In this study we argue that Sophocles’ Antigone deals with a conflict between two different ways in which the human relates to the divine. One of the main factors causing this conflict is that the positions taken by the play’s main characters are characterized by their boldness and insolence. The conflict between Antigone and Creon takes place because two misconceptions of the divine seek to annihilate each other. The limitations in both Antigone’s and Creon’s misconceptions are caused by a god. (...) Due to the vagueness as to the exact divine cause of their misconceptions, the learning process of the two main characters in Sophocles’ play proves to be tragic, since it does not lead them to understand which god has made them fall into disgrace or which particular course of action they should have followed in the past or should follow henceforth. (shrink)

Oedipus the tyrant and the limits of political rationalism -- Blind faith and enlightened statesmanship in Oedipus at colonus -- The pious heroism of Antigone -- Conclusion: Nietzsche, Plato, and Aristotle on philosophy and tragedy.

This paper uses E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End to help articulate what I describe as a moral pluralist approach to moral conflict. Moral pluralism, I argue here, represents a way of responding to the moral conflicts we encounter in our lives, rather than the mere acknowledgment of their inevitability, as suggested by value pluralists like Isaiah Berlin. The tragic view of moral conflict epitomized by Sophocles’ Antigone and endorsed by most theories of value pluralism, tells us that we must (...) choose between moral commitments and reconcile ourselves to the moral regrets that inevitably follow from moral choice. The moral pluralist view, in contrast, suggests that we should seek means, however imperfect, of satisfying conflicting moral commitments and minimizing causes for moral regret. That view, I argue, drives the words and actions of Forster’s heroine in Howards End, Margaret Schlegel. Confronted with a battle between a willful patriarch and a self-righteous sister, a conflict that maps neatly onto the central conflict in Sophocles’ tragedy, Margaret refuses to take sides without refusing to make moral choices. And in doing so, she comes to exemplify an unexpected kind of moral heroism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Matthew S. Santirocco JUSTICE IN SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE Sophocles' Antigone is most often apprehended in terms of conflicts, an approach which the play does indeed invite. The personal clash of Antigone and Creon generates conflicts on many different levels— political (individual or family vs. state, aristocracy vs. democracy), theological (gods vs. men), philosophical (nature vs. law or convention), sexual (woman vs. man), even chronological (young vs. old). However, insofar as (...) no list can ever be so inclusive as the play itself, all such discussions tend by their very nature to be reductionist. And even if a balanced critique were possible at this level, a tragedy is not the sum of abstract conflicts; it is theatre, people in action. Furthermore, the conflict approach encourages us to ask the wrong questions. Although conflict need not imply resolution, critics persist in searching for it. Yet there is no resolution in the Antigone except by death. Similarly, such an approach invites us to ask who is right, Antigone or Creon. But in a very real sense this question misses Sophocles' point. Relevant, perhaps, to versions by Anouilh and Brecht, the question misleads when applied to the ancient play. It is interesting that we oversimplify, for Sophocles' sympathies are more expansive and complex than these modern interpretations of his myth. For all these reasons a valid alternative approach to the play may be to consider it not in terms of the conflicts incarnated in the personalities but rather in terms of one theme in the context of which all the conflicts are played out. The precise issue here, as so often in Greek tragedy, is a philosophical one. As the religious thought of an earlier era was yielding to judicial and political thought, and as older heroic ideals were being supplanted by a rationalistic view of man, tragedy's function in fifth-century Athens was, in part at least, to expose and explore these cultural displacements, either by affirming traditional values and concepts or else by questioning their continued validity. One such concept, perhaps the most recurrent in tragedy, 180 Matthew S. Santirocco181 is justice, dike. Originally a term used to refer to things as they are, dike came also to acquire a normative sense, things as they ought to be. At different times and in different contexts the word can signify custom or usage, law-enforcing authority, penalty, and ofcourse "justice" as a higher standard. Its precise semantic range is wide and fluctuating. Thus tragedy becomes, in a sense, a matter of vocabulary. In the Antigone the characters appeal to justice, but each defines it differently, so that the conflict is not so much between justice and injustice as between one sort of justice and another. The Oresteia of Aeschylus had earlier celebrated the transition from vendetta justice to courtroom justice. The Antigone, however, focuses not so much on the changes in dike as on a question these changes raise, namely the very possibility of dike. The establishment of the law court brought Aeschylus' trilogy to a resolved ending. Sophocles' vision in the Antigone is much more austere. Although he acknowledges the existence of an ideal of justice, he exposes the tensions and ambiguities inherent in it and thereby questions whether that ideal can ever be realized in the lives of men. II A key text concerning justice is contained in one of the choral odes. But can it be trusted? The tragic chorus is not, after all, the mouthpiece of the poet as was the comic chorus in Aristophanes' parabaseis. Nor is it always or necessarily the mouthpiece of the audience, SchlegeFs "ideal spectator." In the Antigone, as elsewhere, the chorus simply constitutes a panel of the population (here, of Thebes) and its perspective on the action is, if not omniscient, not particularly partisan either. Gordon Kirkwood has demonstrated the many dramatic functions of the Sophoclean chorus, including its ambiguities. In the Antigone no fewer than three odes are ambiguous, leaving in doubt the identity of the one who has disturbed order and right (332-75), who has violated the will of heaven (582-625), and whose mind has been perverted by love (781-816). Although the chorus may not be aware of the... (shrink)

This paper reads Sophocles' " Antigone " contextually, as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and larger conflicts these stand for. Antigone defies Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and died in battle, be dishonoured - left unburied. But the play is not about Polynices' treason. It explores the clash in 5th century Athens between Homeric/elite and democratic mourning practices. The former memorialize the unique individuality of the dead, focus on (...) the family's loss and bereavement and call for vengeance. The latter memorialize the dead's contribution to the immortal polis and emphasize the replaceability of those lost. Each economy of mourning sees the other as excessive and politically unstable. The remainders of both, managed by way of exception institutions such as tragedy and the Dionysian Festival, continue to haunt us now. (shrink)

Hegel thought Sophocles' Antigone was the finest tragedy, and he put drama atop his hierarchy of the arts, precisely at the point where his system transitions from aesthetics to the philosophy of religion. Hegel concluded his Aesthetics by writing, "Of all the masterpieces of the classical and modern world, the Antigone seems to me to be the most magnificent and satisfying work of art."1The Antigone owes its place in Hegel's hierarchy to its focus on Antigone's uncanny self-certainty. Positioned at (...) the juncture between Hegel's aesthetics and his philosophy of religion, it has at its centre a funeral rite, the most ancient and universal of all religious rituals. Antigone's perception of what she is called upon to .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cynthia Willett HEGEL, ANTIGONE, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF ECSTATIC DIALOGUE In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel argues that drama is the highest form of art. Only drama can resolve, or sublate (auflieben), an opposition between objective and subjective poles ofaesthetic experience.1 This opposition takes its penultimate form in the difference between epic and lyric poetry. Subjective feelings expressed in lyric and the objective representation ofevents in epic are sublated (...) in classical drama as ethical character and action. In this article I will examine both what Hegel does and does not say about the structure and function ofclassical drama in order to determine its role in the education of humanity, or what Hegel calls the "phenomenology of spirit." As it turns out, drama is not only a climactic moment in the development of spirit. The structure ofdrama also traces a paradigm and an historical origin for Hegel's dialectic. The ironic reversals and discoveries that emplot tragic drama also constitute dialectic. An immediate consequence of this parallel is mat, in accordance with Aristode's definition of tragic drama, dialectic demands the catharsis, or purging, of emotion from educated spirit.2 After establishing the analogy between dialectic and cathartic drama, I turn to the exemplary role that is played by Sophocles' Antigone in the Phenomenology ofSpirit. A reinterpretation of the play suggests that Hegel fails to see that emotional engagement, or the unsublated subjective feeling relegated to die lower art of lyric, in fact orients the dramatic action of Antigone. The resemblance between drama and dialectic suggests that desire can no more be purged from dialectic than from classical tragedy. As a consequence, Hegelian dialectic should be reconceived in terms of a notion of tragedy that is not cathartic but ecstatic. Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 268-283 Cynthia Willett269 In the AesUietks, Hegel places drama after epic and lyric as the third and final moment of the highest stage of art. Drama presents actions that are ethical and thus differs from the lyrical expression of feelings as well as the adventures narrated in epic (A, pp. 1158; 474). Hegel's definition of epic in terms of narration and description suggests that the language of epic functions as representation. Representational language externalizes, or objectifies, spirit's movement in a series ofevents which are related by the epic poet. This narration functions without the mediation ofa subject, which is to say without an "agent's inner will and character" (A, pp. 1160; 476). Lyric poetry, on the other hand, concerns feelings or "the inner life alone" (A, pp. 984; 254). In accordance with its subject matter, the language oflyric is not representational but expressive. Drama presents actions before an audience, such actions occurring primarily in the mode of speech (A, pp. 1159; 475). What we can characterize as the "speech-acts" performed in drama carry out intentions of, or ends soughtby, the main character. Drama advances dialectic because, as Hegel writes, "drama does not fall apart into a lyric inner life and an external sphere as its opposite, but displays an inner life and its external realization" (A, pp. 1 160; 476). First, events which occur episodically in epic attain the unity of a single action that comprises dramatic plot. Secondly, a "cleaned-up" version ofthe "chaotic" feelings expressed in lyric poetry develops into the intention of a character to adher to a universal ethical principle. It is important to emphasize that, according to Hegel, drama should not draw any of its effect from subjective emotions. Drama sublates lyrical feeling into ethical law. Only thus does drama bring together the epic-making events and lyrical subjectivity, notby wayofa mechanical synthesis, but in a metamorphosis enabling elements initially opposed to give rise to an original whole. The proximity ofdrama to dialectical thought appears in the contrast Hegel draws between dramatic action and action which is prosaic, or philosophically insignificant (A, pp. 1159; 475). Dramatic action, Hegel explains, "is notconfined to the simple and undisturbed accomplishment ofa specific aim; on the contrary, it rests entirely on collisions ofcircumstances, passions, and characters... which in turn necessitate a resolution of the conflict and discord" (A, pp. 1159; 475). On the other hand, a prosaic, or ordinary... (shrink)

Students in the humanities have found Antigone intriguing ever since she was cast as the focal character in Sophocles's much contemplated tragedy. Antigone is enigmatic, to be sure; until comparatively recently, most interpretations of her focused on her role in the context of the tragic series of events unfolding in the play. These accounts relied heavily on her portrayal by Hegel, as representing the prepolitical ties of kinship coming into conflict with the ascending authority of the state.Richer life was (...) breathed into the 2,400-year-old play, however, by Jacques Lacan in his 1960 lecture "The Essence of Tragedy."1 As a result, over the past several decades an intense interest has developed in the persona of... (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur sustains in Soi-même comme un autre that the tragical conflict in Sophocle’s Antigone is only ethical. Antigone and Creon confront each other because they both have limited and partial views of good life. The aim of this brief paper is to show that Antigone's tragedy must be situated in the religions domain. Only Greek theology - the belief in a ‘cruel’ and ‘satanic’ God - gives us the ‘tools’ to understand Sophocles' complex imaginary.

This article considers the war against terror in relation to classical tragedy. It uses Heidegger's analysis of Sophocles's play Antigone to argue that human beings are essentially `homeless' and yet our destiny lies in the continual attempt to overcome this homelessness by establishing foundational principles that might bring our journeying to an end. The tragedy of this situation is that the search for foundations and a search for a home invariably bring differing worlds in conflict with each other (...) as their paths to truth collide. Lucien Goldmann's analysis of the tragedy of refusal is also considered in relation to a non-foundational politics that may permit us not only to endure, but actually to affirm our homelessness as an attempt to resist the terror and anabolic militarism that marks the current age. (shrink)

From Plato's _Republic_ and Aristotle's _Poetics_ to Nietzsche's _The Birth of Tragedy_, the theme of tragedy has been subject to radically conflicting philosophical interpretations. Despite being at the heart of philosophical debate from Ancient Greece to the Nineteenth Century, however, tragedy has yet to receive proper treatment as a philosophical tradition in its own right. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ is a compelling contribution to that oversight and the first book to address the topic in a major way. Eleven new (...) essays by internationally renowned philosophers clearly show how time and again, major thinkers have returned to tragedy in many of their key works. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ aks why it is that thinkers as far apart as Hegel and Benjamin should make tragedy such an important theme in their work, and why, after Kant, an important strand of philosophy should present itself tragically. From Heidegger's reading of Sophocles' Antigone to Nietzsche and Benjamin's book-length studies of tragedy, _Philosophy and Tragedy_ presents an outstanding and original study of this preoccupation. The five sections are organised clearly around five major philosophers: Hegel, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. (shrink)

On a l’habitude de lire dans Antigone l’histoire d’un conflit entre d’un côté l’expression des liens affectifs et de la piété, et de l’autre les prérogatives de l’État dont le but premier serait le maintien des institutions. D’un côté Antigone fidèle à son frère, de l’autre Créon attaché à sa Cité. D’un côté la morale de l’affectivité ou de la conviction (Gesinnungsethik), de l’autre la morale de la responsabilité (Verantwortungsethik), pour parler comme Max Weber. Cette lecture classique de la tragédie (...) demeure sans doute pertinente à bien des égards, mais traduit-elle l’essentiel? Et si l’intention du poète n’avait pas été d’en rester à cette confrontation mais de suggérer, par-delà l’affrontement ruineux, une troisième voie possible? Il n’y aurait plus alors deux termes seulement, le privé et le public que tout sépare, mais deux manières pour l’ordre public lui-même de se rapporter au privé, l’une conflictuelle et tyrannique, celle de Créon, l’autre conciliatrice et délibérative – démocratique en ce sens –, celle défendue par Hémon, par Tirésias, et finalement peut-être par Sophocle lui-même qui, par l’emploi d’un vocabulaire tiré de l’expérience politique athénienne, dénoue d’une main l’intrigue qu’il noue de l’autre. Éclairée entre autres par Aristote, une interprétation nouvelle de la pièce en découle, celle d’un poète qui surjoue les conflits pour mieux insinuer les moyens politiques de les résoudre ou de les atténuer. (shrink)

The article contains an analysis of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone by Sophocles contained in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The philosopher develops his concept of a tragic conflict occurring in the world of the Greek antiquity – a conflict between man’s law (a state representing generality) and underground law (a family representing individuality). The laws are embodied by Kreon and Antigone, respectively. Hegel’s interpretation indicates the privileged position of Antigone. The author argues that the heroine of the (...) class='Hi'>tragedy is the anticipation of modern subjectivity: Antigone is killed because there is no place for an acting woman in ancient ethics. Hegel’s fascination with Antigone as a manifestation of feminine subjectivity therefore undermines stereotypical allegations about the philosopher’s sexism and patriarchalism. (shrink)

This essay re-examines Hegel's account of Greek culture in the section of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ devoted to “ethical action”. The thrust of this section cannot be adequately grasped, it is argued, by focusing on Hegel's references to either Sophocles' _Antigone_ or Greek tragedy as a whole. Taking into account Hegel's complex use of literary sources, the essay shows in particular that Hegel draws on Aristophanes' comedies to comprehend the collapse of Greek culture, a collapse he considered to result (...) from the tragic conflict constitutive of Greek culture as a whole. The essay thus aims to shed light on Hegel's abstruse remarks on womanhood and, more generally, to demonstrate that Hegel's peculiar employment of literary sources constitutes an essential element of the method he employs throughout the _Phenomenology of Spirit_. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine how and why Heidegger's early conception of freedom as the ground of the self-appropriation of Dasein had been gradually transformed after 1930. The approach of Heidegger to the issue of human freedom displays how his thinking proceeds from Kant's formulation of the problem in "The Third Antinomy" of the first Critique to Sophocles' tragedy of Antigone. I argue that the reason behind this transformation resides in the attempt of thinking the relation between freedom and (...) natural necessity over and beyond the constraints of critical philosophy. What seems pivotal in this transformation is Heidegger's growing concern with the "tragic" in which he envisages the possibility of a genuine exposure to the "truth" of the conflict between freedom and necessity and, more primordially, to the "abode" wherein the encounter between man and Being {Sein) occurs. Here, the "tragic" is pointing to the limits of representation and what is presented. In other words, it exhibits the limits of human freedom in its relation to the truth of Being. In the passion for disclosure of Being {aletheia), man is driven into the freedom of instituting its truth. In Heidegger's late thinking, human freedom is determined not any more by the obligation of choosing oneself but by the necessity of clearing the truth of Being. Human freedom is tragic in the face of this necessity that it has to answer. Therefore, man is envisaged as having no right or mastery over his freedom for there is no total clearing of its origin. Finally, I argue that it seems impossible to understand the transformation in Heidegger's concept of freedom without an appeal to his emphasis on the "tragic" as being an attempt to deepen and to transfigure the problem as treated in Kantian critical philosophy. In its tragic sense, Heidegger's concept of human freedom displays what lies beneath the Kantian antinomy: the incomprehensible origin of human freedom conceived as the event of the historical appropriation of Being {Er-eignis). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and IsmeneWm. Blake Tyrrell (bio) and Larry J. BennettAt the core of the Oedipus myth, as Sophocles presents it, is the proposition that all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence. Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejects Oedipus out of fear that his son will seize his throne and invade his conjugal bed. Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, (...) does away with Laius, violently rebuffs the sphinx, then takes their places—as king and “scourge of the city,” respectively. Again, Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, plots the death of that unknown figure who may be seeking to usurp his own position. Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, each taking his cue from the oracle, seek one another’s downfall.All these acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community.—René Girard, Violence and the SacredRené Girard does not include feminine relationships in his assessment of the Oedipus myth, yet the same redundancy that characterizes the males marks the females.1 Jocasta conjoins in one person multiple and redundant social roles: she is the mother and wife of the same person, for which she [End Page 1] hangs herself, leaving for Oedipus “many pains that a mother’s furies fulfilled” (Homer Odyssey 11.279–80). Her daughters, their father’s sisters, manifest kinship redundancy in two persons. Incest produces circularly, reverting to a sibling of the parent rather than moving forward with a descendant. The absence of linear progression from one generation to the next creates a sameness and equilibrium that thwart separation and individuality. Oedipus’s brothers/sons fail in their adult roles, because neither can overcome the other’s right to the throne of Thebes and the mastery of its royal household. They are enemy brothers locked in reciprocal violence.2 Antigone and Ismene have escaped notice not only as enemy sisters but even as products of the same incest. Audiences for Sophocles’s Antigone have viewed them as “normal” women and cooperated with his characters in emphasizing the differences between them. They have assumed from Antigone’s betrothal to Haemon and resistance to Creon that she is the elder, more mature sister.3 They tend to accept without question that Antigone engages in burial rituals with Polyneices’s corpse (241–58) and returns to it (442–35).4 Bernard M. W. Knox’s critically powerful concept of the “Sophoclean hero” has bolstered this view of Antigone while reducing Ismene to a foil, and abetted the tendency of modern producers of the play to cast an older or more famous actress in the role of Antigone.5 Naturalistic readings like that of C. M. Bowra—“seeing that Ismene is her only close relative in the world, Antigone is remarkably cold to her”6—have masked the source and hence the vehemence of Antigone’s fury.That the reciprocity of the violence between Ismene and Antigone has gone unnoticed is understandable in view of the familiarity of the conflict between their brothers. Males in Greek society pursued difference by striving to excel as aristoi (best) in competition for prestige, wealth, and power.7 Whenever Eteocles and Polyneices came together, each asserted a right to Oedipus’s household and throne that was equally matched, and violence ensued from the equilibrium. On the other hand, Greek women were not supposed to compete with one another for distinction. They wove wool for clothes, maintained the household, and cared for the children, the sick, and the dead, activities that required cooperation away from public view.8 Proximity to other women was the norm and desideratum. Moreover, lawgivers like Solon based their funeral legislation on the premise that every woman wanted to participate in mourning.9 For the sake of public tranquillity, legislators tried to limit the numbers of women participants by imposing restrictions according to degrees of kinship, for instance, to children of fifth cousins. In this context, women were interchangeable, and the places they held during birth, coming of age in wedding ceremonies, and death, [End Page 2] were open to more than one woman. Closeness and... (shrink)

In this paper, the tragedy of Hegel's works on索佛克里斯 is interpreted as the object of analysis, to clarify the "Phenomenology of Mind" chapter of the first link: ethical implied the dialectical development of relations. Hegel Antigongnie and Craig Wong as the conflict between the play to express the central theme, the duo behind it as the ethical forces of the two entities split out the two sets of rules of self-symbol, through the wave Li Naike burial period of confrontation (...) with the two sides is not only a Antigongnie ─ ─ Weng personal conflict with Craig, but also family and country, God, law and human law, obligations and civic responsibilities of genetic conflict between, or Sex between women and men conflict. In the ethical stage, the individual and the unity of ethics has a direct relationship between the entities, and directly by its intrinsic norms of behavior, but to achieve out of the ethical nature of the dialectical development of the end point then, replaced by another type. (shrink)

Hegel’s admiration for Sophocles’ Antigone is well-known. In the Philosophy of Religion he declares it to be “for me the absolute example of tragedy.” In the Aesthetics he calls it “one of the most sublime and in every respect most magnificent works of art of all time” - and adds : “Of all the splendors of the ancient or modern worlds - and I know nearly all, and one should and can know them - the Antigone seems to me (...) in this respect the most magnificent, most satisfying, work of art.” No less extravagant is Hegel’s praise of Antigone herself: “the heavenly Antigone, the most magnificent figure ever to have appeared on earth” as he puts it in his History of Philosophy. (shrink)

Book Reviews Catalin Partenie, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, FirstView Article.

Maternity is a ghastly and frightening proposition in Sophocles’s Antigone. This paper probes this startling motif, which unravels the “unhappy girl, child” of Oedipus through the psychoanalytic framework of Julia Kristeva’s theories of the symbolic, the semiotic, and the chora. The significance of a Kristevan reading of Antigone is twofold: Kristeva’s theory of the relationship between maternity and melancholia solves the mystery of Antigone’s irreparable sadness and unflinching affiliation with the dead. Second, Kristeva’s notions of the dual modalities of discourse, (...) the symbolic and the semiotic, and the importance of the chora, focus on evaluating the ominous consequences of the subjugation and destruction of the maternal body in the tragedy. (shrink)

Hegel qualifiait la pièce Antigone de Sophocle de tragédie la plus parfaite. Peut-on, encore aujourd’hui, malgré les critiques ultérieures, soutenir cette idée et la fonder? Si la perfection de cette tragédie tient dans le tissage de conflits que Sophocle construit, nous devrons d’abord effiler chaque conflit, pour ensuite affilier chaque position à ce qui la fonde, et suivre enfin le déroulé tragique du fil d’Antigone.

Tragedy and Citizenship provides a wide-ranging exploration of attitudes toward tragedy and their implications for politics. Derek W. M. Barker reads the history of political thought as a contest between the tragic view of politics that accepts conflict and uncertainty, and an optimistic perspective that sees conflict as self-dissolving. Drawing on Aristotle's political thought, alongside a novel reading of the Antigone that centers on Haemon, its most neglected character, Barker provides contemporary democratic theory with a theory of (...) class='Hi'>tragedy. He sees Hegel's philosophy of reconciliation as a critical turning point that results in the elimination of citizenship. By linking Hegel's failure to address the tragic dimensions of politics to Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Judith Butler, Barkeroffers a major reassessment of contemporary political theory and a fresh perspective on the most urgent challenges facing democratic politics. Derek W. M. Barker is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation. (shrink)

Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling (...) between modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression. (shrink)

The Phoenician Women, Euripides’ peculiar retelling and refashioning of the Theban myth, offers a portrait of Antigone before she becomes the actor we mostly know today from Sophocles’ play. In this under-studied Greek tragedy, Euripides portrays the political and epistemological dissolution that allows for Antigone’s appearance in public. Whereas Sophocles’ Antigone appears on stage ready to confront Creon with her appeal to the universal unwritten laws of the gods and later dissolves into the female lamenting a lost womanhood, Euripides’ (...) Antigone experiences the opposite journey, thereby offering insights into the conditions that allow for her exposure in the political arena. A speech by Eteocles at the center of the play questions the existence of absolutes, calls injustice beautiful, and opens the door for Antigone’s entrance into the public sphere. With this speech Eteocles challenges us to consider the conditions of political openness in the modern age. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political TheoryJennifer RobertsJ. Peter Euben. Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xvi 1 271 pp. Cloth, $55, £37.50; paper, $18.95, £13.95.Who, Socrates asks Meletus, improves the young men of Athens? The laws, Meletus replies. But which people, Socrates wants to know, which men? These very dicasts here. All of them, Meletus, or just (...) some? Oh, all of them. Goodness; and what about the audience? Them too? Yes, them too. And the members of the Boule? Certainly. And the men in the Assembly? Yes, them too. In other words, Meletus, what you are saying is that absolutely everyone in Athens improves young men except me. Is that right? Yes, that is exactly right, Meletus replies.Socrates has succeeded in making a fool of Meletus precisely because the question of “improving” the young (or anyone else) is so problematic. In this wide-ranging study of political thought in classical Athens, Peter Euben locates Greek explorations of the civic community, and how one educates people for it, in the context of contemporary debates over higher education in the United States. Taking as a springboard (and a title) the accusation of corrupting the youth made against Socrates at his trial, Euben seeks to mediate the claims of “canonists,” who advocate a focus on classical texts on the grounds that they instill Values with a capital V, and “multiculturalists,” who are suspicious of such texts, believing them to embody the narrow and bankrupt values of dead white males—dead white slave-holding males at that. His strategy is to stress what he sees as the polyphonal and multivocal nature of the Athenian corpus, emphasizing the impossibility of these revered but disparate texts’ “teaching” any virtue other than that of constant scrutiny of self and other. The texts he examines, moreover—tragedy, comedy, and dialogue—often deal directly with the question of education for democratic citizenship, a project dear to Euben’s heart.To do this, of course, Euben must demonstrate a pro-democratic agenda in both tragedy and Old Comedy, and here I think he succeeds, although the matter is far from simple; and then there is the question of Socrates/Plato. Readers will probably be persuaded by his arguments in the following order: Sophocles’ Antigone, yes; Aristophanes’ Clouds, maybe; Plato’s Gorgias, very dubious. It is in its discussion of the troubling Gorgias that Euben’s book is most challenging and provocative.Demonstrating multiple voices in Antigone is not a daunting task. The play works as a pro-democratic statement on many levels, beginning with its very surface. Most simply, Haemon and the chorus appear to embody the voice [End Page 621] of reason against Creon’s rigidity and vulgarity, and Haemon explicitly sides with the chorus against his autocratic father. At a deeper level, however, the polyphony of the play represents what Euben sees as the multivocal nature of democratic debate, as the conflicting claims of law and family are both enacted and articulated on the stage. Here, as elsewhere in the book, he finds the process of deliberation and analysis intrinsically democratic and gives it as least as much weight as the conclusions to which it leads, if not more.Creon, who rejects discussion and deliberation and associates yielding with unmanliness, seeks to deny the richness and complexity of human life and the human community. If Creon stands for autocracy, does the equally rigid Antigone then represent democracy? It would seem to me that she does not, since the primacy she gives to religious over civic obligations appears to place her in the camp of the female/religious force that Aeschylus rejected in the Oresteia as pre-democratic, replacing it with the patriarchal state of men and civic laws as the Furies are tamed and the rulings of male juries are constituted as the laws of the community. Euben, however, puts forward an interesting argument to the opposite effect: while Creon, he writes, “may regard Antigone as the amorphous anarchic symbol of womanly power, it is worth recalling that conservatives regarded Athenian democracy the same way” (171). (We might... (shrink)

Why should citizens participate in civic endeavors they oppose? In the Philoctetes, Sophocles dramatizes the actions of three interlocutors who struggle for answers to an intractable personal and political conflict amid an existential civic crisis. The characters try several methods to resolve the impasse, specifically deceit, sympathy and appeals to duty. Ultimately, civic religion succeeds in creating unity where other methods of resolution fail. The civic religion framework in the Philoctetes can be seen as Sophocles's statement that resolution of the (...) most extreme political conflicts can be obtained through a combination of piety and reason that respects foundational civic doctrines transcending politics. In this way, civic religion serves to unify political communities divided by self‐interest, intolerance, and desire for revenge while preserving self‐determination and the dignity of free will. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on the mutually implicated structures of tragedy and self-formation found in Hegel’s use of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology. By emphasizing the apparent distinction between particular and universal in Hegel’s reading of the tragedies in Antigone, I propose that a tragedy of action (which particularizes a universal) is inescapable for subjectivity understood as socially constituted and always already socially engaged. I consider universal/particular relations in three communities: Hegel’s Greek polis, his community of conscience, (...) and my reading of certain feminist communities. The position I propose establishes a ground from which to approach subjects, and implies that all subjects may be understood as the result of relations embodying potential tragedy. This speaks to contemporary concerns about marginalization, identity articulation, and relations of recognition. (shrink)

The word “tragedy,” as Irish critic Shaun Richards points out, “is a term frequently used to describe the contemporary Northern Irish situation. It is applied both by newspaper headline writers trying to express the sense of futility and loss at the brutal extinction of individual lives and by commentators attempting to convey a sense of the country and its history in more general terms.” 1 Since identifying this particular use of the word, it has be- come clear that the (...) Irish are not referring to tragedy in general, but to Greek tragedy in particular. For example, Deaglán de Bréadun writes in The Irish Times: “The whole community knows outright disaster was only narrowly averted at Drumcree last year [1996]. There is also a terrible creeping feeling that Drumcree Three will be upon us soon and that, like a Greek tragedy, this time disaster is inevitable.” 2 Another article the following year, on Sinn Fein’s exclusion from the 1998 Peace Process, reported: “One long-distance peace processor lamented that today’s events were ‘like a Greek tragedy. You can see the end coming but you can’t do any- thing about it.’” This “language of exhausted fatalism” 4 is not unfamiliar to the Irish, and offers an explanation for the more than twenty Irish authors who have translated, produced, or adapted over two dozen Irish versions of Greek tragedies in the last century alone. 5 Irish poets have translated the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, yet all with a distinctly Irish stamp. Moreover, these Irish-Greek adaptations all, in one way or another, comment upon and question the instability of twentieth-century Ireland – the people, the poets, and the divided country. (shrink)

This paper deals with the interpretation of Sophocles’ _Antigone_ as developed by Jacques Lacan in the Book VII of the _Seminar_. In contrast with traditional ethical analyses from Aristotle to Kant, the author emphasizes the absolute and radical desire of Antigone, whose fulfillment leads to the ultimate limit of life. In spite of her extreme rigidity, Antigone represents the possibility of assuming ethically one’s own desire, accepting its paradoxical dimension. Therefore, the psychoanalytic interpretation of the tragedy Antigone leads to (...) accept desire’s destabilizing force. From this point of view, the practice of analysis finds an effective contribution in the experience of tragedy: in this sense, it is possible to highlight the relationship between an action and the desire that inhabits it. Through the contrasting readings given by Slavoj Žižek and Massimo Recalcati, this paper is aimed to show how the ethical dimension of Sophocles’ _Antigone_ does not match with the ideals of traditional ethics, but allows us to explore the limit of human desire. (shrink)

Despite his extended readings of parts of the Antigone of Sophocles, Heidegger nowhere explicitly sets about giving us a theory of tragedy or a detailed analysis of the essence of tragedy. The following paper seeks to piece together Heidegger's understanding of tragedy and tragic experience by looking to themes in his thinking – particularly his analyses of early Greek thinking – and connecting them both to his scattered references to tragedy and actual examples from Greek (...) class='Hi'>tragedy. What we find is that, for Heidegger, tragedy is an interruption of speculation, a refusal to philosophize, a way of showing how things are that resonates with the goal of Heidegger's own thinking. (shrink)

Aristote’s meson according to the Hölderlin’s Remarks on Sophocles The first two parts of the Remarks on Oedipus and later on Antigone (1804) form what Hölderlin calls a “point of contact” with an author : 1) Hegel ; 2) Aristote. The Naturphilosophie revisited by Hölderlin leads to elucidate very concretely the structure of the Sophocles tragedies : the “middle” — concept issued from the Poetics — is a “point of indifference” — concept issued from Schelling and Hegel’s “speculative physics”— between (...) the beginning and the end. The “caesura” (word of Tirésias), major discovery of Hölderlin, is structurally necessary as heterogeneous representation in Sophocles’ texts to bring to light the said middle, otherwise imperceptible. The Remarks, as analysed in the present article, disassemble the Poetics piece by piece to rebuild an extraordinary thought of the tragedy. Aristote would have sought to exceed, to really raise the moment of the “middle”, thus prefiguring the Hegelian dialectics. Yet Hölderlin will strongly oppose this suppression of meson. (shrink)

What constitutes an adequate basis for feminist consciousness? What values and concerns are feminists to bring to bear in challenging present standards of well-being and articulating alternative visions of collective life? This essay takes a close and critical look at these questions as they are addressed in the work of political theorist Jean Elshtain. An outspoken defender of "pro-family feminism," Elshtain has urged contemporary feminists to reclaim the "female subject" within the private sphere. Enormous problems attend Elshtain's counsel and these (...) have as much to do with the political implications of her argument as with her reading of the Sophoclean tragedy Antigone. With an eye towards foregrounding what some of these problems are, this essay elaborates an alternative reading of Sophocles' Antigone and moves from that exposition to an examination of why it is that Elshtain's claims and conclusions are politically unsound and unsustainable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery by Tina ChanterM. D. UsherTina Chanter. Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. xli + 233 pp. Cloth, $90; paper, $29.95.Tina Chanter’s book sets out to re-read Sophocles’ Antigone in light of two modern reworkings of the play from sub-Saharan Africa—Athol Fugard’s The Island (1974), which is based on an actual all-male performance (...) of Antigone by prisoners on Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated), and Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni: An African Antigone (1999), a version highlighting racial tensions that is set in British-colonial Nigeria. But Chanter’s book is about much more than that, as she spends a good deal of time critiquing, on the one hand, the interpretive tradition of Western psychoanalysis, which sees gender and kinship relations as the defining themes of the Oedipus cycle, while decrying, on the other, Hegelian readings that view Antigone as an aesthetically pure, ethical heroine caught between obligations to family and state. The thesis of the book is perhaps best captured in Chanter’s own words: “It turns out that the issues raised by Òsófisan and Fugard... far from being tangential to those of Sophocles, are inscribed at the very heart of the Oedipal cycle. Yet their inscription has proved difficult to read by interpreters of Antigone who have inherited ways of reading inflected by philosophical and psychoanalytic legacies, which are themselves implicated in imperialism, bolstered by new world slavery” (143). Chanter’s critique of the West’s reception of Antigone is often illuminating, but the proposition that colonialism per se is the culprit of blindered readings and that slavery lies [End Page 159] somehow at the heart of Sophocles’ original play fails to convince. There are disclaimers that this is not in fact the argument. For example: “The argument is [not] that Sophocles’ Oedipal cycle is really about the question of slavery” (xiii) and “I hope it is clear that my effort here is not to produce a universal narrative in which the truth about Antigone turns out to be that it is really about slavery” (144). But so much of Chanter’s discussion focuses on the topic of slavery—e.g., “A central task of the book is to demonstrate that Antigone’s discrimination of her brother Polynices from a slave is part of a larger complex of themes concerning the status of outsiders, foreigners, and slaves that informs the Oedipal cycle”(x)—that such comments read more like palinodes than as attenuations of the argument. The three whole paragraphs of unanswered, unsubstantiated rhetorical questions about the supposed centrality of slavery to the Antigone and its reception at pages 89–90 reinforce this impression.Chanter does, however, offer informed and sensitive readings of Fugard’s and Osófisan’s works (chaps. 3 and 4). These form the best parts of the book, to which end the plot synopses of those plays on pages 147–49 will be helpful to the reader who is unfamiliar with them. Also good is the analysis/critique of Hegel’s views on tragedy, and on the Antigone in particular (chap. 2). But the book is bloated at the ends: a 38-page preface is followed by a 27-page introduction. Add to that 46 pages of endnotes and the total is 111 pages of prolegomena and epilegomena, much of which is, in this reader’s judgement, parerga. What remains are 124 pages (of a total 235, excluding bibliography and index) of actual evidence and development of the thesis. This feature of the book is due in large part to repetitiveness: Chanter has some fine turns of phrase, to be sure, but statements made once or twice are repeated again and again throughout with no appreciable gain in thought, giving a snowball effect to the development of the argument, which at times is difficult to unpack. A lot of additional space is taken up by metadiscourse: e.g., “this book concerns itself with” (xxxvii); “my overarching approach” (20); “one of the aims of this book” (this on p. 22, after 38 pages of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Antigone, Interrupted by Bonnie HonigLorna HardwickBonnie Honig. Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xviii + 321 pp. Paper, $30.95.This is an important book for three main reasons. First, it offers a substantial contribution to current debates in the arts and humanities about whether and how new constructs of “humanism” can be attuned to transhistorical and transcultural experience, replace the discredited formulations associated with Western-dominated “universalism,” and maintain (...) and justify a role for human agency. Second, it addresses this aim by analysing the text of a Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigone, both as a site for grounding the concepts and theories developed by intellectual historians and philosophers in the West and then as a laboratory for testing different approaches. The book will therefore be required reading for researchers and advanced students in a range of disciplines stretching from Classics to political science, as well as for those whose primary concern is the interdisciplinary “Big Picture” of the possibilities and limitations of human action and thought. Third, because inevitably there are significant problems involved with both aspects of Honig’s project, the ways in which she addresses these and the extent to which her arguments are convincing should make her book a launch-pad for further debate.Honig’s aims in the book are multiple and ambitious. In a 2013 interview for Open Democracy, she described the intellectual influences that shaped the development of the book. These include: French theorists’ use of the conceptual apparatus of fragility, change and unpredictability; Arendt’s vision of politics as “tumultuous and inaugural—always forming and reforming communities and reestablishing the importance of public life”; and the notion developed particularly in Derrida that speech acts are ruptural and extraordinary and sometimes take place in the abyss. Brought to bear on Sophocles’ Antigone, these approaches [End Page 158] lead Honig to read the play as centered around the politicisation of mourning and burial, representing a moment of crisis not just within the play but also in the wider Athenian context as probed by Thucydides in his presentation of the Epitaphios attributed to Pericles (Thuc. 2.34–46). Classicists and ancient historians will hardly find that perspective astonishing, but it provides Honig with the basis for the extension of the argument to the larger canvas of the re-examination of humanist angst and the desire to imagine through the lens of a classical text a humanism that is neither reductive nor pessimist nor a synonym for an imposition of “universal” as its defining characteristic. Her enterprise has implications for Classics as well as for the new humanism that she constructs.1 In some respects the book represents an intellectual journey for Honig herself, in which she moves from an initial sense that “in current contexts of inegalitarian, neo-liberal capitalisation and globalization, the reinterpretation of classical texts hardly seems the most pressing task” (9) to recognition of the play’s pivotal role in the notion of agonistic humanism (196).Honig’s opening chapter sets out the models of humanism that she seeks to overturn. She starts from the supposition that humanism is once again a topic of aspiration: “not the rationalist universalist variety discredited by post-structuralism and the horrific events of the twentieth century, but a newer variant” (17). She claims that one version of “new” humanism asserts that what is common to humans is not rationality but mortality, “not the capacity to reason but vulnerability to suffering.” Furthermore, she asserts that this privileging of finitude as a defining characteristic disempowers humans and marginalises political struggle. Because Greek tragedy has been foundational to attempts to seek solace in “redemptive moments” or the “transformation of suffering and loss into a story of human endurance” (206, n. 7, quoting Euben), the task of envisioning an alternative has to be commenced on the site of the ancient texts. And since Honig perceives Antigone as the representative text of “mortalist humanists” (25), that text has to be her laboratory (Part 1 of the book sets out the shift from Oedipus to Antigone as central texts for different types of humanism).2 Once Antigone is centre-stage, the concepts and practices of lament and... (shrink)

Resumen: El presente ensayo se propone leer desde el concepto de urgencia, algunas de las reescrituras de Antígona en Latinoamérica que se han configurado en torno a procesos de violencia y desapariciones forzadas. Constata, asimismo, la vigencia de la tragedia de Sófocles que se reinventa en la escena contemporánea, bajo la forma de dispositivos capaces de una afectación política tejida como poéticas de la sensibilidad. La urgencia se presenta como impulso creador que los dispositivos elaboran como acontecimiento teatral y aparece (...) no como premura si no como un espacio para la acción, el que no está sujeto a la concepción racional o productiva del tiempo.: This essay aims to read from the concept of urgency, some of the rewrites of Antigone in Latin America that have been configured around processes of violence and forced disappearances. It also confirms the current relevance of the tragedy of Sophocles that is reinvented in the contemporary scene, in the form of devices capable of reaching a political dimension through a poetic of sensitivity. The urgency is presented as a creative impulse that the devices elaborate as a theatrical event and appears not as a rush but as a space for action, which is not subject to the rational or productive conception of time. (shrink)

Translated and edited by Peter D. Arnott, this classic and highly popular edition contains two essential plays in the development of Greek tragedy-_Oedipus the King and Antigone_-for performance and study. The editor's introduction contains a brief biography of the playwright and a description of Greek theater. Also included are a list of principal dates in the life of Sophocles and a bibliography.

Religious freedom is one of the most debated and controversial human rights in contemporary public discourse. At once a universally held human right and a flash point in the political sphere, religious freedom has resisted scholarly efforts to define its parameters. Taliaferro explores a different way of examining the tensions between the aims of religion and the needs of political communities, arguing that religious freedom is a uniquely difficult human right to uphold because it rests on two competing conceptions, human (...) and divine. Drawing on classical natural law, Taliaferro expounds a new, practical theory of religious freedom for the modern world. By examining conceptions of law such as Sophocles' Antigone, Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, Ibn Rushd's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric, and Tertullian's writings, The Possibility of Religious Freedom explains how expanding our notion of law to incorporate such theories can mediate conflicts of human and divine law and provide a solid foundation for religious liberty in modernity's pluralism. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the work of Russian philosopher and cultural researcher Helen Petrovsky. The focus of the article is her original way of working, which consists in expanding the possibilities of philosophical analysis through reference to the practice of contemporary arts. Where art reveals its technique, Helen Petrovsky sees an opportunity to find a mechanism corresponding to this method in the sphere of thinking, a version of the Kantian Witz. The example of Helen Petrovsky's analysis of painting and (...) photography shows that her attention is focused on signs-affects, stains, traces, imprints of the external (nature or society), which are in conflict with human abilities of perception and understanding. Here the side of the image that remains outside the representation manifests itself. Turning to Lacoue-Labarthe's mimetology and Mondzain's interpretation of the icon allows us to see more clearly the Russian scholar's original way of working. Her critical gaze reanimates the "logic of the tragic" (Lacoue-Labarthe) as the culturally displaced basis of cognition (Oedipus' line) and judgment (Antigone's line). The collective affectivity and modern technologies with which Helen Petrovsky works allow us today to see Greek tragedy not so much as a cultural value, but as an alternative practice of thinking immanent to the problems of contemporary society. (shrink)

In postwar Western culture, the myth of Antigone has been the subject of noted literary, literary-critical, dramatic, philosophical, and philological treatments, not least due to the strong influence of one of the key plays of the twentieth century, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. The rich discussion of the myth has often dealt with its most famous formulation, Sophocles’ Antigone, but has paid less attention to the broader ancient context; the epic sources (the Iliad, Odyssey, Thebaid, and Oedipodea); the other tragic versions (Aeschylus’s (...) Seven Against Thebes and his lost Eleusinians; Euripides’s Suppliants, Phoenician Women, and Antigone, of which only a few short fragments have been preserved); and the responses of late antiquity. This paper analyses the basic features of this nearly thousand-year-long ancient tradition and shows how they connect in surprising ways – sometimes even more directly than Sophoclean tragedy does – with the main issues in some unique contemporary traditions of its reception (especially the Slovenian, Polish and Argentine ones): the question of burying the wartime (or postwar) dead and the ideal of reconciliation. (shrink)