyond mere feeling, since the ethical is intrinsically universal, and as such is bound up with the family as community, and thus, more generally, with the community as state. So mere feeling as such is transcended in the interests on the state.
- 20.
To say that Hegel fails to take account of the organizing role of culturally sanctioned kinship structures is perhaps naïve. To the extent that Aufhebung is understood as akin to repression (Gearhart 1998, and Derrida 1986), it might be more accurate to say that Hegel exhibits a symptomatic repression of the fact that the very play that informs his discussion of human and divine law is named for a product of incest. Antigone’s very existence violates the incest taboo. As such her very existence becomes an occasion for Hegel to reinforce the taboo Oedipus transgressed. When Hegel asserts that there is no desire between the brother and the sister, his assertion can be read as much as a negation in the sense that Freud develops that term in his essay, ‘Negation,’ as much as it can be taken at face value.
- 21.
In his Aesthetics, Hegel engages in a somewhat tortuous explanation as to why slavery is an inappropriate topic for tragedy. His argument is intriguing on several different levels, as an attempt to negotiate between a Platonic and Aristotelian response to tragic poetry, as an interpretation of Greek tragic heroes, as a reflection on the role of tragedy as a commentary on the transition from Sittlichkeit and Moralität in a society that is transforming from a pre-legal to a law based one, and as a defensive reaction to thinking through the significance of new world slavery and colonialism. Tragic heroes are interpretations of the statues of gods. Their ethical rigidity and inflexibility are reflections of Greek statuary. Hegel’s account, which aligns Antigone with the old order of divinities, and Creon with the new, also manages to infuse Antigone with racialized traits that construe her as on the brink of civilization. Hegel’s attitude towards the ethos of the Greeks is ambivalent. Laudable in bearing unwavering responsibility even for events over which they had no control (e.g. Oedipus’s accepting responsibility for his unwitting marriage of his mother and murder of his father), yet unsophisticated in their failure to distinguish voluntary from involuntary acts, Greek tragic heroes stand, for Hegel, as both political and moral precursors to nineteenth century Europe, and as that which modern Europe, allegedly, surpasses in moral sophistication.
- 22.
Others have pointed out that the law did not so much concern marriage as such, since it stipulate only that one’s parents on both sides should be Athenian in order for the claim of an Athenian to be considered legitimate.
- 23.
See Boegehold (1994, pp. 57–8), who dismisses the effort to link the law to racial purity.
- 24.
- 25.
I draw here on Froma Zeitlin’s (1990) discussion of tragic drama’s projection of Thebes as containing the tensions Athenians had trouble confronting in their own polis.
- 26.
Gearhart (1998) argues that Hegel’s Aufhebung should be understood as akin to repression.
References
Ahl, Frederick. 2008. Two faces of Oedipus: Sophocles’ Oedipus tyrannus and Seneca’s Oedipus. Trans. and with introduction by F. Ahl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Boegehold, Alan L. 1994. Perikles’ citizenship law of 450/1 BC. In Athenian identity and civic ideology, ed. Alan L. Boegehold and Adele C. Scafuro, 57–66. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone’s claim: Kinship between life & death. New York: Columbia University Press.
Calvino, Italo. 1989. The literature machine. London: Picador.
Cartledge, Paul. 2002. The Greeks: A portrait of self and others. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chanter, Tina. 2011. Whose Antigone? The Tragic marginalization of slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Critchley, Simon. 1999. Ethics-politics-subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and French contemporary thought. New York: Verso.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981a. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981b. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand, translated John P. Leavey, Jr. In Deconstruction and philosophy: The texts of philosophy, ed. John Sallis. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Fugard, Athol, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. 1974. The Island. In Statements: Two workshop productions. Sizwe Bansi is dead, and the Island; and a new play, Statements after an arrest under the Immorality Act. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gearhart, Suzanne. 1998. The remnants of philosophy: Psychoanalysis after Glas. In Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett, 147–170. New York: Routledge.
Hall, Edith. 1989. Inventing the barbarian: Greek self-definition through tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon.
Heaney, Seamus. 2004. The burial at Thebes: A version of Sophocles’ Antigone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Heaney, Seamus. 2009. Title deeds: Translating a classic. In Living classics: Greece and Rome in contemporary poetry in english, ed. S.J. Harrison, 122–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1974. Science of logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International.
Heidegger, Martin. 1959. An introduction to metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the other woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Just, Roger. 1989. Women in Athenian law and life. London: Routledge.
Kenelly, Brendan. 1996. Sophocles’ Antigone. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books.
Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book VII. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Tavistock/Routledge.
Loraux, Nicole. 2000. Born of the earth: Myth and politics in Athens. Trans. Selina Stewart. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Mader, Mary Beth. 2005. Antigone’s Line. Bulletin de la société Américaine de philosophie de langue Francaise 14: 2.
Mathews, Aidan Carl. Undated. Antigone. Gone Anti. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author.
McDonald, Marianne. 1996. Antigone by Sophocles. London: Nick Hern Books.
Murnaghan, Sheila. 1986. Antigone 904–920 and the Institution of Marriage. The American Journal of Philology 107: 192–207.
Òsófisan, Fémi. 1999. Tègònni, an African Antigone. Ibadan: Kenbim Press.
Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death: A comparative study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paulin, Tom. 1985. The riot act: A version of Sophocles’ Antigone. London/Boston: Faber and Faber.
Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. 1993. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Taxidou, Olga. 2004. Tragedy, modernity and mourning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University.
Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, Kevin. 1998. Hegelian dialectic and the quasi-transcendental in Glas. In Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett, 239–259. New York: Routledge.
Tyrrell, Wm. Blake, and Larry Bennett. 1998. Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1990. Myth and society in ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books.
Weber, Samuel. 2004. Antigone’s ‘Nomos’. In Theatricality as medium, 121–140. New York: Fordham University Press.
Zeitlin, Froma I. 1990. Thebes: Theater of self and society in Athenian drama. In Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian drama in its social context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, 130–167. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chanter, T. (2015). Exhuming the Remains of Antigone’s Tragedy. In: Welchman, A. (eds) Politics of Religion/Religions of Politics. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9448-0_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9448-0_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9447-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9448-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)