eBooks

Occupy Antigone

Tradition, Transition and Transformation in Performance

1010
2016
978-3-8233-7955-3
978-3-8233-6955-4
Gunter Narr Verlag 
Katharina Pewny
Luk Van den Dries
Charlotte Gruber
Simon Leenknegt

This anthology provides some of today's most relevant views on Sophocles' classic and its many interpretations from an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural perspective. It critically investigates the work of artists and theoreticians who have occupied Antigone ever since she appeared onstage in antiquity, dealing with questions of the relationship between performance and philosophy and of how Antigone can be appropriated to criticize reigning discourses. Occupy Antigone makes an original contribution to the vibrant life the mythical figure enjoys in contemporary performance practice and theory.

<?page no="0"?> This anthology provides some of today’s most relevant views on Sophocles’ classic and its many interpretations from an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural perspective. It critically investigates the work of artists and theoreticians who have occupied Antigone ever since she appeared onstage in antiquity, dealing with questions of the relationship between performance and philosophy and of how Antigone can be appropriated to criticize reigning discourses. Occupy Antigone makes an original contribution to the vibrant life the mythical figure enjoys in contemporary performance practice and theory. Forum Modernes Theater Schriftenreihe | Band 47 Pewny/ Van den Dries/ Gruber/ Leenknegt (eds.) Occupy Antigone Katharina Pewny/ Luk Van den Dries/ Charlotte Gruber/ Simon Leenknegt (eds.) Occupy Antigone Tradition, Transition and Transformation in Performance ISBN 978-3-8233-6955-4 <?page no="1"?> Occupy Antigone <?page no="2"?> Forum Modernes Theater Schriftenreihe l Band 47 begründet von Günter Ahrends (Bochum) herausgegeben von Christopher Balme (München) <?page no="3"?> Katharina Pewny/ Luk Van den Dries/ Charlotte Gruber/ Simon Leenknegt (eds.) Occupy Antigone Tradition, Transition and Transformation in Performance <?page no="4"?> Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Cover picture: Antigone , a performance by Ulrike Quade and Nicole Beutler. Photo ©-AnjaBeutler.de Published with the support of: © 2016 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf chlorfrei gebleichtem und säurefreiem Werkdruckpapier. Internet: www.narr.de E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed in Germany ISSN 0935-0012I SBN 978-3-8233-6955-4 <?page no="5"?> Content Introducing (Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt) � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1 Antigone’s Transformed Heritage � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 11 1. Freddie Rokem “The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 13 2. Kati Röttger “Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone” � � � 33 3. Klaas Tindemans “Against the Unwritten Laws. The Figure of Antigone and the Political Occupation of the Public Space” � � � � � � � � � � 51 4. Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera “Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 62 Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 79 5. Tina Chanter “The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 81 6. Wumi Raji “Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 94 7. Izuu Nwankwọ E. “Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 108 8. Charlotte Gruber “The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 123 Antigone’s Scenes of Death � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 137 9. Francesca Spiegel “Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 139 10. Małgorzata Budzowska “The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 150 11. Aneta Stojnić “(Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 165 12. Katharina Pewny and Inge Arteel “Ritual Failure Remains? The Inaccessibility of the Dead (Corpse) in Antigone and in Contemporary Post-Conflict Art” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 177 <?page no="7"?> Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt 1 Introducing Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt The articles on Antigone collected in this anthology are based on contributions to the international conference Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation, which took place on 18 and 19 March 2014 in Ghent, Belgium. This conference was funded by the Research Foundation- - Flanders ( FWO ), Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. As part of the research-branch on contemporary tragedy within the Research Centre Studies in Performing Arts and Media (S: PAM ) of Ghent University, the conference was organized by Katharina Pewny and Charlotte Gruber (both involved in the BOF -funded project Antigone in/ as Transition, 2012 - 2016 ) in collaboration with Luk Van den Dries and the Research Centre for Visual Poetics of the University of Antwerp. Being a result of the conference, this anthology puts together some of today’s most relevant perspectives on the tragedy Antigone from a variety of different fields-- in the first place perspectives with an outlook on the significance of the tragedy in terms of (especially contemporary) performance practice and theoretical reflections with regard to the notion of performativity. This anthology thus provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to Antigone from a performance studies angle. In doing so, this specialized issue draws attention to what could easily be called a boom of the tragedy’s occurrence and relevance in both theatre spaces and academia, which unravelled ever since the turn of the millennium and has just taken on momentum again during the last five years. This is apparent in the multitude of very recent publications addressing Antigone in particular, such as The Returns of Antigone. Interdisciplinary Essays, 1 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor. New Essays on Jaques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 2 and Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery� 3 These were preceded by, for instance, Les Antigones contemporaines: de 1945 à nos jours, 4 and Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora� 5 1 Tina Chanter and Sean D. Kirkland (Edd.), The Returns of Antigone, New York 2014 � 2 Charles Freeland, Antigone, in her Unbearable Splendor. New Essays on Jaques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalsysis, New York 2013 � 3 Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery, New York 2011 � 4 Rose Duroux and Stephanie Urdician (Edd.), Les Antigones contemporaines: de 1945 à nos jours, Clermont-Ferrand 2010 � 5 Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson (Edd.), Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora, Oxford 2008 � <?page no="8"?> 2 Introducing Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation Hans-Thies Lehmann, one of the most influential figures in discourses on contemporary performance strategies, published a contribution to Tragödie-- Trauerspiel-- Spektakel in 2007 , 6 which preceded his extensive publication Tragödie und Dramatisches Theater that appeared in 2013 � 7 These publications demonstrate the overlooked relevance of tragedy in postdramatic theatre. In a chapter on what he calls “Das Modell Antigone” (not to be confused with the Antigonemodell by Bertolt Brecht), Lehmann has yet again assigned a special position to the figure of Antigone. It is Antigone whom he calls “the embodiment of tragedy”. 8 Occupy Antigone elaborates on the neglect of the vast multitude of performances of Antigone, while at the same time providing a scholarly encounter between theory and theatre practice. This publication is hence located between-- and inspired by-- specialized anthologies such as Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism 9 and Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage� 10 These publications reveal a trend of radically rethinking the canonical classic and critically engage with the heritage and legacies formed by earlier interpretations. Within the German speaking humanities, and particularly under the influence of Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s influential interpretation, Antigone had come to mark the conflict-laden transition from an ethics of the family and divine law to an ethics of the state and humanism. 11 Since Hegel’s account, however, the myth of Antigone and its essential dynamics have been read in a great number of ways rather contesting his position. In 1984 , George Steiner published a versatile analysis of the Antigone myth in various artistic, cultural and intellectual fields. 12 Therein, the author describes Antigone as “object of obsession from the end of the eighteenth century until the present”. 13 In twentieth-century French academia, Antigone entered psychoanalysis mainly due to Jacques Lacan, 14 whose emphasis 6 Hans-Thies Lehmann, "Tragödie und postdramatisches Theater“, in: Bettine Menke and Christoph Menke (Edd.), Tragödie- - Trauerspiel- - Spektakel, in the series Recherchen, vol. 38 , Berlin 2007 � 7 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragödie und Dramatisches Theater, Berlin 2013 � 8 Hans-Thies Lehmann, op.cit., 2007 , p. 219 � 9 S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė (Edd.), Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, Oxford 2010 � 10 Erin B. Mee and Helen P. Foley (Edd.), Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, Oxford 2011 � 11 G. W. F. Hegel, “Die konkrete Entwicklung der dramatischen Poesie und ihrer Arten”, in: G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, edd. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl M. Michel, in the series Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Werke, vol. 15 , Frankfurt am Main 1986 � 12 Georg Steiner, Antigones, Oxford/ New York 1984 � 13 Françoise Meltzer, “Theories of Desire: Antigone Again”, in: Critical Inquiry 37 ( 2 ), 2011 , p. 169 � 14 Jaques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959-1960, edd. Jacques Alain-Miller and Dennis Porter, in the series The Seminar of Jaques Lacan, vol. VII, New York 1991 � <?page no="9"?> Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt 3 on the heroin’s death-drive was later radically criticized by his former student Luce Irigaray. 15 She accused Lacan of denying and undermining female desire and marked an important moment in early feminism. Hegel, Lacan and Irigaray have all been crucial influences on Judith Butler’s quintessential publication Antigone’s Claim� 16 Butler, in contrast to Hegel, points out the linkages between the symbolic orders of language, the family and the state. Similar themes had been taken up before in the cryptic deconstructionist writing of the literary-philosophical text collage Glas by Jaques Derrida. 17 It is interesting that in theory on Antigone (and Antigone in theory), particularly against the background of Butler’s and Derrida’s publications, the fields of psychoanalysis and philosophy seem to find an important meeting point. Since then, different proclamations of the notion of an ‘Antigone Complex’ played a role in publications by Cecilia Sjöholm 18 and Bernard Stiegler, 19 whose work frequently crosses the borders between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Occupy Antigone investigates the vibrant life-- since the beginning of this millennium-- of a mythical figure that is after all more than 2500 years old. One of the earliest records of Antigone, mentioning her as being one of the daughters of Oedipus, is a fragment of Pherecydes of Athens that dates from around the beginning of the fifth century BCE � 20 The first known tragedy in which Antigone appeared was Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, which probably premiered in 467 BCE� 21 It is of course mainly due to the tragedy entitled Antigone, which Sophocles wrote around 441 BCE, that the figure became and remained important, especially on theatre stages. Besides the original text, famous twentieth-century adaptations, such as the one by Bertolt Brecht ( 1948 ) and those written by Jean Anouilh ( 1944 ) and Jean Cocteau ( 1922 ), continue to inspire today’s theatre makers. Performances that are built around the mythical figure of Antigone are hence an exceptionally rich and ever-growing field of research for performance analysis. First and foremost, there is an immense amount of material from the boom of re-stagings of ancient tragedies since the 1980 s, and contemporary stagings of Antigone are found in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and India. Antigone adaptations have, 15 Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’Autre Femme, Paris 1978 � 16 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim, New York 2000 � 17 Jacques Derrida, Glas, edd. John P. Leavy Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln/ London 1986 � 18 Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex; Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire, Redwood City 2004 � 19 Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, Cambridge/ Malden 2013 , pp. 30 - 50 � 20 Christiane Zimmermann, Der Antigone-Mythos in der antiken Literatur und Kunst, Tübingen 1993 , pp. 89 - 92 � 21 Lutz Walther and Martina Hayo (Edd.), Mythos Antigone. Texte von Sophokles bis Hochhuth, Leipzig 2004 , p. 27 � <?page no="10"?> 4 Introducing Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation for example, told the story of the founding of the nation of Ghana (Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Chioce, Ghana, 1962 ) or critiqued the neo-colonialism at the turn of the century (Femi Òsófisan’s Tègònni, USA , 1994 ). The forbidden burial of one’s kin provides a point of departure for Latin American versions of Antigone, for example in Argentina and Peru, where civilians were abducted by military regimes in the second half of the twentieth century (Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa, Argentina, 1986 and José Watanabe’s Antígona, Peru, 2000 ). There is especially in Africa a continuing trend of theatrical, postcolonial deconstructions of the classic that is a part of Western heritage. This might partly have to do with the renowned drama The Island (South Africa, 1973 ) by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in which two prisoners of the apartheid era prison Robben Island prepare to perform Antigone for the other prisoners. Two more recent African plays have gained a similar level of popularity, namely Òsófisan’s Tègònni and Koffi Kwahulé’s Bintou (France, 1997 ). But also in Europe and the United States the amount of Antigone performances in recent years is strikingly high. Some productions even travel to different continents, often actualizing the tragedy by building it up around recent political issues. In 2012 , Volker Lösch, known for his controversial choruses for which he often uses amateurs from specific, marginalized groups, presented his Antigona Oriental in Uruguay. In this performance, he worked with Uruguayan women that were victims of political persecution and imprisonment during the military dictatorship in the 1970 s. Flemish director Ivo van Hove, who works across Europe and the United States, chose, on the contrary, a deliberately unspecific setting, starring Oscar-winning French actress Juliette Binoche as Antigone and using a new translation by T. S. Eliot Prize winning poet Anne Carson (Antigone, UK , 2014 ). Besides the slightly grimmer translation she did for Van Hove, 22 Carson published together with Bianca Stone a wonderfully crafted (hand-lettered and illustrated), witty book entitled Antigonick in 2012 � 23 In California, theatre company Shotgun Players made a very dedicated effort to bring the aesthetics of the book to the stage (Antigonick, USA , 2015 ). At Paris-Sorbonne University, as part of the Theater, Performance, Philosophy conference in 2014 , Ben Hjorth organized a performative public reading with Judith Butler as Kreon: a public proof of the intense link between academia, new translations of classic texts and innovative performance practice. Roy Williams’s Antigone: a play for today’s streets is another exciting, inventive adaptation. Translated in gang-slang, the tragedy was first performed by Pilot Theatre in the United Kingdom in 2014 . Another example worth mentioning is Dutch dramatist Lot Vekemans’s monologue of Ismene entitled Zus Van 22 Anne Carson, Antigone, London 2015 � 23 Anne Carson and Bianca Stone, Antigonick, Highgreen (Northumberland) 2012 � <?page no="11"?> Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt 5 (“Sister of ”), which received many lauding reviews. 24 It was produced in Belgium and the Netherlands by Allan Zipson ( 2005 - 2013 ) as well as in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, directed by Stephan Kimmig in 2014 during the annual Autorentheatertage. Previously, Kimmig was the director of Ödipus Stadt, a performance that combines Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus the King with Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and Euripides’ The Phoenician Women (also at Deutsches Theater, 2012 ). This performance was, among other cities, invited to Prague, Santiago de Chile and Beijing. Among the other performances that combine Antigone with other tragedies are kReon by Jorgen Cassier (Belgium, 2009 ), Ödipus/ Antigone by Michael Thalheimer (Germany, 2009 ) and These Seven Sicknesses by Sean Graney ( USA , 2012 ). The list can be extended almost endlessly and gives us only a peek at the prominence of Antigone on contemporary stages. The limited amount of publications that actually consider performance practice reveals that research on contemporary performances of Antigone are still at the very beginning in both theatre and performance studies. The title of the conference and this resulting anthology Occupy Antigone refers to the amount of projects, publications and people occupied with Antigone. ‘Occupation’ is of course a term that strongly echoes political force. Especially in postcolonial discourses, histories of occupation are addressed as being related to violence and oppression. Occupation, however, and this is particularly true for the global counteractions of the Occupy Movement, can also refer to bottom-up approaches to resistance and empowerment. Occupation can then be understood as an act of seizing a certain object, usurping it, collectively using it in a different way and thereby giving new meaning to it. The contributions collected in this volume emphasize the political impact of performance practice and academic writing with regard to present sociopolitical realities. Three key sections form the structure of this collection: “Antigone’s Transformed Heritage”, “Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance” and “Antigone’s Scenes of Death”. In the first section questions are raised such as: what were the links between philosophy, art and performance and the figure of Antigone in the past? What is the state of these relations today? Within which philosophical frameworks do we encounter Antigone today? What is the tragic element in these frameworks? Are there connections between changes in how the tragic is conceptualized and changes in how Antigone is interpreted? Freddie Rokem, author of Performing History and Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance and also one of the driving forces behind the research net- 24 Lot Vekemans was awarded the Mr. H. G. van der Vies-prijs for Zus van in 2005 . For a recent analysis of this performance, see Katharina Pewny, “Das Theater der Anderen: Antigone”, in: Nina Birkner, Andrea Geier and Ute Helduse (Edd.), Spielräume des Anderen: Geschlecht und Alterität im postdramatischen Theater, Bielefeld 2014 , pp. 211 - 222 � <?page no="12"?> 6 Introducing Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation work Performance Philosophy, opens the first section. Referring to Aristotle, Rokem postulates that in tragedy, principles from basic formal logic are central to critically approaching the philosophical question of what it means to be human. Claiming that “one of the distinguishing features of tragedy is that it both integrates and at the same time confronts and subverts the classical forms of logical argumentation” (p. 17 ), his paper is a unique example of the fertile exchange between performance practice, philosophy and classic propositional logic. He then performs a careful reading of the famous “Ode to Man”, with regard to the different translations and interpretations of deinon and their respective contexts, from Sophocles’ original and Hölderlin’s translation to Heidegger’s reading and Brecht’s production The Antigone of Sophocles; A version for the stage after Hölderlin’s translation� Rokem provides a particularly complex reflection on the manifold meanings of the term, the philosophical questions it touches upon and how this has had an impact on both philosophical writing and performance practice throughout the centuries. Kati Röttger dives even deeper into the history of philosophy, seeking the traces Antigone has left in this field. In her contribution “Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone”, she detects subtle differences between approaches to the figure of Antigone and scrutinizes them against their historical backgrounds, unravelling an “interrelation between the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law” (p. 36 ). This is the point of departure to reveal the commonalities “between philosophical and theatrical thinking” (p. 36 ), which she finds to be strikingly present in Antigone. Focusing on the significance of the notion of poiesis and agon, she contrasts dialogues between Heidegger and Hölderlin with dialogues between Derrida and Heidegger, while also taking relevant remarks by Walter Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe and others into consideration. Röttger stresses that the remarkable kinship between theatre and philosophy “is founded on dialogue” (p. 38 ) and can be seen as a matter closely related to dramaturgy. In “Against the Unwritten Laws. The Figure of Antigone and the Political Occupation of the Public Space”, Klaas Tindemans deals with a more concrete mode of the abstract concept of law and the politics of undermining them. Engaging with Hannah Arendt’s ideas on the construction of a democratic political realm and studies by contemporary thinkers such as Cecilia Sjöholm, Bonnie Honig, Florence Dupont and Cornelius Castoriadis, he moves between historical analysis and contemporary philosophical ideas to reflect on public space as political space. He connects examples from film and theatre productions with their political realities-- particularly the aftermath of the ‘German autumn’ in the 1970 s-- to tackle the problem that while “[a] public, political space needs written laws in order to frame itself,-[…] it of course also needs an Antigone to occupy it” (p. 53 ). The article “Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT ” by Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera closes the section on “Antigone’s Transformed Heritage”. <?page no="13"?> Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt 7 They reveal the transformation the concept of kinship has undergone in both philosophy and psychoanalysis. Starting from Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, they investigate her claim that “stable kinship norms support our abiding sense of culture’s intelligibility” 25 within popular culture. Through original case studies such as the science fiction film Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009 ), the film Stoker (Park Chan-Wook, 2013 ) and the TV series Game of Thrones ( 2011 -present) they shed new light on the traditional Oedipal scenario that Freud read in Sophocles’ Antigone. With an innovative theoretical twist in their analysis, they extend Butler’s ideas by means of the Actor-Network Theory that Bruno Latour develops in Reassembling the Social as a “circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society”. 26 They deploy Latour’s theory to open up a path that goes beyond the philosophy of causality. Performativity is defined as something that is constantly being made and remade. The second section, “Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance”, addresses the appropriation of Antigone as a canonical text of Western heritage against the critical background of postcolonial theory, with two contributions turning their attention to the African context, which has frequently been the subject of analysis. 27 The readings of Antigone and related performances that are addressed in the second section deal with the legacy of domination of Western thought and the repression of cultural diversity and difference, while showing the relevance of an independent cultural heritage to form and nurture an independent cultural identity. However, the manifest focus on the few exemplary popular performances (of which Femi Òsófisan’s Tègònni is one) in the second section and in many other publications in the English-speaking performance studies also reflects that the access to-- and consideration of-- non-Western performances remains restricted and problematic. Tina Chanter has recently edited the anthology The Returns of Antigone 28 and is author of the critical analysis of Sophocles’ original entitled Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery ( 2011 ). 29 The publication received acclaim 25 Judith Butler, op. cit., 2000 , p. 71 � 26 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford 2005 , p. 89 � 27 See for instance: Wumi Raji, “Africanizing Antigone: Postcolonial Discourse and Strategies of Indigenizing a Western Classic”, in: Research in African Literatures 36 , 4 ( 2005 ), pp. 135 - 154 ; Steven Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė (Edd.), op. cit., 2010 ; Tina Chanter and Sean D. Kirkland (Edd.), op. cit., 2014 ; Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson (Edd.), op. cit., 2008 ; Astrid Van Weyenberg, The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy, Amsterdam 2013 � 28 Tina Chanter and Sean D. Kirkland (Edd.), op. cit., 2014 � 29 Tina Chanter, op. cit., 2011 � Whose Antigone? might as well be added to the list of publications dealing with the appropriation of Antigone in an African context, since Chanter also discusses African adaptations such as Òsófisan’s Tègònni� <?page no="14"?> 8 Introducing Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation for the fact that Chanter traces Antigone’s influence on Western thought to reveal and problematize how the marginalization of the position of slaves, which is crucially inherent in the tragedy and was so fundamental to the society of the Attic polis, has been gone more or less unnoticed for more than five centuries. In her contribution “The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: to Bury or not to Bury”, she unfolds this argument anew and shows “how [Antigone’s] efforts to inscribe her burial of her brother as meaningful, legitimate, and intelligible underwrite the marginalization of others” (p. 81 ). With the subsequent articles by Wumi Raji and Izuu Nwankwo, two African scholars provide their view regarding the production by Femi Òsófisan. In “Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations”, Raji draws from Sophocles’ original as well as Òsófisan’s performance to “undertake a comparative exploration of the formal and visionary continuities and transformations between these two related tragedies” (pp. 94 - 95 ). He does so by “[f]ocusing specifically on the private theme of inter-racial love” (p. 95 ). While Raji links the Greek tragedy to the African adaptation, Nwankwo starts from Òsófisan’s Tègònni to make comparisons with the illustrated translation Antigonick by Anne Carson and Bianca Stone. 30 In his paper “Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society”, Nwankwo uses Derrida’s concept of différance to look “to other characters who surround Antigone to determine how their (in)actions shape hers” (p. 108 ). The shift towards a more careful consideration of the other characters in Antigone is a trend that can be seen in both performance practice (e. g. Lot Vekeman’s Zus Van, 2005 ) and philosophical theory (e. g. the focus on the neglected role of Ismene in Bonnie Honig’s Antigone Interrupted). 31 In her contribution “The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies”, Charlotte Gruber, who also engages with theoretical concepts by Derrida, addresses this shift towards the Other and its relevance for introducing a critical distance from Eurocentrism and logocentrism in two recent European theatre productions, namely Zus Van by Lot Vekemans (Belgium, 2005 ) and Antigone by Nicole Beutler and Ulrike Quade (The Netherlands, 2012 ). The articles that constitute the last section revolve around “Antigone’s Scenes of Death”. While in Hegel’s account the ritual and religious aspects of the burial performed by Antigone stood central, today Antigone often comes to represent the radical politicality of the right to mourn and bury the deceased as a basic human right and as a tool of political power. Especially when contemplating for example 30 Anne Carson and Bianca Stone, op. cit., 2012 � 31 Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted, Cambridge/ New York 2013 � <?page no="15"?> Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt 9 Foucault’s work on biopolitics 32 and Judith Butler’s reflections on ‘grievable life’, 33 questions surrounding the dead and their righteous place become important. In“Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother”, Francesca Spiegel gives a detailed analysis of the role of Polyneices from a variety of angles, stressing that “[e]ven though Polyneices is not the most important character of Antigone, his life, and the end of his life, is ultimately what provokes all of the arguments, crisis and tragedy of Antigone” (p. 149 ). She investigates how the group dynamics in the play are influenced by the presence of his corpse and are as much social and political as they are ideological. She points out his neglected position, for even though “[t]he dead Polyneices does not speak in Antigone,-[…] the presence of his body and of his spirit weigh heavy on the whole character constellation” (p. 149 ). Małgorzata Budzowska addresses the concept of ‘post-memory’ by Marianne Hirsch in her article “The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber”. According to Budzowska, the Polish performance, which premiered at the New Theatre in Łódź in 2013 , deals with post-war trauma and connects themes of a global and a local level, as well as public and individual modes of mourning. Her analysis of Liber’s adaptation is the point of departure for critically examining how political engineering influences questions of who and what is worth to be commemorated and how this should be done. The paper “(Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning” by Aneta Stojnić, establishes a connection between Antigone and Chelsea Manning by interpreting the figure of the whistleblower as a contemporary Antigone, while also tackling aspects of gender performativity against this background. Citing Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler as well as Arthur Danto, Stojnić presents an exciting case of how contemporary resistance works and fails on various levels. Butler’s theories also play a central role in the joint contribution “Ritual Failure Remains? The Inaccessibility of the Dead (Corpse) in Antigone and in Contemporary Post-Conflict Art” by Katharina Pewny and Inge Arteel. They particularly elaborate on Butler’s work on grievable life and relate it to the concept of ‘ritual failure’, which originated in a context of religious studies and social sciences. Combining approaches from performance studies and literary studies, they analyse the novel Frozen Time ( 2010 ) by Anna Kim and the film Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding ( 2013 ) by Sarah Vanagt. In their analyses, they unravel ‘Antigonal’ motives in contemporary art practices and close this anthology by showing that “mourning is not simply a private matter, but also something that constructs political, social and ethical norms” (p. 180 ). 32 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, New York 1997 � 33 Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? , London/ New York 2009 � <?page no="17"?> Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt 11 Antigone’s Transformed Heritage <?page no="19"?> Freddie Rokem 13 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University) There is (probably) no other literary work in the Western canon that has inspired such a complex and multifaceted tradition of stage productions, adaptations, rewritings, canonized translations, as well as philosophical, psychoanalytical, political, ethical and activist readings as Sophocles’ Antigone. Perhaps only Oedipus the King and Shakespeare’s Hamlet can compete; but not really, at least judging from the constantly growing number of interpretations of Antigone since the turn of the millennium. The conflict between Antigone and her maternal uncle Creon concerning the burial of Antigone’s brother Polyneices after the end of a cruel and devastating civil war, has given rise to a complex, intertextual web of interpretations both on the page and on the stage, where drama, theatre, and performance, on the one hand and philosophy and theory, on the other, interact on a number of levels. 1 In what follows I will zoom in on two particular moments of the multifaceted tradition of Antigone readings and productions, during and directly after the Second World War, focusing on the almost contemporaneous, but indeed quite different interpretations of Sophocles’ play: first by Martin Heidegger in his seminar on Hölderlin’s poem The Ister, which he conducted at the University of Freiburg, in the summer of 1942 , after his resignation as rector-- and not published (in German) until 1984 . This particular interpretation was partly based on his previous readings of Sophocles’ play-- which includes a detailed interpretation of Hölderlin’s 1804 translation of Antigone-- but in this context Heidegger adds some quite remarkable reflections on war and violence. And second, by examining Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation of Hölderlin’s translation, which Brecht directed in Chur, in Switzerland in 1948 , six years after the Heidegger seminar and three years after the end of the Second World War. After having spent fifteen years in exile, Antigone-- a play about the aftermath of war-- was Brecht’s first assignment for the German language stage after the war, leading the following year, in 1949 , to the 1 See Philosophy Performance website: http: / / performancephilosophy.ning.com/ about, which at the time of the proofs of this paper had almost 2200 members. For my own contributions to this research focus, see in particular Freddie Rokem, Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance, Stanford 2010 . I have also explored some of the basic principles of logic and tragedy in my article "The Logic of/ in Tragedy: Hanoch Levin’s Drama The Torments of Job", in: Modern Drama 56 , 4 (Winter 2013 ), pp. 521 - 539 . This issue of Modern Drama is devoted to "Drama and Philosophy". <?page no="20"?> 14 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone much more known production of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Both these Brecht productions, in different ways taking the spectators directly into the ’heart’ of the ’experience’ of war were important steps towards the establishment of the Berliner Ensemble. Soon after his return to Berlin, Brecht also published the book Antigonemodell 1948 in collaboration with Caspar Neher, the scenographer of this production and a close friend since their school days in Augsburg. It was edited (redigiert) by Ruth Berlau, whom Brecht had met in Denmark, during his exile there. She also photographed all of the scenes of the performance that were published in the so-called Modellbuch� In their foreword to this book, which was to become the first in a series of such publications, laying the basis for an innovative approach to the documentation of Brecht’s own theatre productions and for the understanding of the epic theatre, Brecht and Neher somewhat laconically stated that "[t]he Antigone story was picked for the present theatrical operation as providing a certain topicality of subject matter and posing some interesting formal questions", 2 stressing in particular the ways in which the theatre-- and this play in particular-- reveals "the causality at work in society [my emphasis, FR ]", 3 adding that, "[e]ven if we felt obliged to do something for a work like Antigone we could only do so by letting the play do something for us". 4 It is important to pay attention to how they formulate the dynamics of their engagement with Sophocles’ play, revealing how the "causality" or logic of society is constituted. And only after "letting the play do something for us" will they be able to do something in return for the play. So what does the play do for us? What is the inner logic of Sophocles’ tragedy that enables this reciprocal ’doing’ or ’negotiation’ with this ancient text? Antigone is a play depicting the anxieties and the threats of a post-war situation, when guilt and responsibility have to be confronted and when there are winners and losers, as well as perpetrators and victims who cannot always be clearly distinguished. For the production in Chur, Brecht composed a short Vorspiel, a prelude, which, as the signboard (fig. 1 ) written with capital block letters above the stage indicates, takes place in Berlin, an early morning in April 1945 at the time when a new day breaks. In this short scene with two unnamed sisters returning 2 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht Collected Plays, vol. 8 , edd. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, London 2003 , p. 204 . In the first edition of Antigonemodell 1948, Brecht and Neher were given the credits as authors while it says “Redigiert von Ruth Berlau”. It was published by Gebrüder Weiss (Berlin) in 1949 . There is also a radically edited Suhrkamp edition of the Antigonemodell 1948 (Bertolt Brecht, Brechts Antigone des Sophokles, ed. Werner Hecht, Frankfurt am Main 1988 ), where many of the Berlau photos of the production appear, but far from the amount in the 1949 publication, which was later published again by Henscherverlag (Berlin) in 1955 in a different format. 3 Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 2003 , p. 203 � 4 Id., p. 205 � <?page no="21"?> Freddie Rokem 15 from the air-raid shelter discovering traces of someone who has entered their home, leaving food for them. Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel, who played the First Sister in the dark coat and will then play Antigone in Sophocles’ play and Marita Glenk as the Second Sister in the white coat, who will then be Antigone’s sister Ismene in the play itself, immediately following the Vorspiel, realize-- when it is already too late-- that it is their brother who has made a short visit to their home, bringing the much needed food. Fig. 1 Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone ( 1948 ) in Chur, Switzerland. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Theaterdoku 318/ 317, ©-R. Berlau/ Hoffmann. As their happiness from this unexpected fortune was growing, they hear a scream from the outside and an SS officer who can also be seen in the photo enters the room and interrogates them about the identity of the man that had been seen coming out through the door of their house and who had then been killed by hanging. The two sisters deny that they recognize this dead soldier-- who is actually their brother-- just as Mutter Courage denies knowing her own son Swiss Cheese when he is brought onto the stage on a stretcher after he had been executed for having stolen the cash-box of the Finnish Regiment. In Mutter Courage the mother bargains too long for the life of her son, trying to sell her wagon. And after the soldiers have left with her dead son, Courage/ Weigel opens her mouth in what has become her renowned silent scream. In Brecht’s Antigone, the sisters are not given any opportunity to prevent the execution of their brother. In Sophocles’ original play, <?page no="22"?> 16 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone however, as opposed to the two situations of denial for the sake of survival that Brecht presented, Antigone never denies that she has buried her brother, creating a stark contrast between the Vorspiel and the ancient tragedy. 1. Tragedy and logic Sophocles’ Antigone was composed in 441 BC , less than a decade after the fifty-year long Persian Wars had come to an end. While the play presents the concrete circumstances and consequences of a war that had both been caused by and led to a ’state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand), 5 the primary concerns of the play are also more general, raising issues about the relations between the individual and society, the interactions between the private and the public spheres, the tensions between family/ kinship relations and marriage, finally confronting individual duties and rights based on carefully formulated claims and counter-claims as well as-- and this is a crucial issue-- what it means to be human. But it is probably the combination of the extraordinary circumstances of Antigone’s family history and her identity-- being both the daughter and the sister of the same man (Oedipus)- - and these more general human concerns that has given Sophocles’ play its unique status as a dramatic as well as a philosophical text, or perhaps rather a text presenting direct challenges for philosophical thinking. This combination forces us to listen very carefully to how the characters perform their claims and in particular how they argue for their respective positions as humans in a world of ethical conflicts and ambiguities. Hegel formulated the basic structure of Sophocles’ play as an agon, a competition or a struggle between two incommensurable positions, where neither Antigone, representing the primacy of the family or kinship structures, nor Creon, representing the larger collective of the polis-- the state and the law-- is willing to compromise. Both of these positions, which are presented in the two first scenes of the play, can be summed up as logical arguments for what is the legal and the eth- 5 I am referring to Walter Benjamin’s formulation in "The Concept of History" that "[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ’state of exception’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of exception; and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm.-- The amazement that the things we are experiencing in the 20 th century are ’still’ possible is not philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the idea of history on which it rests is untenable." I have used the translations of Dennis Redmond on http: / / members.efn.org/ ~dredmond/ ThesesonHistory.html (accessed 25 . 04 . 2014 ) as well as by Harry Zohn in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4 , Cambridge (Mass.) 2003 , p. 392 , to create what I hope is a reliable version of Benjamin’s text. <?page no="23"?> Freddie Rokem 17 ically right (or proper) action with regard to the burial of Polyneices-- Antigone’s brother and Creon’s nephew-- after he has been killed in the war between two factions of the family and whose name actually means "manifold strife". According to Samuel Weber “to identify the Hegelian interpretation of Antigone with the position of Creon, for instance, privileging the authority of the state over that of the family, is to ignore the dialectical structure of the Hegelian text”. 6 Instead, Weber claims, there is a “symmetrical negativity”, comparable to Judith Butler’s double negative in her rendering of Antigone’s confession, emphasizing that Antigone’s admission is expressed with a double negation that "I will not deny my deed". 7 According to Weber the relations between family and state become transformed into what he describes as “signifiers of something else-[…] [which] has to do with the determination of identity in terms of individuality: not individuality as such, but individuality mediated and reflected in its constitutive negativity, which is to say, individuality as ‘spirit’”. 8 In terms of the plot of Sophocles’ play this multifaceted negativity gradually leads to three consecutive and inevitable erasures, of individuality, of family and finally of the polis itself. Examining these features of tragedy as a literary genre and in particular of Sophocles’ Antigone-- though they are not necessarily limited to drama or performance-- I want to argue here that one of the distinguishing features of tragedy is that it both integrates and at the same time confronts and subverts the classical forms of logical argumentation. Logical argumentation and its subversion constitute the ‘ground’ of tragedy on which the perceptions of the tragic as well as of particular literary tragedies are based. The ways in which logical argumentation is privileged while at the same time drawing attention to its limitations are no doubt an important reason why tragedy as a genre, and Antigone specifically has received such a prominent position in philosophical discourses, in particular with regard to which actions are ethically right or wrong (or humane) and how to seek justice by developing and problematizing legal practices rather than just doing what is ’legal’. Since logical arguments have been embedded in Antigone as well as in most tragedies, the principles of logic can in turn be extracted from these plays. And even if the theoretical principles of logical argumentation were only fully formulated by Aristotle in the Poetics two generations after these plays had been written and performed, the notion of tragedy as it had been practiced by Sophocles was, on the one hand, based on the use of logical argumentation in order to define the positions and relations of the major conflicting characters-- in this case of Antigone 6 Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, New York 2004 , pp. 124 - 125 � 7 This is the translation suggested by Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, New York 2000 , p. 8 � 8 Samuel Weber, op.cit., 2004 , p. 125 � <?page no="24"?> 18 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone and Creon-- but at the same time also to investigate and define what it means to be human. Being human includes both the ability to make logical arguments based on rational thinking and the use of language, while the tragedies bring about situations where the basic principles of logic are challenged and even reach a liminal point of failure and collapse. And paradoxically, this collapse frequently occurs exactly at the point when someone is trying to define what the characteristics of being human are. But before examining this paradoxical situation in terms of tragedy and the tragic I want to present the two basic principles of formal logic which are activated and challenged by tragedy. First, the theory of deduction, for example in the so-called ‘Barbara syllogism’, beginning with a universal proposition which does not have to be proven empirically, but is based on some common understanding and can therefore also refer to fictional/ mythical situations that “All x are y” or “All humans are mortal” or “The Gods are immortal”. Such a universal statement is followed by a particular statement, like the claim that “Socrates is a human” from which we draw the necessary conclusion that “Socrates is mortal”. The second principle of formal logic that is of importance in this context is the three Classical Laws of Thought: the Law of Identity, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and in particular the Law of Non-contradiction. The Law of Identity is based on the proposition that “A is A and not not-A”, the Law of the Excluded Middle on “P is either true or false” and the Law of Non-contradiction that “P and not-P” is always false. 9 Even if Aristotle no doubt was familiar with a large number of literary works when he formulated these basic principles of logic, he never explicitly associated the syllogism, which can in effect be seen as a basic narrative ‘scaffolding’ for the narrative kernels in tragedies. But Aristotle’s self-evident, even seemingly ’trivial’ formulation in chapter 7 of the Poetics, that a tragedy must have three parts in order to be complete-- a beginning, a middle and an end-- must not be understood naively, as if Aristotle was considering the three acts in a play, but rather as an implied reference to the three parts of the deductive syllogism: A beginning [Aristotle claims] is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles. 10 9 Laurence R. Horn, “Contradiction”, on: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http: / / plato. stanford.edu/ entries/ contradiction/ (accessed 27 . 12 . 2012 ). 10 Aristotle, Poetics, ed. S. H. Butcher, chapter 7 , on: http: / / classics.mit.edu/ Aristotle/ poetics.1.1.html, (accessed 10 . 11 . 2012 ). <?page no="25"?> Freddie Rokem 19 A narrative which begins with something “which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be”, and ends with “nothing following it” could just as well be a deductive syllogism, which Aristotle defined in the Prior Analytics as “an argument in which when certain things are laid down something else follows of necessity in virtue of their being so”. 11 It is also possible to show that what can be said about tragedy as a whole is also true of its parts, which are the focus of this discussion. But I will not develop this idea in detail here. At this point I am thus not examining the comprehensive syllogistic structure of any particular tragedy, which is apparently Aristotle’s concern in the above passage from the Poetics. My focus is rather to clarify how a specific tragedy integrates the logical structures presented by the characters and how their contradictory argumentations, in situations of conflict through an agon, affect our understanding of what it means to be human. On the one hand, these arguments are framed within a combination of social, political, religious, ethical and ideological contexts, which open up a broad range of hermeneutical horizons, which most likely, in cases like Antigone, can activate the readers, directors and spectators for new and innovative interpretations in increasingly more complex contexts and situations, testing our ability to contain and even to accept the tensions between the logical necessities of the underlying syllogisms in relation to the randomness and intrinsic instability of the broad range of such social, political and ideological contexts in which they have been or can be embedded. At the same time, these contextualisations can also be developed and expanded by confronting different logical arguments with each other as they are presented and contextualized within the psychic universes of the characters. In Sophocles’ Antigone the confrontations between the positions of Antigone and Creon are obviously the most important ones. For Antigone the syllogism, with which the play begins, is: • To be human means to bury our dead/ kin as the gods have commanded us to do • Polyneices is my (dead) brother • Therefore I must (and will) bury Polyneices 11 According to Christopher Shields: "In Aristotle’s logic, the basic ingredients of reasoning are given in terms of inclusion and exclusion relations-[…]. He begins with the notion of a patently correct sort of argument, one whose evident and unassailable acceptability induces Aristotle to refer to is as a ‘perfect deduction’ (APr� 24 b 22 - 25 ). Generally, a deduction (sullogismon), according to Aristotle, is a valid or acceptable argument. More exactly, a deduction is ‘an argument in which when certain things are laid down something else follows of necessity in virtue of their being so’ (APr� 24 b 18 - 20 )". And, adds Shields, “a deduction is the sort of argument whose structure guarantees its validity, irrespective of the truth or falsity of its premises” (Christopher Shields, “Aristotle: Logic”, on: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http: / / plato.stanford.edu/ entries/ aristotle/ #RheArt, accessed 15 . 12 . 2012 ). <?page no="26"?> 20 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone And for Creon, who presents his argument in the following section of the play, the syllogism has the following formulation: • It is illegal to bury enemies • Polyneices is an enemy of the polis • It is illegal to bury Polyneices The gradually accelerating conflict between Antigone and Creon is based on the incommensurability of these two syllogistic arguments which are simultaneously contextualized in social, religious and ethical terms. Relying on divine authority both of them argue that it is either legal or illegal to bury Polyneices. It cannot be both. Such a situation was formulated by Aristotle as the Law of Non-contradiction that “P and not-P” is always false, or according to Aristotle’s own formulation in the Metaphysics: “It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect”. 12 However, just after the conflict between Antigone’s and Creon’s syllogistic formulations has challenged the Law of Non-contradiction concerning the burial of Polyneices, in the next section of the play, with the chorus singing the first stasimon, usually referred to as the "Ode to Man", this challenge to one of the basic laws of logic is further reinforced. In the "Ode to Man" the chorus directly draws attention to the contradictory nature of what it means to live a human life and to be human. There is only one thing concerning human ‘life’ about which there is no argument, and that is that all humans are mortal which as the chorus argues cannot be prevented, even by the remarkable marvels of human inventiveness. Here is an abbreviated quote from the “Ode to Man”, which obviously needs a much more detailed philological explication. But it contains enough information to formulate its syllogistic argument, and for the moment I will insert the key concept of deinon and deinotaton, referring to the contradictory characteristics that define what it means to be human-- being both wondrous and monstrous (which will be clarified in what follows)-- without translation: There is much that is deinon, but nothing that surpasses man in deinotaton� He sets sail on the frothing waters amid the south winds of winter tacking through the mountains and furious chasms of the waves. […] 12 Laurence R. Horn, op.cit., accessed 27 . 12 . 2012 � <?page no="27"?> Freddie Rokem 21 Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue, he comes to nothingness. Through no flight can he resist the one assault of death, even if he has succeeded in cleverly evading painful sickness. […] Clever indeed, mastering The ways of skill beyond all hope, he sometimes accomplishes evil, sometimes achieves brave deeds. 13 The attempt to formulate the syllogistic structure of the “Ode to Man” is much more complex than in the two previous cases. First, because it consists of three universal statements- - which is also an accepted form of syllogism (“All men are mortal. / All Greeks are men. / All Greeks are mortal.”)-- and these universal statements in turn branch out into syllogisms about the mortality of humans that include particular statements as well as referencing particular human deeds and claims; and, secondly, (as I pointed out before) because of the preference for the use of negative statements, like "Nothing surpasses man in being deinon”� The following attempt to formulate an extended syllogism in the “Ode to Man” gives us a basic idea of this complexity, regardless of its circularity: • Nothing surpasses humans (which I prefer to “man” in the quote) in being deinon; or simply: All humans are deinon • Since humans “sometimes accomplish evil, / sometimes achieve brave deeds”, they are defined by their inherent contradictory nature. Or in other words: the Law of Non-contradiction does not apply to human nature or actions, i. e. what it means to be human • Therefore the attempt to apply the Law of Non-contradiction to humans will show that they are deinon, possessing contradictory characteristics We could probably say that logic has outwitted itself by arguing that "The Law of Non-contradiction does not apply to human nature or actions", which is a self-referential statement, like the Cretan who says that"All Cretans are liars". The Greeks were no doubt fascinated by situations of logic and its contextualisations where the relations between inclusions and exclusions are tested and logic and language seem to turn upon themselves, as in such paradoxical statements. 13 Quoted from “The Ode to Man in Sophocles’ Antigone” in: Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven 1959 (first published 1953 ), pp. 86 - 87 � <?page no="28"?> 22 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone Classical Greek tragedy exposes and examines the tensions between different laws of logic and between these laws and the contexts of the fictional world, including those specific situations where the laws of logical thinking are actually applied but also questioned. This activates a self-referential mechanism where the paradoxical combinations of context and logic serve as a challenge to the adequacy of logical thinking for the understanding of the complexity of what it means to be human. But classical drama-- and I should really only speak of Sophocles’ Antigone here-- does not challenge the fundamental validity of logical thinking as such. As I intend to show however, the two twentieth-century interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone by Heidegger and Brecht I will now examine more closely, also contest the validity of the traditional, Classical forms of logical thinking, in particular in those cases when the logical argumentation refers to ethical contexts, regardless if the interpretation is primarily philosophical (as with Heidegger) or performative (as in Brecht’s case). 2. Heidegger’s deinon The crucial issue for our present discussion is how to interpret the notion of deinon, which is a concept that has a broad range of meanings. The following five points give an overview of its contradictory connotations: 1� It can mean fearful, terrible, dread, dire, in Sophocles also danger or suffering awe 2� The term projects a sense of being powerful, related to being able, clever, cunning and skilful 3� It also refers to force or power- - mighty, powerful, wondrous, marvellous or strange. In his German translation from 1804 , Hölderlin used "ungeheuer", which was used by Brecht in his 1948 adaptation, meaning awesome, monstrous 4� For Heidegger on the other hand it means violent, which in a strange combination with unheimisch-- not homely, is the particular connotation he developed on the basis of deinon as uncanny (unheimlich) instead of ungeheuer 5� And as we shall finally see, in Brecht’s interpretation, the deinon of a human is his ability, even his fatal attraction for becoming his own enemy, which is the ultimate form of negation through annihilation One of the many occasions when Heidegger formulated his position with regard to deinon was in a lecture course in 1935 at the University of Freiburg, where he was then the rector. These lectures were first published as An Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953 . Here Heidegger emphasized that <?page no="29"?> Freddie Rokem 23 deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who uses power, who not only disposes of power [Gewalt] but is violent [gewalt-tätig] insofar as the use of power is the basic trait not only of his action but also of his being-there [Dasein]. Here we use the word violence in an essential sense extending beyond the common usage of the word, as mere arbitrary brutality. In this common usage violence is seen from the standpoint of a realm which draws its standards from conventional compromise and mutual aid, and which accordingly disparages all violence as a disturbance of the peace.- […] Man is deinon, first because he remains exposed within this overpowering power,-[…] But at the same time man is deinon because he is the violent one-[…] he gathers the power and brings it to manifestness. Man is the violent one, not aside from and along with other attributes but solely in the sense that in his fundamental violence [Gewalt-tätigkeit] he uses power [Gewalt] against the overpowering [Überwältinge]. Because he is twice deinon in a sense that is originally one, he is to deinotaton, the most powerful; violent in the midst of overpowering. 14 Even if it sounds like Heidegger talks about the two sides of deinon, he actually disambiguates the term to mean nothing but violence. However in his seminar on the Hölderlin-hymn The Ister, which Heidegger also conducted at the University of Freiburg, now in the summer of 1942 , he also included a more detailed reading of the “Ode to Man” more directly valorising state power/ violence, while at the same time reintroducing an expression of radical ambiguity with regard to which forms of violence are an essential aspect of what it means to be human. In 1942 Heidegger also more openly exposed his hermeneutic strategy, rejecting the rendering of deinon as ungeheuer, which Hölderlin had used in his translation of the play. Instead of ungeheuer, Heidegger insists on understanding deinon as unheimlich-- “uncanny”-- which at this time had already been used by Freud, an author Heidegger probably never read. Heidegger’s interpretation or ’adaptation’ of Hölderlin’s translation of deinon as "unheimlich" (uncanny) is based on an intentional, even somewhat paradoxical resistance towards the complex double nature of being human expressed in the “Ode to Man”. Or as Heidegger himself explains, he chose this translation because it "is initially alien to us, violent, or in ’philological’ terms ’wrong’". 15 And immediately following this gesture of resistance, Heidegger asks how it is possible to decide about the correctness of a translation, beyond the mere dictionary meaning of a word. Or according to Heidegger’s own explanation: In most cases a dictionary provides the correct information about the meaning of a word, yet the correctness does not yet guarantee us any insight into the truth of what the word 14 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 1959 ( 1953 ), p. 89 � 15 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, Bloomington (Indiana) 1996 (first published in 1984 ), p. 61 � <?page no="30"?> 24 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone means and can mean, given that we are asking about the essential realm named in the word. 16 In what follows, Heidegger argues that central texts by Kant and Hegel are actually "in need of translation" because It pertains to the essence of a historical people to extend like a mountain range into the lowlands and the flatlands and at the same time to have its occasional peaks towering above into an otherwise inaccessible altitude.-[…] Translation must set us upon the path of ascent towards the peak. 17 According to Heidegger, translation can be seen as a legal process, making something understandable, which"means awakening our understanding to the fact that the blind obstinacy of habitual opinion must be shattered and abandoned if the truth of a work is to unveil itself". 18 But Heidegger takes an additional step beyond this arbitrary relation to translation by phonologically, but without any solid etymological basis, reading unheimlich as unheimich (‘unhomely’), explaining that [b]eing unhomely is no mere deviance from the homely, but rather the converse: a seeking and searching out the homely, a seeking that at times does not know itself. This seeking shies at no danger and no risk. Everywhere it ventures and is underway in all directions. 19 Heidegger’s reading, appropriating or seeking for the “homely”- - actually the Heimat- - regardless of the dangers involved, no doubt reflects the situation of Germany as Heidegger understood it during the summer of 1942 , at a moment in history situated ’between’ the Wannsee conference and the battle of Stalingrad. 3. Brecht’s deinon Brecht’s method of adapting Sophocles/ Hölderlin for the stage, in what he officially called The Antigone of Sophocles; A version for the stage after Hölderlin’s translation, is based on diametrically opposite premises, recognizing the hermeneutical heritage of the text instead of Heidegger’s open and even violent resistance to this humanistic heritage. Thus, instead of violating the translation of deinon as ungeheuer, Brecht accepts this option. In the English translation of Brecht’s adaptation of the Hölderlin version of the “Ode to Man”, translated by David Constantine, 16 Id., pp. 61 - 62 � 17 Id., p. 62 � 18 Id., p. 63 � 19 Id., p. 74 � <?page no="31"?> Freddie Rokem 25 who has also translated Hölderlin’s German translations of Antigone as well as of Oedipus the King into English, ungeheuer is “monstrous”. Monstrous [ungeheuer], a lot. But nothing More Monstrous than man. For he across the night Of the sea, when into the winter the Southerlies blow, he puts out In winged and whirring houses. 20 Brecht follows Hölderlin’s translation of the “Ode to Man” until the end of the second strophe, where the chorus says that even if man’s resources are seemingly infinite, there is one thing he cannot escape, and that is death. Hölderlin’s German translation, again with a strong negative, is "Allbewandert. / Unbewandert. Zu nichts kommt er", which Constantine translates as "All-travelled / Untravelled. He comes to nothing". 21 And to give a brief impression of how condensed Hölderlin’s translation is, the Penguin Classics translation by Robert Fagles of this crucial passage in Antigone has thirty instead of the six words. The "Allbewandert. / Unbewandert. Zu nichts kommt er" of Hölderlin in this English translation is: Never without resources never an impasse as he marches on the future-- only Death, from Death alone he will find no rescue but from desperate plagues he has plotted his escapes. 22 But at this point, where the second antistrophe begins, Brecht (as his own name indicates) literally breaks away from his Vorlage (source or prototype). The first sentence of Hölderlin’s version of the second antistrophe (in English) is more like an adaptation of Sophocles’ text than the other sections of his translation of the “Ode to Man”: [Only the future place of the dead He does not know how to flee Nor to think of a way 20 Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 2003 , p. 17 . In German: “Ungeheuer ist viel. Doch nichts / Ungeheuer als der Mensch. / Denn der, über die Nacht / Des Meers, wenn gegen den Winter wehet / der Südwind, fähret era us / In geflügelten sausenden Häusern” (Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 1988 , p. 86 ). 21 Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 2003 , p. 18 � 22 Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, edd. Robert Fagles and Bernard Knox, New York 1984 , p. 77 . In the translation by Richard C. Jebb, the last sentence of the second strophe is: "only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes” (Sophocles, Antigone, ed. Richard C. Jebb, on: http: / / classics.mit.edu/ Sophocles/ antigone.html, accessed 31 . 01 . 2015 ). <?page no="32"?> 26 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone Of flight from clumsy plagues.] Possessing something More than he hopes of wisdom and the skills of art He comes to grief one time and to good another. 23 And here is Brecht’s version of the second antistrophe, where the chorus points at itself and at man (and here the male gender is appropriate) as his own enemy: Always he knows what to do Nothing nonplusses him. In all this he is boundless but A measure is set. For when he wants for an enemy He rises up as his own. […] By himself alone His belly will never be filled but he builds a wall Around what he owns and the wall Must be torn down. The roof Opened to the rain. Humanity Weighs with him not a jot. Monstrous thereby He becomes to himself. 24 Brecht is gradually working towards the paradoxical definition of man as he who becomes monstrous to himself, or in the German-- "So, ungeheur / Wird er sich selbst"-- which with its compressed reflexivity, projects a mirror of monstrosity where man can view how he becomes his own enemy and destroyer. This detailed textual analysis is crucial in order to understand how the logical arguments are constructed, and these logical arguments are in turn necessary in order to grasp which principles a certain translation, adaptation, staging or interpretation has applied, how it is constituted and how a specific reading, in spite of 23 Sophocles and Friedrich Hölderlin, Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus & Antigone, ed. David Constantine, Highgreen (Northumberland) 2001 , p. 81 . It is unclear exactly where the section in parenthesis fits in. In the translation by Jebb, the second antistrophe begins with: "Cunning beyond fancy’s dream is the fertile skill which brings him, now to evil, now to good" (Sophocles, op.cit.). 24 Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 2003 , p. 18 . The German original of the passage from “Always he knows” to “as his own” is: "Überall weiß er Rat / Ratlos trifft ihn nichts. / Dies alles ist grenzlos ihm, ist / Aber ein Maß gesetzt. / - […] / Der nähmlich keinen findet, zum eigenem / Feind wirft er sich auf"; the passage from “By himself alone” to “He becomes to himself ” is in German: "Nicht den Magen / Kann er sich füllen allein, aber die Mauer / Setzt er ums Eigene, und die Mauer / Niedergerissen muß sie sein! Das Dach / Geöffnet dem Regen! Menschliches / Achtet er gar für nichts. So, ungeheur / Wird er sich selbst" (Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 1988 , p. 88 ). <?page no="33"?> Freddie Rokem 27 its potential contradictions progresses towards some form of poetic or aesthetic consistency. But this is not sufficient. With regard to Heidegger’s ’reading’, we still need to learn more about how deinon appropriates and disposes that which is not violent and expresses itself through what he terms “a seeking and searching out the homely, a seeking that at times does not know itself ”, totally annihilating Antigone’s subject position. His approach is based on an unrestrained use of force and violence which, using Heidegger’s own metaphor, he believes can actually "set us upon the path of ascent towards the peak". And with regard to Brecht it is important to note that even before his production of Antigone, already in his Lehrstücke (The Learning Plays), which were composed prior to his exile after Hitler’s takeover of political power in 1933 , Brecht had already explored the notion that tragedy shows how man becomes his own enemy. At that time-- as he was writing the Lehrstücke-- the thinking of Walter Benjamin, in particular as developed in his essay " Critique of Violence", from 1921 , and his book on the Trauerspiel, the German mourning play, from 1928 , as well as their close personal contacts were no doubt of great importance. When working on his production of Antigone in 1948 , after the Second World War, trying to answer the question what Antigone "can do for us", Brecht’s adaptation of the "Ode to Man" was, I believe, carried out with the hope (or perhaps even conviction) that the monstrosity of human actions can be controlled by the awareness that man has transformed himself into his own enemy, becoming monstrous (ungeheuer) to himself. 4. Closing reflections In closing, I want to return for a brief look at the documentation of Brecht’s Antigone production, in the Antigonemodell 1948, drawing attention to the short scene as the "Ode to Man" chorus ends, just before the entrance of Antigone together with the guard who claims he caught her while she was trying to bury her brother Polyneices. According to the explanatory text on page 30 in the first edition of Antigonemodell 1948 (published in 1949 ) we can see on the Berlau photos the guard at the edge (Bank in German) "belting her with the board", while the chorus goes on to say that "it stands before me now like God’s temptation"-- in German Götterversuchung-- that "I should know and yet shall say / This is not the child, Antigone / O unhappy girl of the unhappy / Father Oedipus”. 25 It seems to me that this can on the one hand be interpreted to mean that Antigone should not be considered as her own enemy. But at the same time-- in the following 25 Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 2003 , p. 19 . The belting is depicted in Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher, Antigonemodell 1948, ed. Ruth Berlau, Berlin 1949 , p. 18 � <?page no="34"?> 28 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone lines-- the chorus asks us to consider where Antigone’s disobedience to the state may lead her. This is when she makes her full entry in order to confront the accusations against her, while she is carrying or ’wearing’ something that looks like a door on her back while her hands are shackled through two holes in this board (fig. 2 ). Fig. 2 Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone ( 1948 ) in Chur, Switzerland. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Theaterdoku 318/ 283, ©-R. Berlau/ Hoffmann. In Neher’s drawing of Antigone for the production she is tied with both head and hands to a board that looks like a pillory or the stocks used for punishment and public humiliation during the Middle Ages that is in front of her. In the performance this board has become much larger and Antigone wears it as a cross, on her back as her hands can be seen in the two holes in the board when seen from behind, like in the photo. When seen from the front in other photos, however, it looks as if her hands are tied behind her back. Antigone is literally wearing the entrance to the house that will never be hers on her back as a sign of her suffering, metaphorically on her way to the cave of death, signifying Golgotha. This is at the same time also a transformation of the door from the first scene through which she has seen her dead brother hanging on the pole that is his cross. It is the same door through which the SS officer has made his entry asking if they know him, pointing at him through the open door with an ecce homo gesture. And it is interesting to note that in the photo of the Vorspiel (fig. 1 ) there is also a board covering the window which has been left lying <?page no="35"?> Freddie Rokem 29 diagonally on the right. Maybe this is the board which Antigone is wearing as she goes to meet her death in the cave. The door that Antigone is forced to wear on her back after the “The Ode to Man” chorus in Brecht’s production is that liminal space between the security of her home- - her Heimat- - and the dangers of the outside world. As opposed to Heidegger’s desire to domesticate that outside world, appropriating it by making it homely through violence, Brecht, in the ensuing argument between Creon and Antigone introduces a detailed discussion relating to what in German is a Heimat, which does not appear in Hölderlin’s translation, nor in the original text. Instead, in Brecht’s adaptation, Creon accuses Antigone for slandering the homeland ("schmäh nur die Heimat”) and Antigone answers by defending herself. 26 I begin by quoting Antigone’s speech in German: Falsch ist’s. Erde ist Mühsal. Heimat ist nicht nur Erde, noch Haus nur. Nicht, wo einer Schweiß vergoß Nicht das Haus, das hilflos dem Feuer entgegensieht Nicht, wo er den Nacken gebeugt, nicht das heißt er Heimat. 27 In Constantine’s translation this passage is translated as: Wrong there. The earth is travail. The homeland is not just Earth, nor the house. Not where a man poured his sweat Not the house that helplessly watches the coming of fire Not where he bowed his neck, he does not call that the homeland. 28 In Brecht’s subsequent theatre production, Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder, now in Berlin, in 1949 , the house with a door has become a wagon moving through the war, ending after Courage, also famously played by Helene Weigel, has lost all her three children, drawing the carriage into total darkness (fig. 3 ). In the opening scene-- at least in the film-version of this production 29 -- Courage is seated com- 26 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht’s Antigone des Sophocles, Suhrkamp 1988 , Berlin, p. 100 � 27 Ibid. 28 Bertolt Brecht, op. cit., 2003 , p. 23 . It is interesting to compare this translation in the Methuen edition with the translation of the same passage in the chapter on Antigone in Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London 1995 : "It’s false. Earth is a burden. Home is not only / Earth, not house only. Not where one has poured out sweat / Not the house that helplessly sees the approaching fire / Not where he bowed his neck, not that calls he home" (http: / / publishing.cdlib.org/ ucpressebooks/ view? docId=ft4m3nb2jk; query=; brand=ucpress, note 27 in “Antigone” chapter, p. 220 , accessed 29 . 08 . 2014 ). 29 Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (DEFA-Film 1959 / 60 ), after the production by Bertolt Brecht and Erich Engel at the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth. <?page no="36"?> 30 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone fortably on the wagon beside Kattrin while her two sons (instead of horses) are drawing the carriage, singing the song with the following refrain: The spring is come. Christian, revive! The snowdrifts melt. The dead lie dead. And if by chance you’re still alive It’s time to rise and shake a leg. 30 Fig. 3 Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1949) in Berlin. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Hill 044/ 045, Hainer Hill. 30 Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 5 , ed. Ralph Manheim, New York 1972 , p. 136 � <?page no="37"?> Freddie Rokem 31 In the final scene of Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder-- as the photo clearly shows-- she is both carrying a house (on her back), while she holds the cross- - the two poles to which the horses are usually harnessed-- under her reclining body. With the rope from the carriage (her house) and the weight of the cross under her, the final scene of the performance shows Mutter Courage on her final steps to some form of redemption. Even if the Chur performance was not a success, in terms of the reactions of the spectators and the critics, because it was only performed five times, it needs our attention. At the same time as it is unclear if Brecht and Neher had found the way to make "the play to do something for" audiences of their own time, it paved the way for the much more successful production, which changed the course of modern theatre, about Mutter Courage who has lost her three children in the Thirty Years’ War. It is a play that ends with the burial of a young woman, her daughter, who had proven her courage by trying to prevent further bloodshed, and was killed by it, not by military heroism or stealing the money of the Finish Regiment, as her brothers had been. Kattrin had been the true hero of the war. But Brecht’s Antigone production also needs our attention today as researchers, because of the unique form of documentation, in the form of the first complete Modellbuch it gave rise to (from which the Berlau photos of the production have been reproduced here). It was followed by similar publication projects of the productions of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (published in 1958 ), of Aufbau einer Rolle (also published in 1958 ) where the 1947 Laughton production as well as the 1957 Berliner Ensemble production of Das Leben des Galilei, as well as several other such projects, based on photographs, introductory texts as well as explanatory notes. This documentation project, which I have not dealt at all with in this article, still needs to be more fully investigated, as it gives us important insights into the work of Brecht and his many collaborators during the last years of his life as well as its theoretical and ideological basis. 31 "A model", Brecht wrote in his introduction to the Antigonemodell 1948, cannot depend on cadences whose charm is due to particular voices or on gestures and movements whose beauty springs from particular physical characteristics: that sort of thing cannot serve as a model, for it is not exemplary as much as unparalleled. If something is to be usefully copied, it must first be shown. What is actually achieved when the model is put to use can then be a mixture of the exemplary and the unparalleled. 32 31 See my article: Freddie Rokem, “Scenographic Paradigms: Some principles of perception and interpretation”, in: Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 18 , 3 ( 2013 ), pp. 75 - 83 � 32 Bertolt Brecht, "Antigone Model 1948 ", in: Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, edd. Tom Kuhn et al., London 2014 , p. 167 � <?page no="38"?> 32 The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone This "mixture of the exemplary and the unparalleled"- - the Beispielhaften and the Beispiellosen in Brecht’s German- - is not only something that the theatre can achieve by learning from and developing its own creative resources, but also what the theatre is about when the characters called Antigone and Creon enter the stage, just two years after the end of the Second World War, and this entrance is no doubt still relevant for us today. <?page no="39"?> Kati Röttger 33 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone Kati Röttger (University of Amsterdam) Nothing could be worse for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt. One has to know who is buried where-- and it is necessary (to know-- to make certain) that, in what remains of him, remains there.-[…] The spirit of the spirit is work-[…], a certain power of transformation. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 9� Sophocles’ Antigone-- more than any other tragedy-- plays a crucial role in philosophy from the early nineteenth century on. Since the tragic plot of Sophocles’ Antigone ‘organizes the scene’ of the speculative dialectics that Hegel developed in Phenomenology of Spirit, 1 it resonates in the thinking of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Butler, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou, Stiegler-- to name only a few. In other words: Antigone is haunting philosophy in the long run, generating a genealogy that is based on what I would call a specific and sometimes tragic kinship between theatre and philosophy that is based on poiesis, as I will argue with Heidegger later on. To explore this kinship more extensively, I will outline two scenes in which an encounter between philosophers occurs, both occupied by Antigone as a specific work of poiesis. I will respectively arrange these scenes as a special type of dialogue. The first dialogue happens between Hölderlin and Hegel and the second between Heidegger and Derrida. My aim in doing so is twofold. Firstly, I will interrogate the relationship between what I call philosophical thinking and theatrical thinking. 2 This interrogation is informed by Heidegger’s claim that thinking “is at bottom still a poiesis”� 3 What is it in Antigone, the tragedy, that makes it so paradigmatic for philosophy? To answer this question, I will, secondly, start from the presumption that the relation- 1 The notion of ‘organizing the scene’ refers to the beginning of Jacques Derrida’s critical interpretation of Hegel’s Antigone adaptation to establish his method of dialectical gradation towards the idea of the spirit as true ethic life. See Jacques Derrida, GLAS, Munich 2006 , p. 159 � 2 I am of course aware of the legacy of literature on this issue and I do not want to claim that this is an original idea. See e. g. Freddie Rokem. Philosophers and Thespians. Thinking Performance, Stanford 2009 . See also Jean-Luc Nancy, “Theater als Kunst des Bezugs 1 ”, in: Marita Tatari (Ed.), Orte des Unermesslichen. Theater nach der Geschichtsteleologie, Berlin 2014 , p. 95 � 3 See Alexander Ferrari di Pippo, “The concept of Poiesis in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics”, in: David Shikiar (Ed.), Thinking Fundamentals. IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, vol. 9 , Vienna 2000 , p. 33 � <?page no="40"?> 34 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone ship between theatrical thinking and philosophical thinking in Antigone is closely connected to the question of law. While this question of law keeps surfacing throughout the history of the Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigone exposes it in a specific tragic way. This applies in the first instance to the tragic plot. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, feels obliged to bury her brother Polyneices, regardless of Creon’s law. Antigone is convinced she acts justly, expounding the superiority of divine law over the law made by man. In the history of philosophy, this tragic conflict was often interpreted as unfolding between private/ individual law and public/ state law, causing a deep crisis for the governmental order. Antigone was therefore regarded as a representative of the family in collision with the state (Hegel), as a figure that absolves of the sphere of law and orders that govern the access to speech and speakability (Lacan), or as an allegory of politics that points to the limits of kinship and representation (Butler). But whichever way Antigone is interpreted, the point that I want to make is that law does not only define the subject of the tragedy but also its composition. This leads to the question to which extend the tragedy of law relates to the law of tragedy (the poetic norms of composition) and how this relation connects philosophy to the dramaturgy of tragedy. In general terms, the consideration of the strong connection between antique tragedy and the institution of procedural law is no new idea. Walter Benjamin, for example, referred to Jacob Burckhardt when he stated in his seminal study on the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels that: “Athletic contests, law, and tragedy constitute the great agonal trinity of Greek life-- in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte Jacob Burckhardt refers to the agon as a scheme-- and they are bound together under the sign of this contract”. 4 According to Benjamin, transcending the regular perimeters of this agon, together with transcending the procedural trail of opposed factions by the Dionysian power of the living speech, created the ultimate affinity between trial and tragedy in Athens. The hero’s word, on those isolated occasions when it breaks through the rigid amour of the self, becomes a cry of protest. Tragedy is assimilated in this image of the trial; here too a process of conciliation [Sühneverhandlung] takes place. So is it that in Sophocles and Euripides the heroes learn; not to speak-… only to debate. 5 Like the trial in antiquity, dialogue is the medium of the debate, “because it is based on the twin roles of prosecutor and accused, without official procedure. It 4 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London/ New York 2003 , p. 115 , referring to: Jackob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, vol. IV, ed. Oeri Von Jacob, Berlin/ Stuttgart 1902 , pp. 2 - 3 � 5 Walter Benjamin, op. cit., 2003 , p. 116 � <?page no="41"?> Kati Röttger 35 has its chorus”. 6 While Benjamin traces here a cautious line between trial, living speech and tragedy in antiquity, hinting to the similarity of the dramatic form of dialogue and choir in both procedures, Christoph Menke, in a recent study, makes the connections between tragedy and law more explicit. He relies on Benjamin’s notion of fateful violence of the law worked out in Critique on Violence to trace the specific tragic experience of law. 7 Benjamin makes clear to which extend the violence (Gewalt) of the law means a humiliation and violation of justice. According to Menke this is a paradox in law expressed in the relationship between vengeance and law. Vengeance creates an equal relationship, because the revenging act always reacts on a previous revenging act. The justice of revenge is thus a never ending repetition of bloody violence. Law, on the contrary, means the instalment of a juridical-procedural order of justice that interrupts the bloody circle of vengeance. Tragedy starts exactly at that point where the transition from vengeance to law creates a difference in the order of justice. With Benjamin this difference might be called the mythical and violent foundation of law in the Greek world, because it exposes the paradox of law as being violent. Menke is elucidating his point with Oresteia and Oedipus the King. In both tragedies, the installed juridical-procedural order puts an end to the endless repetition of revenge, establishing judgment. Judgment entails a recognition that two parties are involved, or on the scene. This recognition creates a new form of justice. It is grounded in the acceptation of the equality of the citizens through the instalment of a juridical-procedural order that takes into account the interests of both parties. In the Oresteia it is Athena who establishes a trial as a legal procedure against Orestes, who is punished by it. In Oedipus the King, Oedipus, in his double role of governor and accused, judges himself and executes self-punishment. But it is the very principle (the law) of tragedy to bring forth the law as a form of justice (Gerechtigkeitsform) that is, in its essence, a form of violence. 8 The tragic in tragedy happens at the turning point or reversal (peripety) 9 that defines the tragic conflict without a just solution that applies to all. The legal break with fateful violence means at the same time a legal peripety, a transformation into another violence that is the violence buried inside the law. To conclude with, we can state that tragedy and law are closely linked in subject and form. While tragedy can be described as a genre of the law, and therefore the form of representation (Darstellungsform) of law, the law is in 6 Ibid., with reference to: Kurt Latte, Heiliges Recht. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der sakralen Rechtsformen in Griechenland, Tübingen 1920 � 7 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, in: Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, New York 1986 , pp. 277 - 300 � 8 Christoph Menke, Recht und Gewalt, Berlin 2012 , p. 8 � 9 Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, ed. Samuel Henry Butcher, on: http: / / books.ebooklibrary. org/ members/ penn_state_collection/ psuecs/ poetics.pdf, 2005 ( 1902 ), p. 15 � <?page no="42"?> 36 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone turn inscribed in the justice of tragedy. To put it more precisely: law is not just the form of justice (Gerechtigkeitsform) of tragedy, but also-- and even more so-- the form of justice that is brought forth by tragedy as inherently tragic, 10 namely in the situation in which the condemned produces violence. This specific interrelation between the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law will lead in the course of my argument to the following question: how does this specific connection between law and tragedy help us to understand the interrelatedness between philosophical and theatrical thinking apparent in the case of Antigone? The plot yet bears some evidence. Antigone certainly executes justice with her demand to bury her brother. But with her deed she refuses to accept the king’s law. In doing so, she incorporates myth and therefore the order of revenge: to do what has to be done. 11 Antigone is literally doing what she says: “I say that I did it and I do not deny it”. 12 Therefore, she is punished by the law of Creon and sentenced to be buried alive. Confronted with this, she takes responsibility and decides to end her own life. She executes self-punishment. But does she execute the procedural law, like Oedipus did? The problem is that this tragedy neither knows a third position that recognizes the two parties, nor does Antigone act in the double role of governor and accused like her father Oedipus. She is accused by the governmental law of Creon, and therefore declared guilty. In spite of acting according to the mythical realm, she does not carry out an act of revenge; she does not repeat the bloody circle of killing to create justice. On the contrary, she goes for another kind of justice, out of philia. She cares for the work of mourning that has to be done by making certain that what remains of her brother, remains there, buried. So what is the tragic plot here? Antigone breaks with the violence of the law and she breaks with the violence of revenge. This is why she has to execute herself. 13 Antigone incorporates the mythical order of the legal break with fateful violence and the violence of law at the same time. She tends towards another form of law. Following Hölderlin, it can be called a modern form that opens up a space for the work of mourning, as I will explain in a more detailed way later in this article. It encompasses a transformation that happens on a threshold where 10 Christoph Menke, op. cit., 2012 , p. 9 . It is worth mentioning here that Menke contends that in tragedy-- and this is another reason why tragedy is the genre of law-- there are always two people needed on the scene. The history of tragedy starts with Aeschylus raising the number of actors from one to two (id., p. 21 ). 11 Id., p. 23 � 12 Sophocles, “Antigone”, ed. E. H. Plumptre, in: Charles W. Eliot (Ed.), The Harvard Classics Vol. 8: Nine Greek Dramas, part 6 , on: http: / / www.bartleby.com/ 8/ 6/ antigone.pdf, 2001 ( 1909 - 14 ), p. 8 � 13 Nancy stresses the indifference of Greek tragedy and especially of Antigone towards the idea of sacrifice. Tragedy is about death as an entrance to another order, into myth ( Jean- Luc Nancy, op. cit., 2014 , p. 11 ). <?page no="43"?> Kati Röttger 37 an old order loses ground while a new one is not yet fully created: a time out of joint. And this might be the reason for Antigone’s prominent inscription in the philosophy of history. Consequently, it can be interpreted as an instruction of that historical-philosophical consideration of the law, which Walter Benjamin summarized in the sentence: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history”. 14 Therefore, it might be no coincidence that Antigone prominently appears in those historical moments of transition or rupture when a demand for a different law is imminent, which claims to bring with it another form of (legal) justice. In the following, I will pick up two historical moments when Antigone infiltrated scenes of philosophical thinking, as mentioned at the beginning. One of these moments coincided with the genesis of a philosophy of history in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was the moment when Hegel conducted the construction of speculative dialectics after the model of tragedy, and most prominently after Antigone. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, he had dramatized the experience and exposition of abstract thought according to the law of tragedy, to implement a law executed by the spirit. Hegel’s counterpart in this scene is Hölderlin, who shared his speculative adventure, but who pleaded for a transgression and deconstruction of the law of tragedy. The second scene is located two hundred years later, after 1989 . It stages Jacques Derrida who reacts to the “totalitarian terror” of the twentieth century. 15 In Specters of Marx, he locates his project of deconstruction at this historical moment, because the eschatological themes of the ‘end of history’-[…] were-[…] our daily bread. It-[…] was, on the other hand and indissociably, what we had known or what some of us for quite a time no longer hid from concerning totalitarian terror in all Eastern countries-[…] Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed. 16 I will argue that next to the spectre of Marx and the spectre of Hamlet’s father, the spectre of Antigone plays a crucial role in this project of deconstruction. It is haunted by Heidegger’s comment on Antigone, which was part of his lectures on the Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935 . More precisely, I propose to stage a spectral dia-logue not only between Derrida and Heidegger, and between Hamlet and Antigone, but, foremost, between the spectres of Hamlet’s father and Oedipus’ daughter/ sister Antigone. I will demonstrate in the following to which extend this spectral dialogue might help to transgress what I call the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law. While Hegel still encloses Antigone in her tomb and while Hei- 14 Walter Benjamin, op. cit., 1986 , p. 299 � 15 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, New York/ London 1994 , p. 16 � 16 Ibid. <?page no="44"?> 38 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone degger invites us to listen to the voice of tragic poiesis, Derrida opens the tomb for the return of the dead Antigone. While Heidegger still runs the risk to enclose justice in the laws of tragedy, Derrida tries to give justice a chance through the deconstruction of the tragedy of law. In short, I propose with Derrida a transgression that embraces hauntology instead of ontology, 17 following up Heidegger’s Philo-Logics of Listening. 1. Dialogues performed by ‘thinkers’: a question of dramaturgy? What does Antigone contribute to an understanding of the connection between theatrical and philosophical thinking? According to Jean-Luc Nancy, there is a remarkable kinship between theatre and philosophy that is founded on dialogue. 18 Since the beginning of its history with the Platonic dialogue, it constitutes a certain relation. It is a relatedness that is brought forth between people and between humans and gods. Yet, the difference between philosophy and tragedy appears in two different ways to manifest that relatedness. Plato’s philosophy sets logos as dialogue, because insight and knowledge have to be gained by a dialogical activity that departs from logos and arrives at logos. Tragedy’s dialogue is informed by myth. Myth is the name that is given by Aristotle to plot. 19 It is mediated by the spoken word and directed towards listeners. While Platonic dialogue claims progression to allow the argument to develop, myth does not have any progressive dimension. Taken as a story of origination or origin, myth tells what has already happened and arrives there where we are now. It does not tell anything new, it tells what is given. It tells a story whose end is given from the beginning on. It is especially striking that Nancy at this point explicitly mentions Antigone as the most exemplary tragedy. 20 Taken as a story of kinship, the conflict in this tragedy is indeed already given from the beginning, because Antigone and her brother Polyneices are children and siblings of Oedipus. As this oedipal conflict of backward genealogy lies at its origin, the tragedy cannot have any progressive dimension. It is telling a story whose development is given in the same origin, and therefore also in Antigone herself. Consequently, Antigone, who is incorporating myth, is doing what she says (“I say that I did it and I do not deny it”). Embodying her 17 I put this abbreviated formula for the whole complex of Derrida’s challenge to comprehend and undermine the discourse of and about ‘the end’. See e. g. Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 1994 , p. 10 : “Staging [the spectre] for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology. This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the ‘to be’, assuming that it is a matter of Being of the ‘to be’, but nothing is less certain)”. 18 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 2014 , p. 95 � 19 Aristotle, op. cit., 2005 ( 1902 ), pp. 12 - 15 � 20 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 2014 , p. 95 � <?page no="45"?> Kati Röttger 39 saying in her acting, she is acting out poiesis. Platonic dialogue, on the contrary, is considered to be the starting point of a long, progressive history of speculative philosophy, especially in the history of Hegelian philosophy, locating the dia-logue in the realm of noein. Therefore, the Presocratic origin of the kinship between the notions of noein and poiesis became no longer accessible. 21 Nancy is not the only one who situates Antigone in an exemplary way right at the threshold where the form of dialogue splits into two directions: philosophy and tragedy, logos and myth, thinking and poetizing. As we will see later in this article, Heidegger chooses Antigone to explore his considerations on the divorce of philosophy and tragedy as well, to overcome this split. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on his part is asking: “what has tragedy to do with the birth of speculative thinking and Onto-Logic? ” 22 We have now arrived at the first scene. 2. First scene: Hegel and Hölderlin. Theory of dramaturgy and dramaturgy of theory In his comprehensive critical study on Antigone, George Steiner dedicates a short passage to the encounter between Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling in the theological seminar in Tübingen between 1789 and 1793 � 23 They shared a passion for Sophocles and especially for Antigone. For Hölderlin, this tragedy was the most Greek one and incorporated therefore the very essence of tragedy, “the strongest of all poetical forms”. 24 For Hegel, it was the most consummate form of art human effort had ever brought forth. 25 In addition, they recognized in that play, amid the devastating terror following the French Revolution, the violent and unresolved conflict between private and public law that was at stake at that time. Following Steiner, Antigone knitted a close tie between the three friends, but it was also the starting point for a keen polemics. That applied especially to Hegel and Hölderlin. Only one year after the publication of Hölderlin’s Anmerkungen zur Antigone ( 1804 ), Hegel on his part wrote the crucial pages of his Phenomenology of Spirit dedicated to Antigone and these, from then on, deeply influenced the whole modern interpretation of tragedy until at least Heidegger. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hegel’s intention then was not just to correct Hölderlin’s analysis, 26 it was also 21 Alexander Ferrari di Pippo, op. cit., 2000 , p. 2 � 22 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Die Nachahmung der Modernen. Typographien II, Basel 2003 , p. 45 � 23 George Steiner, Die Antigonen. Geschichte und Gegenwart eines Mythos, München 1990 , pp. 20 - 21 � 24 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., 2003 , p. 34 � 25 George Steiner, op. cit., 1990 , p. 4 � 26 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., 2003 , p. 55 <?page no="46"?> 40 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone of a dramaturgical order: Hegel resisted Hölderlin’s dramaturgical approach to antique tragedy to defend the dominance of philosophy. While the tragic form and plot of Antigone organized the theoretical scene of Hegel’s phenomenology, 27 Hölderlin took Antigone as a point of departure to develop a modern theory of tragedy. How should this be understood? Let us follow Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument further. Hegel adapted antique drama as a model for philosophy, Hölderlin combined both dramaturgy and philosophy. In a close “dialogue with Sophocles”, Hölderlin theorized tragedy on the one hand and experimented with translations of tragedies on the other hand. 28 In doing so, he opened up a way towards a specific theory and practice of modern tragedy that goes beyond the concept of antiquity. Hegel’s Antigone interpretation, on the contrary, conjures up the antique concept of tragedy. Antigone resonates in his Phenomenology of Spirit, because Hegel is adapting the conflict between the political law of the state and the private law of kinship to speculative thinking. He is creating a dialectical scene that is structured by the dissymmetrical opposition between the law of the particular and the law of the general; an opposition that entails a whole series of further pairs of oppositions, like divine law and human law, family and state, man and woman, life and death, all antithetically arranged according to the plot of the tragedy. This conflict, consequently, is translated into a dialectical procedure that leads to an abstraction in the realm of ideas: this abstraction is moral justice, more precisely: moral justice as a concept. The formal law of tragedy (aspects of conflict, crisis, peripety, and catharsis) thus illustrates the dynamics of collision and synthetical dissolution Hegel’s dialectics stands for. But more than this, Hegel offers a solution to the conflict through sublation, a good end (that is the end of history) to achieve higher conciliation. ‘Good infinity’ means the dissolution of the historical collision in the concept of spirit, thus in philosophy! According to Lacoue-Labarthe, this dissolution is identical with the “philosophical exploitation of the Aristotelian concept of catharsis”-- in the name of idealism. 29 While Hegel adapted Antigone to foresee the course of history through philosophy, the opposite was true for Hölderlin. 30 The latter conceived the uniqueness, 27 See also Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 2006 , p. 159 � 28 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., 2003 , p. 42 � 29 Id., p. 39 . It is worth mentioning here that Hayden White in his book Metahistory-- The historical imagination in the 19 th century (Baltimore 1973 ) insists on the comical perspective of Hegel’s “tragic concept of history”. According to his extensive interpretation, the idea of reconciliation is based on the significance of the human comedy for Hegel’s construction of the historical process as “happy end”. (In the German version: Hayden White, Metahistory. Die historische Einbildungskraft im 19. Jahrhundert in Europa, Frankfurt am Main 1991 , pp. 111 - 176 , especially pp. 156 - 163 , “Von der Tragödie zur Komödie”). 30 Heidegger, on his part, described the difference between Hegel and Hölderlin in the following way: “[While] Hegel looks backward and closes up, Hölderlin gazes forwards and opens <?page no="47"?> Kati Röttger 41 the Greekness of tragedy as a work (organon) that is not identically repeatable and not transferable, neither to the realm of ideas, neither to his actual time. This was the reason for him to think that antique tragedy was only able to survive by a transformation into a modern tragedy, and modern meant for him: different, resistant, a disorganized model of tragedy, 31 a tragedy out of joint. The way to do so was for Hölderlin the work of translation as a disarticulation of tragedy. Hölderlin introduced the notion of caesura to define this means of disarticulation. With caesura he meant those parts in tragedy that resist the totality of its form. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hölderlin’s modern approach to a theory of tragedy results from a dramaturgical interest in deconstruction. For Hölderlin “modern tragedy only exists in the form of deconstruction of antique tragedy. Similarly a theory of the tragic and tragedy was only possible in the deconstruction of classical poetics and her speculative reinterpretation”. 32 This form of deconstruction has to be understood as an adaption of the violence of tragic catastrophe. Hölderlin proposed to comply with the law of tragedy only so far as the catastrophe of its original meaning would be turned into the catastrophe of occupancy or appropriation (Aneignung) through the dramaturgical processing. The catastrophic transgression of the classical form of tragedy creates at the same time “the paradox of the dramaturge”. 33 The clue of Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s dramaturgical intervention is that this catastrophe of occupancy occurs in terms of mimesis, and not catharsis like in Hegel’s view. And here it is important to know that mimesis in English inclusively means occupancy or appropriation. Dramaturgical processing is understood thus as a mimetic act of translation as the catastrophe of translating the catastrophic plot of tragedy into modernity. In that sense, the dramaturgical process comes close to the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), a notion that recalls Trauerspiel. In dramaturgical terms, it results in the need to “de-organize [tragedy], to de-systematize it, to get it out of joint”, concludes Lacoue-Labarthe. 34 Hölderlin had proposed a way to occupy Antigone that leads through logos to poiesies that is a combined ergon (work) and algos (pain). 35 This turn to poiesies deliberately haunts Heidegger’s thinking and hence, Derrida’s. Therefore, Hölderlin is the forerunner of the next scene of encounter that is occupied by Antigone� up” (Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven/ London 2000 , p. 133 ). 31 Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., 2003 , p. 67 � 32 Id., p. 52 � 33 Id., p. 60 � 34 Id., p. 67 . Hölderlin proposes to do that at a point where the dialectical structure of the tragedy is confirmed by an empty articulation- - a break or caesura- - and postpones the catastrophic turning in terms of active neutrality, e. g. in Antigone the entrance of Tiresias, which is the entrance of prophetic speech. 35 Id., p. 68 � <?page no="48"?> 42 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone It is a scene defined by dramaturgy in the literal sense of the word: namely in the combination of the words drama (to act) and ergon (work), meaning ‘to bring drama to work’. Bringing drama to work involves, as we will see, a transgression of the law of tragedy, and with this also of the tragedy of law, towards a work of mourning. It is a work of mourning, as I will demonstrate, that turns out to be a crucial concern for justice, in Derrida’s Specters of Marx. But to understand this, we first need to understand how Heidegger’s Antigone comment, and especially his translation of diké (justice) with the German term Fug (fitting, joint) as well as his understanding of logos as listening, has influenced Derrida’s project of deconstruction, which achieves a performative approach to Antigone� 3. Second scene: Heidegger and Derrida. The transgression of the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law through the gift of justice Heidegger’s Antigone comment is part of his lectures on the Introduction to Metaphysics that he held in 1935 in Freiburg. In these lectures, Heidegger develops the rehabilitation of poiesis for the matter of thinking in great detail. His retrieval of an original Presocratic concept of poiesis furnished his concern to move artistic production into the foreground and to free himself from his own transcendental framework at stake in his previous lectures and writings. 36 This concern was influenced by his intensive involvement with Hölderlin at that time. Hölderlin had inspired him to ask the question of the historicity of Being from poiesis, the work of art. This question is motivated by the “attack” against the dominance of the divide between Being and thinking, which according to Heidegger forms the fundamental orientation of the spirit in the Western world. 37 Brought into opposition to Being, the notion of thinking was since Plato transformed into logos as abstraction, meaning truth. Logos, in terms of reason, developed then in the long run into logics as a science of thinking that formed the basis of all other metaphysical distinctions in Western epistemology, until Hegel’s Science of Logics� 38 Heidegger does not hesitate to announce that his “attack” aims to overcome that speculative division that defines Western thinking. He does so by going back to the time before Plato. This step was important, because for Heidegger, “Plato and Aristotle failed to grasp [the] Presocratic understanding of poiesis, because they covered over the Presocratic understanding of phusis [Being]-- losing the sense of the Presocratic 36 Alexander Ferrari di Pippo, op. cit., 2000 , p. 5 � 37 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 2000 , p. 124 � 38 See Michael Theunissen, Sein und Schein. Die kritische Funktion der hegelschen Logik, Frankfurt am Main 1994 , p. 15 . Here, he affirms that for Hegel the science of logics was the utmost metaphysics. <?page no="49"?> Kati Röttger 43 understanding of phusis prevented a deeper understanding of poiesis”� 39 Heidegger calls on two Presocratic thinkers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, claiming that the origin of the divorce of Being and thinking necessarily includes the question of an essential togetherness of both that can be found in their writings; writings in which Heidegger aims to prove the possibility of a poetic thinking that connects to phusis as an event of Being. One might ask now: why is Antigone so important in Heidegger’s argument for the transgression of the divide between Being and thinking by the work of art? And how is his argument related to the law of tragedy, comprising the tragedy of law? According to the first question, it can be said in general terms that for Heidegger the thinking poetry of the Greeks was tragedy, “the poetry in which Greek Being and Dasein [human beings insofar as they relate to Being] were authentically founded”. 40 In other words: exclusively in tragedy, the notion of the human being in its interrelation with noein, phusis, poiesis and eventually mortality is brought about, because, as Heidegger states, the human being is the only species that is capable of death. 41 Heidegger finds this specific “poetic projection of Being-human among the Greek” most prominently presented in Antigone� 42 According to him, Antigone even performs “the authentic Greek definition of humanity”. 43 To prove this, he invites to listen to the first choral ode of the play (lines 368 - 412 ). 44 It would extend this article too much if I would follow the path of the three (literal) passageways that Heidegger subsequently goes over to finally “assess who the human being is accordingly this poetic saying”. 45 I will only concentrate on his considerations concerning those two notions that help to inform us about the role of Antigone in his endeavour to overcome the divide between Being and thinking through the work of art. While deinon is the central topical notion in Antigone that he uses to prove his argument, logos is the central poetical notion. I will begin with the latter one. It is certainly no coincidence that Heidegger invites us to listen to the choral ode, because Heidegger brings the fundamental meaning of logos together with the act of listening. Heidegger asks: “What do logos and legein mean, if they do not mean thinking? ” To answer, he goes back to the etymology of the term that includes various meanings: Logos means the word, discourse (speech), and legein means to talk. Dia-logue is reciprocal discourse, and mono-logue is solitary discourse.-[…] Lego, legein, Latin legere, is the 39 Alexander Ferrari di Pippo, op. cit., 2000 , p. 26 � 40 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 2000 , p. 154 � 41 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetik der Geschichte, Berlin 2004 , p. 15 � 42 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 2000 , p. 156 � 43 Id., p. 161 � 44 Sophocles, op. cit., 2001 ( 1909 - 14 ), pp. 10 - 11 � 45 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 2000 , p. 158 � <?page no="50"?> 44 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone same word as our lesen (to collect): gleaning, collecting wood, harvesting grapes, making a selection; ‘reading [lesen] a book’ is only a variant of gathering in the authentic sense. This means laying one thing next to another, bringing them together as one-- in short, gathering; but at the same time, the one is contrasted with the other. 46 Heidegger ensures here a double re-evaluation of the term logos. First, he brings logos ‘back’ to the notion of word and speech. Secondly, he concludes that the fundamental meaning of logos is gathering, more precisely “the relation of one thing to another” 47 and more extensively, “the originally gathering gatheredness that constantly holds sway in itself ”. 48 This double re-evaluation connects logos directly to the notion of phusis as emerging sway, because logos and Being are together in the gatheredness of Beings. It also most prominently includes the relation to the act of hearing. “Saying and hearing”, on their part, “are proper only when they are intrinsically directed in advance towards Being, towards logos”� 49 And it is important to notice here that both notions are crucial parts of tragedy as breakaway into language and therefore into Being, as could be heard in the choral ode of Antigone. This close relatedness between logos as Being and hearing directly leads to the question of the human being. Assuming that the human being is part of the emerging sway and has part in the happening of appearance, Heidegger says that humans must themselves be, they must belong to Being. In other words: humans are part of nature, of the emerging sway. But at the same time they are alien to Being, because they do not grasp it. They are not able to grasp the gatheredness of Beings themselves. They do hear words and discourse, yet they are closed off to what they should listen to. This means: “they are distant to logos”. 50 To understand this problem, it is important to mention that Heidegger remarks that logos certainly already means discourse and words, but in Presocratic thinking “this is not the essence of logos”. While discourse corresponds to mere hearing the words and therefore to doxa (as inessential part of logos), the essence consists in “genuine hearkening”. It is a hearkening that obeys what logos is and therefore follows (and does not define) the gatheredness of Beings themselves. So, because human beings are not able to grasp this kind of logos and therefore “are absently present; in the midst of the things-[…] and yet away”, defining humanity has to be a question, a questioning of Being. At this point, the eminence of tragedy and Heidegger’s notion of the tragic become especially relevant. This relevance is based not only on the connection between logos and phusis, but also between noein and poiesis, both 46 Id., p. 131 � 47 Id., p. 132 � 48 Id., p. 135 � 49 Id., p. 140 � 50 Id., p. 137 � <?page no="51"?> Kati Röttger 45 implicit in tragedy as a medium that confronts the question of being human. How is this to be understood? The procedure of questioning the human being is echoed in Heidegger’s translation of noein as listening and apprehension (Vernehmung) as a specific human quality. Crucial in his interpretation of apprehension is the opening up towards Being, which is something else than just hearing, because one can for example hear words without understanding what they mean. Apprehending is the condition of human beings insofar as it enables them to “bring their Dasein to stand in the Being of the beings”. 51 To bring Dasein to stand means to see that the Being of life includes death: “Everything that comes to life thereby already begins to die as well, to go towards its death, and death is also life”. 52 Now we are close to Antigone dealing with the confrontation between divine and human law, between immortality and the capability to die. According to Heidegger, the question who is human can only be dealt with when humanity goes into confrontation: “We know that the disjunction of gods and beings happens only in polemos, in setting-apartfrom-each-other [Auseinandersetzung]. Only such struggle sets out [zeigt]. It lets gods and human beings step forth in their being”. And only in the confrontation between beings by attempting to bring them into beings, “humanity sets beings into limits and forms, projects something new (not yet present), thus originally poetizes, grounds poetically”� 53 In this, the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides relates to the thinking poetry of the Greek that is, according to Heidegger, tragedy, or, more precisely: Antigone. So, if logos refers to the performative part of tragedy through the notions of dia-logue and listening, 54 it re-evaluates tragedy in terms of hearkening as a medium of thinking that originally poetizes. At this point, the second, topical notion deinon has to be brought in. To understand it, it is necessary to give a glimpse of Heidegger’s own translation of the Greek text into German (that, unfortunately, can only be echoed in this article through its English version), because-- not at least out of his involvement with Hölderlin in that period-- it deviates quite drastically from ‘common’ translations. At the same time, these deviations have to be taken into account as a crucial part of his argumentation. To give an idea, I present here the first lines of Heidegger’s translation of that stasimon in English, next to a classical English translation: 51 Id., p. 141 � 52 Id., p. 139 . This is a quote of Heraclitus in Heidegger. 53 Ibid. 54 See Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 2014 : it is mediated by the spoken word and directed towards listeners� <?page no="52"?> 46 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone Heidegger’s translation: Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing uncannier than man bestirs itself, rising up beyond him. He fares forth upon the foaming tide, amid winters southerly tempest and cruises through the summits Of the raging, clefted swells. 55 The Harvard Classics translation: Many the forms of life, Fearful and strange to see. But man supreme stands out, For strangeness and for fear. He, with the wintry gales, O‘er the foam-crested sea, ’Mid billows surging round, Tacked this way across. 56 Heidegger’s translation in German: Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch Über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt-… 57 A German version: Es gibt viel Ungeheuerliches, doch nichts Ist ungeheuerlicher als der Mensch 58 Heidegger translates the crucial word of the first line, deinon, with the word uncanny (unheimlich). This translation is breaking the way for the whole of his interpretation of Antigone, because it lays out the antagonism of the Being of the human. It is utterly expressed in one line of the stasimon that says: The human being is to deinotaton, the uncanniest of the uncanny. 59 What does that mean? According to Heidegger, deinon (unheimlich) connotes the notion of monstrous and the meaning of ‘to be thrown out of the homely’ (Heim- = home). The human being is monstrous as well as condemned to be thrown out of the homely. This conflict is expressed in the term violence (Gewalt). But this notion is again divided into two different significations. On the one hand, violence signifies the ‘over-whelming’ (das Überwältigende), which is the essential character of the sway (walten) itself. On the other hand, it means the ‘one who needs to use violence’, but not in the usual meaning of brutality, but as a basic trait of man’s worldly existence: Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities, but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming. Because it is doubly deinon in an originally united sense: it is to deinotaton, violence-doing in the midst of the over-whelming. 60 55 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 2000 , p. 156 � 56 Sophocles, op. cit., 2001 ( 1909 - 14 ), p. 10 � 57 Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen 1998 , p. 112 � 58 Ernst G. Sandvoss, Die Wahrheit wird euch frei machen: Sokrates und Jesus, München 2001 , p. 71 � 59 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 2000 , p. 159 � 60 Id., p. 160 � <?page no="53"?> Kati Röttger 47 Violence-doing happens when “they overstep the limits of the homely, precisely in the direction of the uncanny [unheimlich] in the sense of the overwhelming”. 61 This explanation makes clear why Heidegger prefers the translation ‘uncanny’ to cover the sense of deinon most precisely. It is exactly what the human being sets out in struggle (polemos). It is a struggle, at the same time, between techné and diké. It defines the essence of the tragic conflict that the human being confronts and that is at stake in Antigone. How are techné and diké related? Heidegger links techné directly to doing violence, while he links diké to the overwhelming. According to Heidegger, techné means more than skills: it means knowing; diké signifies more than justice and also means Fug. 62 Correspondingly, he translates diké in Antigone with the same word. In German, Fug contains a lot of notions that go along with Fügung (coincidence, providence, dispensation and construction). In the official English translation of Heidegger’s text it says “fittingness”. I quote the translation of the passage in which Heidegger introduces the notion: “Here we understand fittingness first in the sense of joint and structure. Then as arrangement, as the direction that the overwhelming gives to its sway, finally as the enjoining structure which compels fitting in and compliance”. 63 Deinon comprises diké and techné as a reciprocal over-against. This over-against is insofar as “the uncanniest, namely human being, happens. Insofar as humanity unfolds in history [my emphasis, KR ]”. 64 Unfolding in history needs techné to break out against diké, which at the same time has techné to its disposal. At this point, art comes in. For techné (knowledge) is closely connected to art: “The Greeks call- […] art techné in the emphatic sense, because it brings in the most immediate way Being to stand, in the work”� 65 As work of art, it puts Being into work. Consequently, Being becomes confirmed and accessible as Being. On the other hand, the one who knows who creates, who sets out into the un-said and breaks through the un-known and who is therefore violence-doing, takes a risk. The uncanny is therefore also the potential of crash, decay or death. For the violence against the overwhelming is reciprocally shattered by the overwhelming. The result is human kind being thrown into distress. Therefore, the worldly existence of the human being as a historical being means being a breach, an abyss (Abgrund). Although Heidegger concedes that 61 Id., p. 161 � 62 See the translator’s footnote 64 in Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 1994 , p. 171 : “The usual translation of diké is “justice” (in German, Gerechtigkeit). The word Fug nowadays is used today only in stock phrases such as mit Fug und Recht (quite rightfully, quite properly). It is related to Fuge (joint, fugue), Gefüge (structure), Fügung (arrangement [but also ‘destiny’, KR]), fügen (enjoin, dispose), sich fügen (compel [also ‘obey’, KR]), einfügen (fit into, fit in) and verfügen (have at its disposal)”. 63 Martin Heidegger, op. cit., 2000 , p. 171 � 64 Ibid. 65 Id., p. 170 � <?page no="54"?> 48 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone the choir in the last strophe turns against this human being, against the uncanny, because it is not the everyday manner of his worldly existence, he suggests that logos and noein-- through techné (art)-- are always an act of violence against the overwhelming (phusis), but at the same time always and only for it. In fact, the human being is therefore torn between Fug and Unfug. Only thinking poetry is able to express this most intimate relation of being there to Being and its opening up, i. e. not being here. This means the event of Being, and this is the case in Antigone. Here, in “the word of the poet”, in tragedy, “the most intimate relation of Dasein to being and its opening up” is expressed. “For the poet’s word names what is farthest from Being: not-Being-here [not being alive]. Here, the uncanniest possibility of Dasein shows itself: to break the excessive violence of Being through Dasein’s ultimate act of violence against itself ”. 66 Da-Sein cannot achieve complete mastery, because its violence shatters against one thing: death. It has to be asked how Heidegger’s interpretation of Antigone relates to the law. Does it open up a way towards the transgression of the tragedy of law and the law of tragedy? The answer is ambivalent. Firstly, in his passageway through the chorus line, Heidegger acts as a thinker and as a dramaturge. He is practicing, in line with Hölderlin, thinking poetry (or poetic thinking), setting the drama, the tragedy, into work through translation. This means that, secondly, Heidegger, in contrast to Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone, does not tend to achieve a higher conciliation in philosophy. Instead, Heidegger recalls the mystic law of tragedy to remember that there is no distributive justice. It results, thirdly, in a critique on logos as logics and on poiesis as poetics reduced to formalized laws, pleading instead for the transgression of the law by a poetic thinking that translates logos into gathering and hearkening. In other words: Heidegger transgresses the law of tragedy by manifesting a relation between philosophy and tragedy that is mediated by the spoken word and directed towards listeners, overcoming the formalized laws of logos and poetics. But does this inclusively lead to a transgression of the tragedy of law? Here, Derrida has to be brought in dialogue with Heidegger. Derrida’s interest in Antigone is mainly known through his interpretation in GLAS , which is clearly dedicated to the deconstruction of the Hegelian Antigone interpretation. Derrida diagnoses Antigone as the quasi-transcendental of the Hegelian system, because she represents an excessive difference that both exceeds and is necessary for the operation of the dialectic. Derrida accuses Hegel of making an example of Antigone and removing her from the history of tragedy by forcing her into a paradigmatic and universal ‘truth’ for modernity under the condition of her exclusion. In other words: Hegel enclosed Antigone in her tomb, nothing should survive Antigone and nothing 66 Id., p. 189 � <?page no="55"?> Kati Röttger 49 should emerge out of her. But what has not been remarked yet, is the ongoing dialogue on Antigone that Derrida carries out in his later works, especially in Specters of Marx and Politics of Friendship, echoing Heidegger’s Antigone comment. 67 While Hegel’s announcement of her death had to ring in the absolute end of history in the name of the spirit, Derrida opens in Specters of Marx the tombs for the return of the dead: the spectres of Hamlet’s father and Oedipus’ daughter! Their appearance poses the question of law and justice anew, not for law, for the calculation of restitutions, the economy of vengeance or punishment-[…] [but] beyond an economy of repression [Verdrängung! ] whose law implies it to exceed itself, of itself in the course of history, be it a history of theatre or of politics between Oedipus Rex and Hamlet� 68 I would like to stress “between” here, because what Derrida is aiming at is bringing up “ethics itself: to learn to live”, which “can only happen between life and death”, 69 thus on the threshold that is theatre as a space that makes present. An ethics that needs the theatre, because it brings up anew the question of justice as a question where “it is not yet” and not reducible to the law. 70 This question, Derrida states, cannot be asked without “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there [which certainly is Antigone’s concern, KR ], of those who are no longer present and living”. It is a question directed to what happens after the end of history and “deserves the name of event”. 71 The motto that haunts this account is “The time is out of joint”. 72 At this point, Derrida directly calls up Heidegger, 73 because ‘joint’ means ‘Fug’ or ‘Fuge’, which in Heidegger’s translation of the choir ode in Antigone means ‘diké’. Derrida directs the following question to Heidegger: what if one translates diké still with justice, without running the risk that justice will be reduced once again 67 See Derrida’s considerations of the problem of Heidegger’s notion of polemos in the context of his rectorship at the University of Freiburg at the beginning of the Nazi regime in Germany. He shines a special light on the homologies that Heidegger makes with the notion of philia. Derrida concludes that Heidegger, at the end, warned that the Germans did not listen to the poetry of Hölderlin and therefore also deaf to his sacrifice ( Jacques Derrida, Heidegger’s Ear. Philopolemology. (Geschlecht 4), Bloomington/ Indianapolis 1989 ). 68 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 1994 , p. 26 � 69 Id,. p. XVII� 70 Id., p. XVIII� 71 Id., p. 17 � 72 See the epigraph at the very beginning of this article. 73 Derrida is not directly referring to the comment on Antigone in the Introduction to Metaphysics, but to the same considerations about diké that Heidegger repeated in “The Anaximander Fragment”, in: Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking. The Dawn of Western Philosophy, New York 1975 � <?page no="56"?> 50 Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone to juridical, moral rules, norms or representations, within an inevitable totalizing horizon? 74 “Heidegger runs this risk”, Derrida says, “despite so many necessary precautions, when he gives priority to gathering and to the same”. 75 In this sense, Derrida reveals a kind of ambivalence in Heidegger’s thinking. While he went with Antigone for a transgression of the law of tragedy, the tragedy of law was reaffirmed by violence against the same and the gathering. By way of contrast, Derrida proposes to give priority to dis-juncture, to Un-Fug, to the other. Here is his project of deconstruction located at. It goes along with the proposal to think justice beyond the law, beyond right, beyond morality and beyond moralism. It is located where the possibility of justice is played out as deconstruction, on a stage where the spectres have the chance to appear. For Derrida, the necessary disjunction, the Un-Fug, the de-totalizing condition of justice, is indeed that of the present (in the double sense of the word): justice as a gift. This is “where deconstruction would always begin to take shape as thinking of the gift and of undeconstructable justice”. 76 It is a justice beyond law and revenge, a justice of philia, 77 on a threshold where the dead and the living can coexist. Derrida proposes hauntology instead of ontology. According to Derrida, it needs a performative interpretation that changes/ transforms what it interprets. 78 Does Antigone reveal a kinship between theatre and philosophy? Yes, under the condition of a logics of listening, a listening to the family of the spectres. In this kind of kinship, catharsis has made place for a notion of mimesis that goes beyond the Platonic order of ideas: mimesis as the work of repeating occupancy (appropriation), a mimesis coming along with phusis as event: mimesis-= occupancy-= event (Aneignung- = Ereignung- = Ereignis). According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger ignored the event of mimesis when he placed the work of art in the midst of the agon between diké and techné, in order to reveal phusis. If one had at least listened to Aristotle, who claimed that mimesis is able to do what phusis is not: “to bring into work”. 79 This-- I would say-- can happen in the work of drama that performs the thinking of dramaturgy as a work of mourning. 74 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 1994 , p. 31 � 75 Id., p. 34 � 76 Id., p. 33 � 77 See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, London 2003 , and Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Chicago 1989 . Here, he further develops the questions dealing with justice as a gift and a project of deconstruction through the notion of philia� 78 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 1994 , p. 63 � 79 Aristotle, Physics: Book II, ed. William Charlton, Oxford 1984 , p. 8 , 199 a. <?page no="57"?> Against the Unwritten Laws. The Figure of Antigone and the Political Occupation of the Public Space Klaas Tindemans ( RITCS / School of Arts, Erasmus University College Brussels/ Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, AP University College) As in Sophocles’ Antigone, the symbolic impact of the rites of funeral, in a social and, most importantly, political sense, is the theme of the film Deutschland im Herbst, which can be considered as a cinematographic Trauerspiel. This episodic film was made in 1978 by Alexander Kluge and a team of German directors and deals with the political and societal climate under the threat of far-left terrorism in the German Federal Republic, which culminated in the events of October 1977 . The head of the West-German employers’ lobby, Hans-Martin Schleyer, was kidnapped by the Rote Armee Fraktion and finally assassinated. A Lufthansa airplane was hijacked by Palestinian RAF -allies and was subsequently liberated in a spectacular way by West-German elite soldiers in Mogadishu. In the end, the four imprisoned historical founders of the RAF allegedly committed suicide in their ultra-secured prison in Stammheim, Stuttgart. Kluge and his colleagues tried to evoke the atmosphere of this ‘leaden era’- - die bleierne Zeit, also the title of another film about this period by Margaretha von Trotta-- by putting their stories in the framework of three funerals: the state funeral of Schleyer, the controversial burial of the terrorists and, surprisingly, the official funeral of Marshal Erwin Rommel in 1944 . Rommel, who sympathized with the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944 , was forced by the Führer to commit suicide, but he was nevertheless granted an honourable interment. As it happens, Manfred Rommel, the Marshal’s only son, was the mayor of Stuttgart in 1977 and he decided, against popular voices, to bury Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan Carl Raspe in the official Dornhalden cemetery. 1. Antigone censored Before the documentary part on the Baader-Ensslin-Raspe-funeral was screened, a fictional episode called Die verschobene Antigone (The Delayed Antigone) was written by Heinrich Böll and directed by Volker Schlöndorff. This television adaptation of Sophocles’ play makes a direct link between Germany in 1977 and the icon of Antigone. The directors of the TV channel, however, were reluctant to broadcast it in the given circumstances: the play deals, after all, with ‘rebel- <?page no="58"?> 52 Against the Unwritten Laws lious wives’. The discussion focused on a disclaimer preceding the actual episode. The director paraphrases the famous “Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man” 1 (“Vieles Gewaltige lebt, und doch / Nichts gewaltiger denn der Mensch”, in the early nineteenth-century translation of K. W. F. Solger). 2 The German term Gewalt refers both to illegal violence and to legitimate power. The supervisors of the channel contended that it was precisely this ambiguity-- demonstrated by Walter Benjamin 3 - - together with the stylized phrasing of the line that risked to render the disclaimer ineffective. On the other hand, a matterof-fact disclaimer, affirming the dissociation from violence by all the crew members was perceived as ironic and thus counterproductive. The meeting decided to complete the production but also to reschedule its actual screening on television. After the meeting, the head of the channel asked, quite seriously, if the director manipulated the conclusion of the play-- to which Schlöndorff answered that he did not. This discussion about Antigone, the ‘terrorist wife’, is probably the clearest example of the iconic significance of the play and the heroine for a reflection-- any reflection-- on the meaning and the reach of political space as public space. 4 Since Heinrich Böll’s script is a short sketch, it leaves little room for asking how the public space of Antigone, in her political position, is exactly defined and circumscribed and, subsequently, what kind of political items are put on the agenda by her rebellious-- if that is the right term-- action. 2. Antigone’s public space In this article, I will reflect upon the public space as a political space, and upon the role the icon of Antigone, as the theatrical embodiment of a political heroine, could play on this agora. My argument will meander between historical assumptions, both theatrical and political, and contemporary philosophical ideas, with Hannah Arendt’s quest for a democratic political realm as connecting thread. The title of this article is a sloganesque summary of another preliminary assumption. Independently from any assessment of the ethical and tragic position of Creon, the tyrannical nature of his regime or the inherent justice of his defeat, the very reference to the existence of ‘unwritten laws’-- or to be more precise: ‘unwritten 1 Sophocles, "Antigone", in: Sophocles, I: Oedipus the King/ Oedipus at Colonus/ Antigone, by Sophocles, ed. F. Storr, Cambridge (Mass.)/ London 1981 , pp. 340 - 341 � 2 Sophocles, “Antigone”, edd. Michael Holzinger and K. W. F. Sorger, Berlin 2013 , l� 332 � 3 Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt", in: Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze, Frankfurt am Main 1965 , pp. 29 - 77 � 4 Isabel Capelao Gil, "L’automne d’Antigone. Le mythe grec et le ’deutscher Herbst’ ( 1977 )", in: Rose Duroux and Stéphanie Urdician (Edd.), Les Antigones contemporaines (de 1945 à nos jours), Clermont-Ferrand 2010 , pp. 307 - 319 � <?page no="59"?> Klaas Tindemans 53 and unshakeable customs of the gods’-- weakens Antigone’s position inasmuch as her objective consists in the creation of a political space. A public, political space needs written laws in order to frame itself, but it of course also needs an Antigone to occupy it. That is the very ambiguity of the tragedy of Antigone, and the question is whether her incarnation onstage remains relevant for Arendt’s political quest or desire. In the aftermath of the ‘German autumn’ of 1977 , German theatres were almost flooded with productions of Antigone. Adaptations of Antigone have been iconic throughout German history, 5 but in this particular momentum it seemed more than ever appropriate to revisit Sophocles’ tragedy. The public debates during these ‘leaden years’ had referred indeed more than once to tragic ambiguities, only to dismiss them as unhelpful for the unity needed to fight the threats to the nation. Politics went back to the basic assumption of Carl Schmitt that a clear distinction between friend and foe is required to affirm its fundamental legitimacy. 6 One of the most remarkable Antigone productions of this period, directed in 1978 by Christoph Nel in Frankfurt am Main, deeply undermines the classical, Hegelian assumption, quite dear to German dramaturgy (and to philosophy in general), of the philosophically balanced battle between the (religious) rights of the family and the (legal) rights of the state- - easily convertible into Schmitt’s distinction. Instead, Nel juxtaposed, in a completely different kind of dialectics, the banal and the sublime. Scenographer Erich Wonder had designed a black box on the stage, dominated by a moving bar of six metres long, filled with spots. This bar swayed in front of the spectators at every scene, thus blinding those sitting in front of it. Nel had chosen for the poetically brilliant translation of Hölderlin, which is condensed and hermetic. For further distanciation, the actors used scattered lines of the text, diminishing understandability also by close body contact. Hölderlin was almost ridiculously aestheticized, his poetry becoming a ruin of classical language, no longer a way of communication. In contrast to this, a chorus of popular, caricatural figures- - tourist, rocker, carnival prince, clown, etcetera- - launched dirty jokes and challenged any propriety and decorum the royal context of the tragic conflict could require. This chorus, in which Creon was integrated as some kind of despotic and whimsical gang leader, killed Antigone, a poor figure hardly conscious of the society she lived in and nevertheless fought against. 7 On a metatheatrical level, Nel’s Antigone dealt with the impossibility to consider Greek tragedy-- or Greek civilization in general-- as an intellectual message about actual possibilities 5 Erika Fischer-Lichte, "Politicizing Antigone", in: S. E. Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (Edd.), Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, Oxford 2010 , pp. 329 - 345 � 6 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Berlin 1963 (originally published in 1932 ). 7 Erika Fischer-Lichte, op. cit., 2010 , pp. 345 - 351 � <?page no="60"?> 54 Against the Unwritten Laws to create a public discourse- - a discourse about the reinvention of democracy after being challenged by unexpectedly violent opposition. In other words: the Frankfurt Antigone tried to demonstrate that the conflict between Antigone and Creon, once considered as the paradigm of a precarious political order based on the sovereignty of the nation, had lost its iconic value. Quite paradoxically, half a dozen Antigone productions in German theatre succeeded in undermining the symbol Antigone, insofar as she stood for the need for a public place for politics. Was this just a postmodern whim or should we reflect on the relationship between Antigone’s position and democratic political space more fundamentally? Three lines of thought will be developed around this question: A) Arendt’s political space and Antigone’s opening/ closing of it; B) the issue of mourning in Antigone; and C) the dramaturgical importance of the unwritten nature of her laws. 3. Hannah Arendt’s Antigone on the agora When Hannah Arendt develops the notion of ‘action’ in The Human Condition, she immediately refers to theatre, conceived of as a ‘mimesis of a praxis’, as did Aristotle. Arendt’s action means ‘drama’, and play-acting is actually an imitation of acting, of action. For her, ‘action’ means political action-- in contrast with the economic and social practices of ‘work’ and ‘labour’. 8 Precisely the difference between imitating characters and a reflective, ‘less imitating’ chorus, constitutes, in this analogy between skènè and agora, the essential meaning of a political space. The theatrical event, in this almost Brechtian interpretation of a dialectics between blind identification (of the tragic hero) and poetic distanciation (by the chorus), is a serious analogy, because theatre is the only form of art that needs the presence of others, both in its subject and in its execution. Theatre is the political sphere of human life transposed into art. 9 Interpreted as a historical account of Attic tragedy, such a statement may be seriously debatable, as is any suggestion of the simultaneous birth of theatre and democracy. 10 But more important for Arendt’s reasoning here is the concept of the true political space as a conscious ‘acting out’ of one’s relationships with others without any assurance of the result, not in discourse and not in practice. In On Revolution, she even more clearly makes the point that a political space is a space of freedom, freedom from economic and social responsibilities. Political liberty is the continuous reinvention of the basic conditions of action: that is the meaning of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in Thomas 8 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago 1958 , p. 187 � 9 Id., p. 188 � 10 Margherita Laera, Reaching Athens. Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Bern 2013 , pp. 210 - 215 � <?page no="61"?> Klaas Tindemans 55 Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and not entrepreneurial freedom. 11 For Arendt, the political realm has to create a space for ‘public freedom’ of speech and action and should not consider the substance of those speeches and those actions. This seems a rather strange conclusion in the age of ideologies, because ideology-- and critique of ideology-- precisely deals with the discursive (trans) formation of speech and action, with the (hegemonic) rules governing the production of meaning. What should we talk about on the agora, if not about economic and social policies? As Cecilia Sjöholm writes, it is precisely in the constitution of this abstract notion of the political space, of the agora, that the figure of Antigone becomes meaningful. In Oedipus at Colonus, she embodies the law of Athens, the foundational idea of politics based on the erasure of Oedipus as mythical hero: the grave as a constitutional scene. Antigone would have liked to follow her father there, but she has a political role to fulfil: she tries to ward off the battle between her brothers. 12 Her position in Antigone is in sharp contrast with this effort to legitimize the power of the polis in Oedipus at Colonus, but at second sight, her attempted burial of Polyneices is as foundational as before. Antigone turns against the law of Creon, against his kerygma, because it precisely lacks the foundational value Athens claimed in the other tragedy. Political Athens, in Oedipus at Colonus, is constituted by its sublimation of Oedipus’ death and the acceptance of the refugee in the city. To put it more abstractly: the exception of the exiles legitimizes the normality of the political community. This paradox could be called ‘divine law’, which is also an oxymoron. 13 In an essay first published in 1943 , We Refugees, Hannah Arendt tries to define the political potential of the position of the exile, the refugee. She explains that one of the main assets of Enlightenment, the principle of sovereignty, has become a monstrous weapon in the hand of those modern nations. The protection a nation provides for its citizens comes at the expense of the excluded, the others, the refugees, all reduced to “human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings” 14 -- they are reduced to bare life, in Giorgio Agamben’s terminology. Assimilated Jews were always the better patriots, Arendt notes with bitter irony. This contradiction is embodied by the double position of Antigone in the two plays: she legitimizes the nation- - Ath- 11 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York 1963 , pp. 126 - 128 � 12 Cecilia Sjöholm, "Naked Life; Arendt and the Exile at Colonus", in: S. E. Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (Edd.), Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, Oxford 2010 , p. 51 � 13 Id., p. 52 � 14 Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees", in: Marc Robinson (Ed.), Altogether Elsewhere. Writers on Exile, San Diego 1996 , pp. 118 � <?page no="62"?> 56 Against the Unwritten Laws ens-- as a political space, marked by the respect for the excluded Oedipus, and in a second move, she refers to the fundamental meaning of this same agora, as it has been de-legitimized by Creon’s kerygma, by his refusal to bury respectfully the excluded Polyneices. But it is not enough to assert that divine laws are protecting the political space, and thus the secular laws, 15 since that would beg the next question: what is the ground of these divine laws? And Sophocles’ Antigone indeed deals with this last issue, i. e. the nature of the foundational tautology, of a Grundnorm-- simply stating that ‘the law is the law’. 16 4. Bonnie Honig’s performative Antigone Before reflecting on this version of the ‘unwritten laws’, inspired by Hannah Arendt, a crucial detour should be taken. Bonnie Honig emphasizes the performative character of Arendt’s political vision. Humanity, as a political value, remains abstract until it is performed in speech and action. The political ‘speech act’, especially when it is foundational-- e. g. the Declaration of Independence-- is not constative. Since it constitutes by itself a political realm, it should not refer to a higher, non-legal truth legitimizing this constitution. 17 Here we come close to Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone’s ‘unwritten law’: a law that is not communicable, since speech requires-- in the context of Sophocles’ play-- a script. And public (=-written) law cannot do without this law, as it is the unpublishable condition of its own emergence. 18 In her own reading of Antigone, Honig concentrates on the political sense of mourning in the tragedy, in an effort to re-politicize the tragedy: from politics of lamentation to politics of lamentation. 19 She points out that Antigone’s act should be seen in a new regulatory context, dominated by the polis� These laws, initiated by Athens’ founding father Solon, are intended to deal with so-called ‘self-indulgent’ rituals of lament: choruses of wailing women, conspicuous grave hills, all focusing on the irreplaceability of the deceased. 20 The political goal is to transform those funeral rites into a national ceremony, which stresses the continuity of the political community and the value of citizenship. Nicole Loraux made a comparable point, although she focused on the funeral oration as a political genre with more or less hidden traces of a previous familyor clan-oriented 15 Cecilia Sjöholm, op. cit., 2010 , p. 66 � 16 Hans Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, Vienna 1960 , pp. 196 - 227 � 17 Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca/ London 1993 , pp. 98 - 99 � 18 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. Kinship between Life and Death, New York 2000 , pp. 38 - 39 � 19 Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge 2013 , p. 196 � 20 Id., pp. 100 - 101 � <?page no="63"?> Klaas Tindemans 57 society. 21 These funeral orations, with Pericles’ oration recorded by Thucydides as the most famous example, 22 inscribe this ceremony in an economy of substitution: the epitaph takes the place of the ‘Homeric’ mourning, henceforth considered as an aristocratic relic. 23 This is exactly the point where Antigone’s political action starts: she refuses to accept this ‘democratic’ logic and thus, consequently, refuses a law based upon an abstract notion of citizenship-- where every citizen is replaceable. In contrast, Creon fiercely defends the Periclean point of view, but the facts contradict his claim for interchangeability of citizens. If Antigone would reflect a conflict between Homeric and classical ‘democratic’ culture, it is tempting to see this ancient tragedy as an exemplary case of tragic ambiguity or, maybe worse, empty undecidability and thus to de-politicize the stake of the debate. 24 To be sure, this simple binary opposition is too simple, since political and cultural ambiguities are present in both ‘parties’. 25 But it would also be misleading to interpret Creon’s hegemonic position as a blunt refusal, out of national-democratic principles, to acknowledge the rival- - and thus debatable- - worldview of Antigone. On the contrary, Creon finally accepts the exceptional challenge the body of Polyneices confronted the city with, albeit after metaphysical catastrophe and great human loss. He erases himself, but at the same time this ruin creates a space to reflect upon the capacity of the political community to manage these devastating events by becoming conscious of the exceptional nature of its institutions. ‘Exceptional’ meaning: born out of exceptions- - an incestuous father, a double fratricide, estranged women- - and this in a double sense. These women- - Antigone and Ismene-- are strangers: although they possess an autochthonous pedigree, Oedipus’ fate has contaminated this certainty. And doubt about the autochthony of political actors causes a threat to the legitimacy of the political order as such: this is the theme of Euripides’ Ion� 26 But these women are also ‘alienated’ in the sense of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung: as women, as non-citizens, they represent and demonstrate more clearly, more ‘objectively’ the contradictions of exclusively male citizenship. 27 21 Nicole Loraux, L’invention d’Athènes. Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la ‘cité classique’, Paris 1983 � 22 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Books I and II, ed. Charles Forster Smith, Cambridge (Mass.)/ London 2003 , pp. 316 - 347 � 23 Bonnie Honig, op. cit., 2013 , pp. 102 - 103 � 24 Bonnie Honig, "Antigone’s Lament, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception", in: Political Theory ( 2009 ), p. 26 � 25 Bonnie Honig, op. cit., 2013 , p. 115 � 26 Klaas Tindemans, “De geboorteakte van de tragische held”, in: Frank Fleerackers (Ed.), Mens en recht. Essays tussen rechtstheorie en rechtspraktijk, Leuven 1996 , pp. 385 - 402 � 27 Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, ed. John Willett, London 1994 , pp. 76 - 77 � <?page no="64"?> 58 Against the Unwritten Laws 5. Florence Dupont’s a-political, musical Antigone On a purely formal level, a parallel could be drawn with a completely different, even anti-political analysis of Attic tragedy, the one proposed by Florence Dupont. In her crusade against the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics on western theatre, against this theatre conceived as ‘the imitation of an action’, 28 Dupont seems to disregard the political-critical character of tragedy performed in Athens: it is precisely the contingent imitation of the mythos-- both in text and in performance-- that challenges traditional worldviews and established institutions. 29 The written, transmitted text of a tragedy is, for Dupont, only the ‘insignificant’ remainder of a popular ritual, a contingent narrative intended to be forgotten. Tragedy is musical theatre, spoken parts are but ‘episodes’-- literally: between the chants-- of a much larger ritual performance. 30 In her interpretation of particular tragedies, such as the versions of the Electra myth by Aeschylus (Libation Bearers), Sophocles (Electra) and Euripides (Electra), the consequences are clear. The figure of Electra is not a mythical character: she is the specific embodiment of the lament, of the kommos, which is a musical form in the first place. The musical dynamic of the kommos, together with the ritual use of instruments and chants, drives the performance forward, the epeisodia are no more than clarifications and comments. 31 Dupont develops an anti-dramaturgical paradigm and refuses, more generally, to think together profoundly experienced ritual and the representation of fundamental political issues. Nevertheless, it could be interesting to consider the kommos in Antigone as an autonomous performative device, regardless of its poetry, but then in a more political sense. In the tragedies about Electra, the chorus represented a group of strangers (women, refugees) and their musical presence marked this ‘otherness’: they sang the old, ritual, ‘Homeric’ laments, and the kommos participated in it. At the same time, says Dupont, the audience identified with the emotional impact of ritual music, not with the characters, but that assertion is quite speculative. 32 However, if one compares this to Antigone, the situation is different, almost dialectical: the kommos of Antigone refers to a state of mind and to a counter-world no longer affected by the political community, whereas the chorus asks itself, throughout the play, if this polis is not fundamentally too vulnerable, as it is based upon autonomy and humanity. The dirge of Antigone, as a gesture, could thus be seen as a profound human presence, reduced to its unpolitical source-- no speech, 28 Florence Dupont, Aristote, ou, Le vampire du théâtre occidental, Paris 2007 , pp. 39 - 61 � 29 Nicole Loraux, Les Enfants d’Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes, Paris 1990 , p. 71 � 30 Florence Dupont, L’insignifiance tragique, Paris 2001 , pp. 11 - 29 � 31 Florence Dupont, op. cit., 2007 , pp. 261 - 302 � 32 Id., pp. 290 - 293 � <?page no="65"?> Klaas Tindemans 59 no action, in Arendt’s sense, just bare life. This is quite different from the political agon Creon and Antigone were engaged in at her trial. But against this ‘earthing’ of Antigone’s position, there is another important argument, to be found in the text of the dirge itself. Creon interrupts Antigone’s final lament, when she clearly prioritizes natal over conjugal kinship-- Polyneices over Haemon. After this interruption, she introduces the (in)famous argument of the irreplaceable brother: Had it been a husband dead I might have wed another, and have borne Another child, to take the dead child’s place. But, now my sire and mother both are dead, No second brother can be born for me. Thus by the law of conscience I was led To honour thee, dear brother. 33 These lines, which embarrassed commentators such as Goethe, 34 refer to Herodotus’ story of Intaphernes’ wife, who plead to the Persian king Darius, planning the execution of her whole family, in favour of her brother- - using exactly the same arguments. She succeeded to save her brother’s life and Darius also spared the life of her oldest son, as the tyrant was impressed by the reasonableness of her pleadings. 35 Bonnie Honig argues that it is precisely here that Antigone politicizes her condition, she shifts from lamentation to litigation. Antigone tries to force Creon-- she does not succeed, unfortunately-- to consider Polyneices’ (non-)burial in the larger context of replaceability in the political community, resulting in a movement from an economy of infinite vengeance to an economy of wants and satisfactions. 36 The political theatre-- in which Antigone continues to participate in her last moments-- shows an almost schizophrenic face: an abyssal lament-- the kommos until Creon’s interruption 37 -- and a calculated rationality. 6. The parrhesiastical Antigone Cornelius Castoriadis says that the distinction between divine and human laws is in fact a false one: a proper burial is a human obligation, and loyalty to the city, as Creon claims himself, is a divine commandment. It is the chorus which insists 33 Sophocles, op. cit., 1981 , pp. 384 - 385 (ll. 909 - 915 ). 34 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, ed. John Oxenford, Whitefish (Mont.) 2005 , p. 227 � 35 Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, ed. G. C. Macaulay, Book 3 , paragraph 119 , on: http: / / www.gutenberg.org/ files/ 2707/ 2707-h/ 2707-h.htm#link32H_4_0001 (accessed 08 . 05 . 2015 ). 36 Bonnie Honig, op. cit., 2013 , pp. 132 - 140 � 37 Sophocles, op. cit., 1981 , pp. 382 - 383 (ll. 883 - 890 ). <?page no="66"?> 60 Against the Unwritten Laws on the parallelism and the apparent contradiction. 38 Even in Honig’s analysis the ‘arrogance’ of Antigone and Creon remains uncontested: they both refuse, for opposite reasons, to treat each other as political equals. The question is, however, if they can escape from this framing by the chorus, well aware of the contingency of their political position. The political domain, says Castoriadis, is comprehensive, and thus a political decision should comprise and take into account all the relevant factors, political and non-political. 39 This includes laws- - nomima or customary rules is the term Antigone uses-- about which “no one knew whence they appeared”. If an institution claims its autonomy, both in its foundation and in its functioning, it cannot reduce itself to its positivity, to its procedural self-sufficiency. Here, Castoriadis seriously disagrees with Hannah Arendt, who excluded the substance of political action from the political space in itself and refused to define the societal impact of political liberty. He refers to the funeral oration of Pericles, which includes an ethical program that defines beauty and wisdom as public goods. 40 As mentioned before, the crucial issue remains whether Antigone’s insistence on the superiority of agrapta nomima strengthens her position in the political space or not. In other words: do her speech acts perform anything political? Her position is ‘parrhesiastical’, 41 ‘outspoken’ in a very precise sense, as an attitude demonstrating a particular political virtue: she refers to herself as the subject of speech, she reveals a truth and by doing so, she runs a deadly risk, face-to-face with a powerful person. Finally, she considers this action as a duty. In the agon, both parties also use specific terms denoting ‘justice’ and ‘law’, which refer both to ancient notions of divine justice as well as to contemporary types of regulation. Dikè with a capital is confronted with dikè without a capital, and the unwritten nature of the rules invoked by Antigone serves as some kind of umbilical cord to link secular laws to their archaic traditions. If she would have used the term agraphoi nomoi (‘unwritten laws’, the term Aristotle uses to describe a form of equity that balances strict legal rules), the issue would have been different, and maybe less convincing. 42 The material fact of being written or not is, in the legal sense, of less importance. What matters is the symbolic meaning of writing and the definition of the political space, or, put in another way, the theological residue of her cause. The ‘parrhesiastical’ position of Antigone, her manifestation 38 Cornelius Castoriadis, "La ’polis’ grecque et la création de la démocratie", in: Cornelius Castoriadis (Ed.), Domaines de l’homme. Les carrefours du labyrinthe 2, Paris 1986 , p. 376 � 39 Id., p. 378 � 40 Id., pp. 379 - 382 � 41 Michel Foucault, "Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia", ed. J. Pearson, 1999 , on: http: / / foucault.info/ documents/ parrhesia/ index.html (accessed 09 . 03 . 2015 ), lecture 1 : “The meaning of the word ‘parrhesia’”. 42 Klaas Tindemans, "‘And no one knows whence they appeared.’ Sophocles’ Antigone and the setting of the law", in: Current Legal Theory ( 1994 ), pp. 25 - 37 � <?page no="67"?> Klaas Tindemans 61 as pure performativity is of course independent of the constitutional status of the rules or laws she refers to: there was no such thing as a constitutional order or a formal hierarchy of norms in ancient Athens. By referring to a black hole of normativity- - “no one knows whence they appeared” 43 - - she warns against an interpretation of political liberty-- Creon’s liberty, as embodiment of the liberty of the newly founded political community; as having a mock-divine foundation; as an emanation of a well-defined political theology or natural justice. But a fundamental question remains open, and Castoriadis could be right in his critique of the abstract definition of the political realm by Arendt: Antigone deals with matters of life and death, Creon deals with matters of inclusion and exclusion, and these issues have substantial consequences. This tragic agon is about mourning, about burial, about citizenship, about exile, about equality and privileges, about freedom and its material conditions. And since political action consists of performative speech acts, especially for the ‘parrhesiastical’ Antigone, her physical presence embodies all this substance, as Tina Chanter has so eloquently demonstrated. 44 Unwritten laws are necessary to open up this space, but they have no substance. Scripta manent, the written word is the rule. Maybe the basic paradox of political theatricality is this one: that even this script requires incarnation to be substantial. A declaration of independence needs a hymn. Returning to the ‘leaden era’ of Germany, the representation of this political crisis in the persona of Antigone makes sense, but in a remarkable way. The paraphrases and interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone itself are not confronting the issue of political foundation-- on what basis does a society create its political space and realm? -- but different themes: political pragmatism and cowardice, confronted with the rebellious nature of Antigone (Böll/ Schlöndorff) or the defeat of the Bildungsideal insofar the German classical spirit has de-politicized tragedy (Nel). Only the structure of Deutschland im Herbst as a comprehensive performance deals with the ‘unwritten’ premises of political action: the deep respect for the dead, whether they are capitalist ex-Nazis (Schleyer), senseless terrorists (Baader, Ensslin and Raspe) or remorseful soldiers (Erwin Rommel). Not the hymn as a political (and performative) gesture, but the dirge. 43 This is my own translation of Sophocles, op. cit., 1981 , p. 348 (l. 457 ). 44 Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery, Albany 2011 , pp. 61 - 74 � <?page no="68"?> 62 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) 45 In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler critically comments on the most important interpretations of the eponymous heroine of one the best known Greek tragedies, namely those by Hegel, Lacan and Irigaray. 46 She refers to Antigone only to prove that at the turn of the twenty-first century, her legacy, just as the legacy of many other figures from antiquity and later epochs, should be radically redefined. This redefinition should be carried out in the interest of our contemporaries who define and interpret the relationship between art and politics in a unique way. One of the important reasons why Butler’s redefinition is so urgent is the fact that Antigone had never before been read as a proper political figure, whose speech acts and deeds have clear political implications, not only in the fictional world but also for the theatre audience. Her actions change together with the social and political circumstances in which Sophocles’ tragedy is staged and watched by various audiences. Hegel, for instance, understood Antigone as a literary figure that established a pre-political opposition of regressive kinship to an emergent politics and a progressive ethical order, both represented by Creon, whose authority as a king was based on principles of universality. Even if his reading was typical for the beginning of the nineteenth century, one century later, Lacan, in a sense, continued the Hegelian legacy in his Seminar VII , when he situated Antigone at the border between the spheres of the imaginary and the symbolic, between nature and culture, precisely where the social is inaugurated through a violent supersession of kinship. Surprisingly enough, even if Irigaray’s feminist approach to classical, patriarchal philosophy in Speculum of the Other Woman was thought to be radically subversive, Butler finds in her interpretation of Sophocles’ play a similar approach to those proposed by Hegel and Lacan. For Irigaray, as for her male predecessors, Antigone signifies the transition from the rule of maternity (i. e. kinship) to a rule of law based on paternity and not only this: as a matter of fact, Sophocles’ heroine marks the very inauguration of symbolic masculine authority. The subversive power of Antigone is therefore typical female power and as such it remains and should remain outside of the political to guarantee the source of 45 This text is the result of research within the framework of the project Unnatural Natures: Technoscientific and Artistic Performances in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Sztuczne natury: performanse technonaki i sztuki w XIX i XX wieku), conducted at the Polish National Science Center ( 2012 / 07 / B/ HS 2 / 01 295 ). 46 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. Kinship Between Life and Death, New York 2000 � <?page no="69"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 63 its power. For this reason, the representative function of Antigone in Irigaray’s writings finds itself in crisis and contrary to all her wishes, Sophocles’ heroine is entirely unable to represent any kind of efficient feminist politics, especially at the turn of the twenty-first century. No wonder that Butler’s own reading goes against the grain of all these critical interpretations. She argues that Antigone’s position within kinship structures has already been confounded by her incestuous legacies, on the level of both sex and gender: since Oedipus married his own mother, Antigone is at the same time his sister and daughter, consciously positioned and educated by him as more manly than her brothers. In Butler’s interpretation, she becomes a figure of political engagement at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, even if the kind of politics at stake here is primarily concerned with representation. Antigone therefore points not so much “to politics as a question of representation but to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed”. 47 Moreover, it is not by chance that in Antigone’s Claim, Butler regards Sophocles’ heroine not as an incarnation of kinship, but as its vital deformation and displacement, as a figure that throws the reigning regimes of politics and representation into crisis when, as a heroine of the tragedy, she refuses to obey any law that negates public recognition of her loss of her brother/ father. And it is not by chance that by the turn of twenty-first century, Butler tries to reopen the relationship between kinship and the reigning epistemic regimes of cultural intelligibility in order to search for a possibility of social transformation. She formulates this problem as the following question: “What new schemes of intelligibility make our loves legitimate and recognizable, our losses true losses? ” 48 Published in 2000 , Antigone’s Claim is made up of three lectures given by Judith Butler in May 1998 , at the University of California in Irvine. Significantly, many a time in her lectures, she outlines the context of her reassessment as a main factor that influences her reading and understanding of Sophocles’ heroine and her kinship trouble. As Butler is no classicist, and she openly admits this in her lectures, it was not a philological interest that has moved her once again to read the ancient tragedy and its canonical interpretations. For Butler, Antigone necessarily prefigures all those of her contemporaries whose losses from AIDS were deemed publicly ungrievable, because they perverted the regulations of normative kinship. It is in their name that she looks for a new concept of human relationships, new grounds for communicability and for liveable life. From today’s perspective, Antigone’s Claim bears testimony to this historical moment which effectively triggered a radically new, politically engaged reading of Sophocles’ tragedy. More 47 Id., p. 2 � 48 Id., p. 24 � <?page no="70"?> 64 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT than a decade later, it is clear that the immediate political context turned Butler’s attention away from a significant issue that we would like to address here. Even if in Antigone’s Claim she penetratingly questions the universality of structuralist rules, described by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship in the late 1940 s as the very basis of our idea of kinship, she nonetheless states that not only normative relations, but also the prohibited ones are encoded in the position that each family member occupies. Consequently, she puts aside any reconsideration of an ideal of a family as a basic structure of coded relations, both normative and prohibited, because she is primarily interested in the equal evaluation of all possible positions within that structure, of the political implications of this evaluation and of the impact it may have on social practices. In other words, although she dismantles the problematic and oppressive terms of kinship, she still upholds the notion of structure, based on binary distinctions, as a grid that defines relationships within family. Perhaps for this reason she puts forward the question that is, as a matter of fact, the leitmotiv of her entire interpretation: “What happened to the heirs of Oedipus? ” 49 After all, it is Oedipus, entangled in the trap of binary structures, who became the figure of subject-formation at the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, should we still, a century later, take this process of subject-formation for granted, without asking questions about the very basis of the modernist episteme, the concept of kinship included? For this reason, we would like to reconsider Butler’s reading of Sophocles’ tragedy with reference to contemporary popular culture, examining various versions of the figure of Antigone as present in the films Splice ( 2009 ) and Stoker ( 2013 ) as well as the television show Game of Thrones ( 2011 -present). We will look for examples of possible ways out of the trap of those structuralist presuppositions, and see if we can look for signs of the presence of Antigone’s heirs on the territory of contemporary popular culture. 1. The trap of structure First, we should consider another problem of considerable importance in this context. Even if Butler emphasizes that she does not intend to be a classicist, her reading provokes yet another question, significant in the context of current discussions of the political significance of academia. Are we dealing in the case of Antigone’s Claim only with a new reading of a Greek tragedy, important as a point of reference in a political manifesto, but nevertheless confined to the academy and deprived of a direct impact on our lives? Or can we perhaps find in contemporary culture evident proof that we are in fact the heirs of Oedipus who constantly 49 Id., p. 25 � <?page no="71"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 65 refuse to accept Antigone’s transgressive heritage? Butler has only assumed that “stable kinship norms support our abiding sense of culture’s intelligibility”. 50 This assumption can be found not only in the Lacanian discourse, but also outside it, such as in popular culture. To prove our point, we therefore would like to take a closer look at the Canadian-French science fiction movie Splice ( 2009 ), directed by Vincenzo Natali. At the core of the movie lies the normative Oedipal scenario as described by Freud in his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, and it is deployed in such a way that it imposes itself on viewers as the only way of reading the story. The action begins in a futurist laboratory of a big pharmaceutical company where a couple of genetic engineers hope to achieve fame by splicing together the DNA of different animal species to create hybrid animals for medical use. Faced with a prohibition on further research, engineers Clive and Elsa conduct in secret their own private experiments, blending human DNA with that of other animals. We witness one of the hybrids growing into adolescence at a vastly accelerated rate. Its development is reminiscent of typical stages of both animal evolution from amphibian through reptiles to mammals on a biological level and subsequently of the acculturation of a human child on a social level. Each stage of evolution is visibly marked by a moment of death when the creature’s organs fully stop to work. Not only does its double helix consist of hybrid DNA , but also its appearance bears traces of different animals: birdlike legs, a naked tail with a poisonous stinger, and big, insect-like wings hidden inside her body and outstretched for flight. Clive and Elsa name the hybrid Dren and in the course of the events, the three of them become a normal nuclear family. Moreover, Elsa has secretly donated her own DNA and is in this respect connected with Dren as her genetic next of kin. No wonder that the family starts to enact a typical Oedipal scenario, when Clive, driven by an inexplicable desire for his child that reminds him so much of young Elsa, commits incest. This event, however, initiates a series of unexpected role-reversals within the Oedipal structure. Dren, raised as a girl, turns after a moment of death into a demonic male and behaves accordingly, raping and impregnating his mother. We witness in Splice two parallel Oedipal scenarios and two parallel scenes of unconventional, incestuous sex, which quite perversely show twice the same Oedipal scenario, but turn our attention away from its usually overlooked arbitrariness. As mentioned above, before Dren turns into a male, she goes through a moment of death and, what is more, is buried by her parents. Nevertheless, instead of looking critically at the incest taboo, we as viewers still believe that we are dealing with the same body and subject, male and female at the same time, which 50 Id., p. 71 � <?page no="72"?> 66 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT only increases our disgust and abomination. Our feeling of abomination seems to be so strong that it does not allow us to consider that, as a matter of fact, Natali represented two different Oedipal scenarios, one after another, involving actually two different bodies. Thus the very source of abomination should be not so much Dren itself, but rather our culturally inherited convictions. Furthermore, Natali, who surely expected this kind of reaction, not only confirms for us the validity of the incest taboo, but also extends its reign to the entire animal kingdom and to different kinds of hybrids such as Dren. That is why the question put forward by Butler about the fate of the heirs of Oedipus refers, in a sense, to Dren as well, despite the indeterminacy of his/ her gender. The trap of structuralist presuppositions seems to be as much embedded in today’s readings of the European canon as in our own culturally influenced imagination and understanding of the world, both the real and fictional realm. The only way out of this trap is to take a step back and to reconsider whether we are actually obliged to see the fate of Oedipus as already sealed. It seems that Hélène Cixous thought otherwise when she embarked in 1978 on rewriting Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in her libretto for an opera entitled The Name of Oedipus: Song of the Forbidden Body, 51 subsequently staged at the Festival in Avignon. Quite unlike Butler in her reading of kinship as a structure of permitted and prohibited positions that each family member is supposed to occupy, Cixous considered Oedipus and Jocasta not as family members, “naturally” linked through their kinship, but as bodies that may or may not be forbidden, depending on the names they choose to refer to themselves. Some of the names indeed confirm the typical structure of kinship and consequently the incest taboo, but some do not, letting the heroes live their lives. In order to foreground this problem, Cixous significantly modifies the action of the original play by Sophocles in that she constructs the libretto of her opera around a single situation. Jocasta is waiting for Oedipus who went out to find the murderer of his father Laius. She fills the time by recollecting images of their past, partly described, partly enacted on the stage. In the finale, Jocasta kills herself, just as in the Greek version of the tragedy, but Oedipus refuses to blind himself for unintended patricide and incest. In this version of the ancient myth, the tragedy of Oedipus is not the fact that he committed all the atrocities against human nature, but the loss of the person who was both his beloved mother and wife. Cixous intentionally introduced this significant change in the original Oedipal scenario, because she wanted to criticize the oppressive heteronormative structures and reflect on the fundamental relationship between words and objects that lies at the core of this structure. The French title of the play, Le Nom d’Oedipe, is in fact a pun that encapsulates the reversal 51 Hélène Cixous, Le Nom d’Oedipe. Opéra tire de Chant du corps interdit, Paris 1978 � <?page no="73"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 67 of the original meaning of the Greek tragedy. Cixous not only writes about the name of Oedipus, but also about the “no” of Oedipus, his refusal to take the blame and to punish himself for it. Cixous links the protest against the dominance of heteronormative structures with a rebellion against the conventional binaries of the system of language, which Lacan regarded as a universal fate. At one point Jocasta says: I wanted to liberate names. All names that pretend to be gods; -[…] They force us to be docile. They pretend to be pure. Father, mother, truth, life, killing, guilt, debt, wife, truth, Husband, king, lineage, who can say who I am? Words rule us. 52 Thus Jocasta links the common usage of words with the dominant division of roles within the family and the social hierarchy. It is the system of names, the structural grid founded upon binaries that is identified with the plague that breaks out in Thebes. To protect Oedipus from the plague of names, Jocasta begs him before his departure from the city: No, Oedipus! Don’t be Oedipus-[…] Don’t be him Become yourself with me, For me, who is you for your own sake And I will tell you our real names. 53 Unlike the ancient Oedipus, the protagonist of Cixous’s play returns to Thebes no longer believing that the name “son” excludes the name “husband” and that the name “mother” excludes the name “wife”. In this version of the ancient myth, Oedipus triumphs over the city of Thebes and escapes from the trap of the myth. He comes to understand the real source of the plague and realizes that not everything that is considered real can be precisely named and not every name reflects the actual nature of human relationships. The subversive force of his gesture comes from his realization that the power over humans and non-humans comes from the ability to use and order names. That is why Cixous answered Butler’s question already cited here: “What new schemes of intelligibility make our loves legitimate and recognizable, our losses true losses? ”, 54 long before it was formulated, even if it was clearly a historically situated answer-- just as all the other given and possible answers to this question. 52 Id., p. 56 � 53 Id., p. 14 � 54 Judith Butler, op. cit., 2000 , p. 24 � <?page no="74"?> 68 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT 2. The one who is not one Since Cixous, the power of language to bring bodies to a heteronormative order has been contested throughout feminist, queer and transgender studies to demonstrate how names given to bodies violate or eliminate them from public view. At the same time, if we consider Cixous’s play on the one hand and Natali’s movie on the other, it becomes quite clear that an important change has taken place. For Cixous, language as an independent system was the very source of evil, a kind of prison for humankind we may try to escape from. Splice could not be interpreted in such a way. Rather than laying blame on language as a binary system for our oppression, it is our dependence on the inherited perspective, on the prevailing regime of knowledge that imprisons us. What should be stressed here is that it imprisons not only human intersex or transgendered bodies by making them invisible, but also any hybrid body that cannot be adjusted to normative categories. It suffices to read Gayle Salamon’s book Assuming a Body ( 2010 ) to see the consequences of the latter manner of thinking. 55 Salamon, like Butler, returns to antiquity as a source of the regime of knowledge that conditions today’s oppression towards transgender bodies. In her ingenious reading of Aristotle’s theory of categorization and its feminist rewriting by Luce Irigaray, Salamon brings to the foreground the mechanism of exclusion of non-normative bodies that fall beyond the scope of existing typologies of sexes. First of all, she refers to those passages from Book IV of Physics in which Aristotle defines place as the primary condition of both existence and movement. All things existing must have a place, and that which does not have its place, does not exist, like imaginary hybrid creatures such as the goat-stag or the sphinx. Or such as Oedipus, Antigone or Natali’s Dren, we might add. For Aristotle, place is a space where two bodies cannot exist simultaneously, just as air fills the place only when water has left it. The mythical mixed beings, so similar to Dren in Splice, do not exist, because the boundaries of their bodies contain a variety of different creatures, various species that cannot occupy the same space. “Place”, Aristotle writes, “is the boundary of the containing body at which it is in contact with the contained body”. 56 Very clearly, Salamon concludes, place is not so much a certain spatial territory, but rather a relation of proximity between two bodies that share the place, but necessarily have to respect their own physical boundaries. Aristotle, by establishing his epistemological paradigm, set up conditions for the possibility of being and non-being. He used the example of monstrous mythological hybrids as that which cannot be precisely categorized 55 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, New York 2010 , especially pp. 131 - 144 � 56 Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1 , ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton (New Jersey) 1984 , p. 360 � <?page no="75"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 69 and put in its proper place, as something that literally does not take place, and therefore cannot exist, or can only exist as an exemplary and forbidden exception that establishes the limit of the acceptable. In Assuming a Body, Salamon very perceptively demonstrates that it is the system of places understood as the dominant scheme of categorization, sanctioned by the common system of knowledge, that determines the visibility and existence of certain bodies, condemning others to punishable monstrosity. Also, it is this system of places that generates violence whenever a body does not neatly fit in any of the given categories, all the more since the Greek expression cata-agorein refers to the ancient agora (a public place) and exactly means “how to talk about or against something or someone in public”. Someone or something that does not fit into existing categories has no place in language and in public, and has therefore no right to have a liveable life. To illustrate this point, we can take a look at another normative narrative about the failed emancipation of a monstrous hybrid, this time in a more metaphorical sense: the film Stoker ( 2013 ) by the Korean director Park Chan-wook. A significant sequence in this respect is the one in which the eponymous heroine, eighteen year old India, shoots the sheriff of the town she lives in as an act of defiance towards the patriarchal order and its institutions. In this scene, she is presented as a product of her unconventional upbringing. She is wearing high heels given to her by her uncle as a birthday gift, her mother’s skirt and her father’s belt. Her clothes symbolise all the influences that shaped her and turned her into a cold-blooded murderer. At the same time, she is exemplary as someone who finds her freedom in the belief that all her deeds and wrongdoings result from her upbringing and as such can be justified. In other words, she is the product of her kinship structure. That is why within this framework, the story of India’s growing up becomes a typically Oedipal scenario in which two men struggle for the position of the Father within the structure of kinship in the Stoker family. The action starts with the death of India’s biological father, Richard, supposedly in a car crash. At the funeral, she is introduced to her uncle Charlie, who claims to have travelled round the world and has now decided to stay with India and support her emotionally unstable mother. Soon, it turns out that the romance with Mrs. Stoker is only a decoy to get close to her daughter, who quite unconsciously had been all her life growing up in the ominous shadow of her uncle. It eventually becomes clear that he spent all his life in mental institutions after having killed his and Richard’s younger brother, because he was jealous of Richard’s affection. Assumedly in an act of revenge for his confinement, he kept sending India long letters describing his imaginary journeys throughout the world. India’s father, fearing that his brother will come after her one day, taught her to defend herself by taking her out hunting. He did not foresee, however, that Charlie’s plan was not to kill India, but to bring her up as his accomplice, as his ‘spiritual daughter’. Not only does he kill his brother, he also <?page no="76"?> 70 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT brings the process of India’s upbringing to a conclusion. She seduces one of her school friends and together with Charlie they strangle him when the boy attempts to rape India. The outburst of violence triggers India’s first profound sexual experience, which introduces her to adulthood. Literally following the Oedipal scenario, she murders her uncle-father and upon leaving her home town, she shoots the sheriff, the guardian of the social order that produced the monstrous India, who nevertheless stops to look like a monster when we choose another perspective than the culturally inherited one. India, just like Antigone, has become a monster, a child of two fathers, because of the collapse of the kinship structure within which she was growing up. Brought up by her father to become a murderer, initiated to adulthood through a sexually charged relationship with her uncle and estranged from her depressive mother, she never learnt to sublimate her murderous instincts in a socially acceptable way. Unlike Antigone, however, she refused to ultimately sacrifice herself for the sake of the stability of the supposedly universal structure of kinship. Instead, she chose backlash, a terrorist form of revenge on the patriarchal structure that produced her as a monster. Antigone and India, both trapped in the same Oedipal scenario, thus become two sides of the same coin, one deciding to kill herself, the other deciding to kill others. Their very existence exposes the structure of kinship as normative and oppressive, but their decisions ultimately lead to the same end-- the outburst of violence as the outcome produced by the system of kinship founded on binary oppositions. And it is not by chance that we decided to confront the fate of both Antigone and India with each other. We should bear in mind that at the very beginning of her first lecture, Butler admitted that she had started to think about Sophocles’ heroine because the legacy of her defiance “appeared to be lost in the contemporary efforts to recast political opposition as legal plaint and to seek the legitimacy of the state in the espousal of feminist claims”. 57 Thus, Butler’s interpretation should be read as a call to finish collaborative efforts to create political opposition and confront the state. But the fate of India proves that the idea to confront and defy the state can turn out to be a dangerous trap too. At this juncture, we would therefore like to put forward the following question: are these two alternatives the only possible reactions to the collapse of kinship structures? And to what extent can we redefine kinship to see it less as a stable structure of binaries and more as a dynamic network of relationships? 57 Judith Butler, op. cit., 2000 , p. 1 � <?page no="77"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 71 3. Kinship and ANT We would like to look at kinship as an integral part of social bounds or a social network as described by Bruno Latour, the French sociologist of science and technology, in his Actor-Network Theory ( ANT ), presented in many of his works, but primarily in Reassembling the Social� 58 Latour began his research with studies of how scientific facts are constructed in laboratories and are socially constructed. After research on chosen cases from the history of science as well as typical experiments in today’s laboratories, he advanced the claim that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory. They can therefore not be seen separately from the instruments that measure them, the minds that interpret them and the language (or discourse) that describes them. All of these factors performatively call facts into being. That is why scientific activity is a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices (discursive practices included)-- in short, science is constructed not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. For Latour, sociology does not exist as an academic discipline among others, but as a specific way of looking at things and conceptualizing them and as a way of joining together that what is meant by ‘social’ and that what is meant by ‘science’ (a regime of knowledge). What is of utmost importance here is that ANT is not only conceived as a binary opposition to and negation of structure and structuralism, but also as something deprived of an unchangeable essence and of a stable structure; something that exists only through the means and media that allow to see it and approach it. In Reassembling the Social, Latour describes ANT as a kind of “circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society”. 59 These networks exist in a constant making and remaking. This means that relations need to be performed repeatedly, otherwise the network will dissolve. Social relations, in other words, are ever in process, and must be continuously repeated as to gain any substance. Therefore, a network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe a state of human and non-human interrelation, not the stable object to be described. We are here, in other words, closer to the perspective provided by Natali’s Splice than to that of Cixous’s The Name of Oedipus or Chan-wook’s Stoker, because from this point of view, it is no longer possible to put blame on others for what we are. This is all the more the case since ANT bids farewell to the philosophy of causality, which is typically applied in social sciences. This is first of all so because the actor mentioned in the name of the theory is not thought of as the source of action, but as the moving target of 58 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford 2005 � 59 Id., p. 89 � <?page no="78"?> 72 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT a vast array of entities swarming towards it. It is hard to say if he is acting or is acted upon. The question of agency remains open all the time. An actor in Latour’s ANT is what is made to act by many others and it changes every time when acted upon. “To use the word ‘actor’ means that it’s never clear who and what is acting when we act since an actor on stage is never alone in acting. Play-acting puts us immediately into a thick imbroglio where the question of who is carrying out the action has become unfathomable”. 60 As a consequence, in a world seen from the perspective of ANT , the utopia conceived by Cixous’s Jocasta is a reality. Both Oedipus-son and Oedipus-husband may exist at the same time as they are not anymore one body as a problematic, if not impossible, holder of two places in the structure of kinship, but indeed two different bodies, involved as mediators in different networks. For this very reason Latour sees no difference between human and non-human actors. Everyone and everything are the same kind of agent in a network of mediators as they have the same possibility of agency at their disposal. That is why there exists not only one network, but many possible networks, depending on the way somebody traces a flow of intermediations or translations, reconstructs traces left behind by some moving agent and begins anew with the passage of another one. This is convincingly put in his recent work An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, in which Latour definitely goes beyond subject/ object opposition by speaking about different modes of existence (law, science and religion among others), each defined by its specific mode of veridiction. 61 And even if he still would be more happy with the name “worknet” instead of “network”-- to emphasize the labour necessary to set up net-works-- his theory offers a chance to look for a transformation of how elements and epistemological grids can be understood, rather than a possible recombination of known elements. He conceives of epistemological grids as dominant schemes of categorization, sanctioned by the common system of knowledge and emphasizing its own coherence. The possibility of change has a lot to do with previous readings of Antigone, including Butler’s, since all of these interpretations depicted her as a kind of exception to both the pre-existing order of kinship and the larger order of a reasonably conceived world. Latour’s ANT allows a radically different perspective, one in which Antigone is not an exception anymore. Here she might even become a model of a body that could occupy many places, depending on the network it is momentarily included in. In such a reading, it becomes clear as well why Sophocles’ heroine, when speaking with Creon, chooses to refer to her brother without giving his name-- 60 Id., p. 46 � 61 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge 2013 � <?page no="79"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 73 Oedipus, Polyneices or Eteocles-- and mentions her father nowhere, a question that Butler left unanswered. The perspective offered by Latour and his ANT allows us to see that in this way Antigone frees herself from vertical, hierarchical dependences between parents and children, the typical source of the Oedipal complex. She feels herself freer in a dynamic network of horizontal relationships between siblings and, at the same time, as the network involves Oedipus as well, gives us the opportunity to look subversively at kinship as a stable, hierarchical structure, or in other words: as a prison. ANT of course remains a scientific theory with the ambition to introduce a paradigmatic change in our regimes of knowledge and therefore its influence is fairly limited. Nonetheless, in today’s popular culture, contrary to Butler’s assumptions, we may find many traces of similar changes that in a radical way put into question the very regimes and categories of knowledge that until recently have been unthinkable of. We have already referred to Aristotle and his impossible creatures, the goat-stag and the sphinx, and we will stay on the territory occupied by hybrids, in the realm of fairy tales and fantasy stories about trolls, demons, vampires, etc. Just like Antigone, who defied kinship structures, these creatures typically served as counter-examples to normatively categorized humans and animals. For this reason they always live “once upon a time, far far away”, from afar and indirectly confirming the normative order. The situation has been changing radically for the last decade and today these creatures live in our world as intersex and transgendered humans (even if as a rule they live peacefully only in fictional or mockumentary worlds). It suffices to recall novels, cartoons, television series, or movies such as True Blood, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, Gena Showalter’s Alice in Zombieland or other countless stories of different genres about vampires and zombies, which attempt to renegotiate the relationships between humans and various hybrid and non-human entities. At this point, we would like to take a look at a single example of such a renegotiation going on in popular culture, namely the immensely successful TV series Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin’s fantasy novels, in which heirs of a deformed or displaced kinship are shown side by side with other types of hybrids. 62 Martin’s epic tale revolves around a struggle for power among seven aristocratic houses in a fantasy world reminiscent of the Middle Ages, although this vision has 62 In his recent writings, Latour takes into account examples of popular culture, such as James Cameron’s movie Avatar and the TV series Star Trek. Latour’s latest book on the climate crisis and the concept of Gaia, refers at several instances to Game of Thrones, analyzing the declarations of identity, the objectives and the politic decisions that drive the protagonists’ struggle for power as points of departure for constructing a future peace. See Bruno Latour, Face à Gaȉa. Huit conférences sur le Nouveau Régime Climatique, Paris 2015 , especially chapter 5 , “Comment convoquer les différents peuples (de la nature)? ”. <?page no="80"?> 74 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT less to do with historical accounts, and more with fantasy worlds that we know from J. R. R. Tolkien’s prose. But the very construction of this fantastic reality bears visible traces of contemporary social and cultural conflicts. This world is divided into two continents, Westeros and Essos, which clearly refers to today’s tensions between the West in constant crisis and the East which is rapidly regaining its economic and political significance. Martin’s saga demonstrates the struggle for integrity of the land of Seven Kingdoms in the face of a political crisis. The story, however, is not a straightforward parable in which contemporary problems are mediated by imaginary events. Game of Thrones can be actualized in various cultural contexts, since it dramatizes the problem of the crisis of the old world, when the existing rules of exerting power have been undermined by those who so far have been excluded from society. The crisis of Seven Kingdoms begins at the moment when teenage king Geoffrey, born out of an incestuous relationship of queen Cersei and her twin brother Jamie, comes to the throne. There are other contestants in the struggle for power, who have so far been condemned to live on the margins of political life. The crisis of heteronormative kinship in the royal family starts other conflicts between those who until now have not been regarded as serious contestants in power struggles: banished bastards, unwanted sons and women, who have to take up the sword and fight in a world ruled by men. The medieval vision in Game of Thrones feeds on our fears born in the era of political upheavals and radical changes of dominant world views. Significantly, it is the East that becomes the cradle of the new epoch, because this is the place where dragons are reborn, although they were believed to have become extinct many centuries ago. They become the major weapon for Daenerys Targaryen, the daughter of the old king, exiled after her father’s death. And it is Daenerys’s story that provides a utopian alternative to the crumbling order, at the same time demonstrating the political power of non-normative renegotiation of kinship as a network in Latour’s meaning. From the very beginning of action, Daenerys is presented as a harbinger of a new era, and her story is that of a forceful break with traditional kinship ties. Her fate is also strongly reminiscent of Antigone’s. Daenerys was born out of an incestuous relationship on a stormy night on a Dragonstone, an ancient fossilized skeleton of a dragon that rests in the dungeons of the king’s castle. Later, she was forced by her brother to marry the chieftain of a powerful nomadic tribe. When due to a failed magical ritual he was left catatonic and Daenerys suffered a miscarriage, she strangled him out of mercy and mounted a funeral pyre taking with her three fossilized dragon eggs that she received as a wedding gift. But instead of dying, she emerged untouched by the fire with three new-born dragons in her arms and is accordingly called by her people ‘Mother of Dragons’. This ultimate demise of the old patriarchal structure is here very clearly shown as a beginning of a new era, a revolution in which kinship with its hierar- <?page no="81"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 75 chical and binary structure ceases to be guaranteed by natural ties and turns into a network of hybrid alliances between humans and non-humans. The political meaning of this revolution is confirmed later on, when Daenerys purchases an army of highly trained soldiers who are deprived of names and castrated, so that they would not succumb to bloodthirsty desires in battle. This primitive biotechnology turns them into man-machines, non-human entities, naked life subject to biopolitics. But Daenerys turns this anonymous mass into individuals by offering them freedom of will and allowing them to form their own hierarchy and choose their own commanders. It is this alliance of humans and non-humans, a non-hierarchical network of changeable relationships based on choice rather than being biologically determined by and culturally recognized as ‘natural’ kinship, that is presented in Game of Thrones as the beginning of a new era and as a remedy for the ongoing political and cultural crisis. A significant difference has to be emphasized here between the television show and Martin’s novel. Although popular culture was at its beginning a realm of pulp fiction that provided quite unrefined mass entertainment, today, it has become a field of formal experimentation of various kinds. The novel Game of Thrones is a case in point. The TV series obliterates this experimental edge, because it renders the events from a single, objective point of view. However, in Martin’s novel, each chapter is written from the point of view of one of the characters. As a consequence, the non-normative vision of the world is reflected on the formal level. The plot is dispersed into an array of fragmentary accounts, each presenting events from an individual subjective perspective. The reader is thus constantly reminded that it is virtually impossible to get to know the entirety of this fictional world and the multi-faceted storyline. The impression of coherence is actually the by-product of reading, it is in the eye of the beholder who puts the fable together from incoherent parts. Therefore the reader’s memory, preference for certain characters, his/ her familiarity with narrative conventions, etc. all play a part in the process of constructing this world in the act of reading. In other words: the reader becomes part of a dynamically changing network, both creating it and coming under its influence. We are far from treating Game of Thrones literally as a work that propounds a vision of a utopian future that gets rid of the old kinship structure as well as of old regimes of knowledge and all of their constraints. However, its dramatization of current political conflicts in a world before the scientific and industrial revolution can be read in line with those theses that Latour put forward in his work We Have Never Been Modern� 63 In his lengthy argument with Steven Shapin and 63 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge 1993 � <?page no="82"?> 76 Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump ( 1985 ), 64 Latour returns to a critical moment in the seventeenth century when the paradigm of science was set up together with Robert Boyle’s experimentation with the air pump and his concept of empirical scientific research based on distanced observation. But in his detailed account of the conflict between Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over the relationship between power and knowledge, Latour returns to the argument of the latter who criticized the Baconian paradigm of science for creating phenomena that do not exist in nature. It is in this context that Latour evokes Antigone, but for him she becomes dangerous the moment she emphasizes the importance of irrational piety over Creon’s ‘reason of state’. 65 For Latour, she becomes the figure of resistance to that power that allied itself with science to restrict the existence of hybrids that do not find their place in the scientifically sanctioned vision of reality. Although very appreciative of Shapin and Schaffer’s work, Latour argues with the final conclusion of their work that all scientific facts are man-made cultural constructions. Quite in line with ANT , he demonstrates that in fact our knowledge and scientific categorizations are not entirely man-made and that they are a result of a network of relationships and mediators-- a result of a mode of existence, as he would say today. After all, as Latour emphasizes, Boyle’s air pump also behaved in a specific way, its materiality reacted to the experiments, and it had to be amended and rebuilt to achieve a desired quality of experimentation. Not only Boyle and his assistants influenced its functioning, it also responded to their efforts and to their understanding of scientific veridiction. Therefore, Latour describes the entire laboratory set up by Boyle as a hybrid consisting of humans and non-humans; a hybrid that however allowed to discover that which came to be regarded as the law of nature. In the latter part of his book, he therefore strives to reconnect that which modernity tried to unravel: the world of nature and the world of social constructions. He conceives of a ‘Parliament of Things’ in which natural phenomena, social phenomena and discourse are not regarded as separate entities to be studied by specialists, but as hybrids made and scrutinized by the public interaction between humans, non-humans, objects and concepts. And although kinship structures are not primary subjects of study for Latour, from our point of view, ANT may help us evaluate them in a new way, in order to bring out a possible political meaning of their reformulation. In the examples that we have discussed in our paper, this political stance seems pretty straightforward in that they undermine in various ways the traditional categories of kinship and introduce characters that exist on the borderline of visibility and comprehensibility. In this respect, one can posit 64 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pomp: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton 2011 � 65 Bruno Latour, op. cit., 1993 , pp. 18 - 22 � <?page no="83"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 77 that contemporary popular culture is populated with the descendants of Antigone, who manage to escape the workings of kinship as a determining structure. They allow us to see kinship as a historical product of an anthropology of the moderns, based on the exclusion of all that was impure and that therefore did not fit into neatly conceived structural categories. After all, kinship in which cultural and natural conditioning is equally significant and which has been subjected to scientific, moral and political conceptualization is another hybrid, a compound of bodies, social practices, discourses and different modes of existence, the understanding of which goes far beyond a simple binary of nature and culture. <?page no="85"?> Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera 79 Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance <?page no="87"?> Tina Chanter 81 The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury Tina Chanter (Kingston University, London) This essay represents an effort to rework old ground in some ways, turning over, unearthing, exhuming once again the remains not so much of Polyneices’ corpse, which has already been unsettled, unearthed, too many times, not least at the hands of the guards who deliver Antigone to Creon. I ask not precisely about Antigone as the figure that remains outside of Hegel’s system, failing to be properly incorporated, but rather about the effects of her attempts to be heard on others, how her efforts to inscribe her burial of her brother as meaningful, legitimate and intelligible underwrite the marginalization of others. At the same time, I suggest that alongside and interwoven with the oppositions generally recognized as central to Antigone is another structuring theme that has been rendered less recognizable, in part because the question of whether or not certain lives are considered worthy of honour has been discounted in advance, so that the question of whether or how they might be granted funerary rites does not signify as noteworthy. We know from Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet that the Theban cycle is replete with word play, reversals, and ambiguities. 1 Yet there is a particular series of resonances and reverberations, enigmatic references that resound throughout the plays that have been peculiarly absent from commentary, or rather relegated to its margins. What this paper interrogates then is a particular pattern of silencing that haunts the official, philosophical narrative that has established itself around the text of Antigone. I sift through the interpretive history of the play to ask what that history casts aside, what it leaves unsaid, what it fails to see, that which it figures without thematizing or conceptualizing. 1. Antigone’s secret encryption One might say that encrypted within the tomb of Antigone, buried alive in the underground cave in which she lives out her last days, is a secret that she has been allowed to take with her to the grave. It is by now very well established that Sophocles’ Theban cycle of plays is centrally concerned with what we see and what we don’t see, with what we understand and what we fail to understand, with 1 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York 1998 , pp. 113 - 140 (the chapter “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex”). <?page no="88"?> 82 The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury that which we know, and with that which we characteristically, constitutionally fail to know. It is, then, about the failures of wisdom, the lapses of judgment that make us who we are, the partiality and limitations of what we take to be important and what we leave aside. Sophocles is concerned with the systematic failures of vision that structure the self-understanding of Oedipus, Antigone and Creon, with how their blindness and their vision construct their ethics, with how Tiresias, the blind prophet, sees in ways that go beyond what Oedipus and Creon take to be self-evident, immediate, indisputable and obvious facts. How then has a certain blindness persisted in Sophocles’ most eminent interpreters? Myths shape philosophy, figuring philosophical imaginaries in ways that have yet to be fully excavated or exhumed. The myth of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, has figured a certain philosophical and psychic heritage, one that has been handed down to the west through Freud’s narration of the Oedipal complex, and G. W. F. Hegel’s adumbration of Antigone in terms of a dichotomy that has staged an ethical heroine who pits the values of the rituals of mourning against those of the order and regulation of the state. A child of incest, Antigone sacrifices marriage, motherhood, and ultimately her life, a sacrifice that is recuperated, in Hegel’s narrative, by the necessity of stabilizing a social contract that requires her subordination. Yet, encrypted in this myth of Oedipus, the anti-hero, of Creon, the hero of the modern political state, and of Antigone, whose sacrificial act, dedicated to honouring her brother’s burial, has made her into a hero of sorts for feminist philosophy, lies another shadowy mythical figuring that has proved itself inaccessible. The celebration of ancient Greece, as the inaugural moment both of philosophy and of democracy (though the fact that this democracy was limited to free, adult males is not always remarked) gives rise to a philosophy that sets itself, in Hegel’s narrative, on a path of progressive self-consciousness, one in which the divergent, but equally valid ethical customs of which Hegel takes Antigone and Creon to be representative, come to be formalized as principles that settle into their proper place, according to a hierarchy in which the bonds uniting the kinship of family (aligned with Antigone and femininity) must be answerable to the welfare of the state (aligned with Creon and masculinity). The shadowy figuration that hides in the crevices of this celebratory tale of the twin births of democracy and philosophy, where the Sittlichkeit (ethical life) of the essentially pre-legal era of ancient Athens serves as both model and precursor of the modern European state, in which a more nuanced view of individual responsibility is said to emerge, reveals the complicity of the heroes philosophy has made of the Oedipal family with colonialism and slavery, a complicity that subtends the story we philosophers and critics continue to tell ourselves, even when we offer recuperative readings of Antigone. Such is the wager of this essay. Following Martin Heidegger’s meditation on the sense in which man is the strangest of all (to deinotaton), the most unheimlich, the trope of the uncanny has <?page no="89"?> Tina Chanter 83 marked the reception of Antigone� 2 Jacques Lacan also takes up the uncanny in his discussion of Antigone, where he provides a reading of the beauty and splendour of Antigone that rehearses the tendency of the tradition to fetishize Antigone. 3 Rather than allowing the oscillation inherent in the fetishization of Antigone, which informs Lacan’s reading of Antigone, to dictate my interpretation, where, on the one hand, she is figured by her dazzling beauty, admired in her splendour, and revered for her ethical stance, yet on the other hand she is domesticated, purified of the threat she represents to the established order when her character flouts the expectations of womanly conduct in ancient Greece, stepping out of line, I follow through the political logic of Antigone’s perpetual renaissance. For Hegel too, Antigone constituted the purest heroine of all, yet at the same time, his response to her intransigence was to contain, quell, or domesticate her unruliness. At a time when feminism threatens to challenge the established order, Hegel’s response is to tame Antigone’s radical edge. She is allowed to represent an ethical point of view, but that ethical point of view must be strictly circumscribed within the family, purified by religious piety, and must be made to understand its subordinate role to the state. Thus Hegel applauds Antigone as the most sublime play, only to echo the Kantian response to the sublime, by re-establishing a relationship of mastery to the disequilibrium Antigone’s intransigence causes. Hegel puts Antigone back in her place, contains her within domesticity, thereby defusing the terrifying visage of someone who appears to be so in love with death that she sacrifices everything for it, someone who will brook no opposition. It is as if, true to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Antigone as a figure of abjection, where sexual difference becomes the stumbling block on which the dialectical machine of thought founders, the threat that the feminine constitutes is tamed by Hegel’s substitutive manoeuvres. 4 Hegel deals with his sister, who threatens in ‘real life’ to become more than, other than, a sister, by disciplining Antigone, thereby sublimating, and taming his own desire. 5 While Hegel is at pains to emphasize the reciprocity of human and divine law, the way in which the nation proceeds from the family, and the way in which the self-conscious, ethical realm of citizenship emerges out of, and remains tied to and dependent on the unconscious netherworld, it nonetheless remains the case that a differential economy of consciousness organizes this apparent reciprocity, which is 2 The argument I develop in this essay, which I explore at greater length in Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery, New York 2011 , is as much a reworking of my own earlier readings of the figure of Antigone as it is of interpretations of others. 3 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vol. VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, London/ New York 1992 � 4 Jacques Derrida, Glas, Lincoln (Nebraska) 1986 , pp. 133 - 134 � 5 Derrida suggests that Hegel’s relationship with his sister, to whom he was very close, informs his reading of Antigone. <?page no="90"?> 84 The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury orchestrated in advance by a decision that has already been made in favour of the authority of the state over whatever claims might be made on behalf of the right of the family to mourn the dead. In Athens/ Thebes, this authority is negotiated not only in relation to sexual difference but also in relation to the differentiation of Greeks from non-Greeks, Europeans from non-Europeans, free citizen adult males from slave, barbarian non-citizens. In Hegel it is negotiated in relationship to the colonial wars of ancient Greece and modern Germany. Citizenship, therefore, is defined not only as the province of adult males, but as the product of adult, free, Greek males, and it is conferred through lines of kinship that require citizenship to be passed along through the bodies of women who are not themselves recognized as citizens, but whose Greek heritage enables their sons on becoming adults to attain citizenship. 2. Sexual difference and the occlusion of slavery Recent interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone have focused their attention on kinship and sexual difference. 6 Even as such interpretations engage polemically with Hegel, they also tend to reinscribe the opposition between state and family in terms of which he reads the tragedy. I argue here that while the question of kinship is clearly central to Antigone, it needs to be understood not only as a site in which tensions regarding familial obligations and those associated with sexual difference are negotiated in relation to the state, but also as a site of tension in terms of which the identity of slaves, foreigners, and enemies of the state are negotiated. 7 Antigone’s insistence on burying her brother Polyneices is articulated not merely on the basis of establishing him as a philos, a loved one, but also by distinguishing him from a doulos, a slave. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to Antigone’s argument that her brother is irreplaceable, and therefore deserving of burial notwithstanding Creon’s prohibition of his burial, in a way a husband or a son is not, Antigone’s differentiation of Polyneices from a slave has suffered relative neglect. Drawing on the historical context in which Sophocles constructed the Theban cycle, including the 451 / 0 BCE Periclean law concerning citizenship, and on textual details that establish the importance of slavery throughout the cycle, I suggest that kinship (genos) be understood within this context. A rich history of appropriations of Antigone- - including Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni: an African Antigone, and Athol Fugard, John Kani and 6 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York 2000 ; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca (New York) 1985 � 7 I develop the following argument in more detail in Tina Chanter, “Exhuming the Remains of Antigone’s Tragedy: The Encryption of Slavery”, in: Alistair Welchman (Ed.), Politics of Religion/ Religions of Politics, Dordrecht/ Heidelberg/ New York/ London 2015 , pp. 143 - 170 � <?page no="91"?> Tina Chanter 85 Winston Ntshona’s The Island-- has taken up the legacy of Antigone in ways that connect with, and illuminate this wider interpretation of kinship. 8 When a corpse becomes the ward of the state, the family is denied the right to mourn one of its own, a denial that can be seen as symptomatic of what Orlando Patterson has called the social death an individual suffered in life, through being regarded as a terrorist or slave. 9 Across the ages, and throughout the continents, the logic of Antigone’s multiple dramatic rebirths allows a confrontation with the way in which readings of Antigone that draw on the logic of the excluded other, to the exclusion of thinking citizenship against the context of slavery, repeat the occlusion of slavery that Hegel’s discussion of Antigone effects. To the extent that this logic remains confined by a Greek/ European philosophical/ political point of view that privileges both a subject of rationality and the pre-rational inscribed or encrypted within it, it proceeds in such a way as to defensively screen or shield an even greater threat of disequilibrium than that posed by woman as the “everlasting irony of the community”. 10 The extraordinarily rich theatrical rebirth of Antigone in different political circumstances, across continents, helps illuminate the dearth of western philosophical reflection on the significance of the threat of the colonial other, which the institutions of slavery and colonialism set out to tame. The international, post-colonial, literary, theatrical, dramatic tradition that infuses new life into the figure of Antigone every time she enters the stage, each time she is put to death and reborn, as she rises again with every new production, at the same sheds light on slavery as the repressed other of the tale that western philosophy tells itself about the tragedy of Antigone. The significance of this tragic marginalization of slavery is reflected in the fact that again and again playwrights have turned to Antigone in racially combustible situations, not the least of which is Fémi Òsófisan’s profound meditation on the figure of Antigone, who, having travelled the roads of history, confronts so many dangers that she has to be accompanied by bodyguards. After all, her dramatic performance always closes with her death offstage, shrouded in mystery. What are we to make of the fact that so much scholarship has been devoted to the authenticity and meaning of the issue of irreplaceability-- Antigone’s claim that she would not have violated the law to bury a husband or a son, only for her brother Polyneices, who cannot be replaced-- but so little attention has been paid 8 Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes: A version of Sophocles’ Antigone, New York 2004 ; Fémi Òsófisan, Tègònni: an African Antigone, Abuja 1999 ; The Island, in: Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, Statements, Oxford 1974 � 9 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard 1982 � 10 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1979 , p. 288 ; G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Hamburg 1952 , p. 340 � <?page no="92"?> 86 The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury to another differentiation Antigone makes, when she distinguishes Polyneices from a slave? The context in which Hegel, Derrida, Lacan, and others have treated the question of Polyneices’ irreplaceability is that of familial blood relation and sexual difference, and the definition of ethics that distinguishes the familial, and specifically feminine, duty of burial, from the ethics that characterizes the masculine community, citizenship, and the nation. The context in which this paper addresses the issue of irreplaceability is in terms of the claim that slavery and sexual difference are intrinsically connected with one another. If familial sexual difference constitutes the remains, the residue, of Hegel’s dialectical thought, that which cannot be fully digested by metaphysics, slavery constitutes the still more resistant, even more radically excluded, element of the thought that thinks these remains. The word doulos is not even translated as ‘slave’ in many translations of Antigone, as if there had been a deliberate writing out of the issue of slavery, by the tradition. This is in keeping with Hegel’s argument in the Aesthetics to the effect that slavery was not a suitable topic for tragedy, an argument that both detracts from the extent to which slavery was in fact broached by the tragic poets, and functions to dissuade future exploration of slavery, both as an extant theme in ancient tragedy, and as a dramatic theme for dramatists appropriating tragedy in new contexts. 11 Perhaps, contrary to received wisdom, tragedy is not dead after all; perhaps those dramatists who appropriate the tragedy of Antigone in ways that expose the abuses of colonialism and slavery can help shed light on Sophocles’ Antigone, by bringing to light aspects of tragedy present in its original incarnation, but covered over by an interpretative tradition. British colonization, and the spectre of slavery, provide the backdrop against which Tègònni: An African Antigone, by the Nigerian playwright Òsófisan, unfolds. Antigone arrives on the scene late, having survived the hazardous roads of history. Òsófisan is thinking through both the way in which Antigone has become an inspirational figure for so many, having made so many appearances in diverse political contexts throughout history, a figure who fights for freedom, justice and truth in the face of corrupt regimes, whether Nazism or apartheid, the Dirty War of Argentina, or the collusion of corrupt officials with European multinational oil corporations in postcolonial Nigeria. Not only is Òsófisan thinking through Antigone’s legacy as inspirational for freedom fighters; he is also thinking through Antigone’s implication in a European, colonial history-- a European colonial history and consciousness that, it turns out, has inflected the philosophical 11 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1 , ed. T. M. Knox, Oxford 1988 , pp. 208 - 211 ; G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 2 , Frankfurt am Main 1970 , pp. 272 - 275 � <?page no="93"?> Tina Chanter 87 and psychoanalytic reception of Antigone, not least as it has been handed down to us from Hegel. 12 This implication includes thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan and Butler, whose responses to the play, although in crucial respects taking their distance from Hegel, are still oriented to the very categories that Hegel’s reading of the play privileges, when he aligns Creon with the state and Antigone with family/ kinship. Even as, in her important work, Antigone’s Claim, Butler complicates how these categories should be understood, arguing that they are inextricably implicated in one another, she still retains them as central categories, and in this sense reinscribes them. 3. Expanding the parameters of kinship to include slavery While kinship, configured in relation to the familial, is certainly central to Antigone, it also bears upon the question of who is a slave, and who is free. Once the importance of such questions is established, it also becomes clear that the parameters within which issues of kinship are usually treated with regard to the play need to be expanded. Like the term Geschlecht (as Derrida has pointed out), among the connotations of the word genos is not only kinship but also race. 13 The generational confusion into which Oedipus has thrown his offspring, by committing incest with his mother, Jocasta, ramifies beyond his immediate kin. Referring to the 450 / 1 BCE law that Pericles established, requiring that in order to qualify as Athenian, both one’s father and mother must be Athenian, Jean-Pierre Vernant observes that Pericles’ law “officially prohibited marriage between Athenians and foreigners” and thereby formalized “a marked tendency toward family endogamy” 12 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 to 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 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. 13 Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand”, in: John Sallis (Ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Philosophy, Chicago 1987 , p. 162 � <?page no="94"?> 88 The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury and away from exogamy that had been extant for some time in Athens. 14 Following Sheila Murnaghan, William Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett link the Periclean law, which echoes the Thucydidean funeral oration, to Antigone’s argument about the replaceability of a husband or son: “From the viewpoint of marriage as an institution, one husband is as good as another. This is the rationale behind Pericles’ law on citizenship of 451 B. C.: the dêmos cares nothing for the emotional bonds in marriage but only that the man and the woman be Athenians”. 15 Murnaghan points out that in characterizing a husband in terms of the “abstract role that could be played by several different men”, Antigone is actually echoing the terms that Creon had employed earlier, when he invokes the image that there are other fields to plough. 16 The same logic of substitution informs the hoplite formation, in which if one warrior fell, another would step up to the line of defence created by the soldiers’ shields to take his place; 17 Hegel’s reference to the need for loyal soldiers to defend the polis fits in seamlessly with such a logic. It is also within this context that Hegel’s understanding of the irreplaceability of the brother for the sister would have to be revisited. 18 Murnaghan contrasts the affection with which Antigone reveres her brother with the interchangeability of husbands that Pericles’ law implies. 19 It emerges, then, that Sophocles writes the Oedipal cycle in a context where marriage practices in Athens have become increasingly endogamous, where Pericles’ law formulates marriage-- or rather (since some critics dispute that the law concerned marriage as such) the requirements for citizenship-- in such a way as to abstract from any emotional bond, and to emphasize the substitutability of husbands, as long as they are Athenian. This interchangeability is echoed by the way in which men were viewed as warriors who were expected to defend the polis, an interchangeability that extended to burial practices. 20 Antigone’s reference to the irreplaceability of her brother is neither symptomatic of her callous extremity, nor of her failure to consistently uphold the very values of philia with 14 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, New York 1990 , p. 67 . Others have pointed out that the law did not so much concern marriage as such, but only stipulated that one’s parents on both sides should be Athenian in order for the claim of an Athenian to be considered legitimate. 15 William Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone, Lanham (Maryland) 1998 , p. 114 � 16 Sheila Murnaghan, “Antigone and the Institution of Marriage”, in: The American Journal of Philology 107 ( 1986 ), pp. 198 - 206 � 17 William Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, op. cit., 1998 , p. 115 � 18 G. W. F. Hegel, op. cit., 1979 , p. 275 ; G. W. F. Hegel, op. cit., 1952 , p. 327 � 19 See Alan L. Boegehold, “Perikles’ Citizenship Law of 450 / 1 BC”, in: Alan L. Boegehold and Adele C. Scafuro (Edd.), Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology, Baltimore 1994 , pp. 57 - 66 � Boegehold dismisses the effort to link the law to racial purity. 20 William Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, op. cit., 1998 , p. 115 � <?page no="95"?> Tina Chanter 89 which she aligns herself (as it is sometimes interpreted), but is rather a refusal to apply to her brother Polyneices the very logic that Creon displays in his crude (but not uncommon) image that his son can find another furrow (wife) to plough, an image that conjures up myths of autochthony at the same time as it reduces women to mere reproductive vessels, good for little else than conferring legitimate citizenship on sons, conduits of citizenship, the privileges of which are exclusive of women themselves. 21 As critics such as Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz have pointed out, “although Athenian women had no political rights they were essential for passing on citizenship to their sons”. 22 Yet none of the critics from which this picture emerges-- neither Vernant, nor Murnaghan, neither Bennett and Tyrell, nor Rabinowitz, have picked up on the salience of the Periclean law, which impinged not only on Pericles, but also on Sophocles’ family-- and the implicit reference Sophocles makes to it in Antigone-- for slavery. It is not just the interchangeability of bodies to which Antigone objects, nor the violation of the right typically granted to kin to honour their dead that Heaney taps into (although it is this too); Antigone also answers to an imperative to reserve the rights of burial for her brother, whom she distinguishes from a slave; in doing so she is asserting at the same time that she herself is no slave. 23 The stakes for Antigone in such a distinction are high; she is concerned not merely to honour her brother, but also to distinguish herself from the slavishness Creon imputes both to Polyneices and to Antigone herself, and even to Haemon, in as much as Haemon remains loyal to her. There was considerable slippage in the Greek imaginary between the status of slaves and that of women, such that the alleged slavishness of barbarians was established in part by their imputed effeminacy; women’s ostensible inferiority was thus used as a ground upon which to establish the ostensible inferiority of slaves to free men. Thus, the very fact that Antigone insists on enunciating a principle-- indeed the very fact that Sophocles’ Antigone has her voice heard at all-- even if her character would have been played by a male actor-- offers a challenge to the popular relegation of women to a locus that has no purchase on politics, and no relevance for the public arena. Yet in establishing her own right to enunciate as a principle the divine, familial dictate that requires the proper burial of her brother, Antigone denies that any such principle should be extended to slaves, thereby making her claim only at the expense of affirming the inferiority of slaves, and 21 Nicole Loraux, Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, Ithaca (New York) 2000 � 22 Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women, Ithaca (New York) 1993 , p. 3 � 23 See Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, Oxford 2002 . See also Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life, London/ New York 1989 � <?page no="96"?> 90 The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury inscribing Polyneices within the community of human law, understood as a human community that excludes slaves from its humanity. When Plutarch reports on Pericles’ law, he does so in the context of relating how, having established the law, Pericles, on the death of his “only remaining legitimate son”, pleaded for its suspension in his own case-- a plea to which the Athenians acceded. Plutarch explains that Pericles “asked this so that the name and lineage of his house should not die out for want of an heir”. 24 Plutarch also relates that when the law was introduced there followed “a long succession of lawsuits-[…] brought against those whose birth was illegitimate according to Pericles’ law”, lawsuits occasioned by a gift of grain from the king of Egypt “to be distributed among the citizens”. A direct result of the law was, Plutarch continues, that “nearly five thousand people were convicted and sold into slavery”. 25 Pericles’ law, which, according to Aristotle, was instituted because there were “too many Athenians”-- a rather “elliptica[l]” explanation, as Alan Boegehold notes-- thus turns out to have had severe repercussions for many Athenians, whose claim to be Athenian had gone previously uncontested; so severe, that they became slaves. 26 Glossing Creon’s argument to Haemon in Antigone that “[t]he fields of others are fit for the plow”, 27 Tyrrell and Bennett say “the parties in marriage are replaceable, and its ties, unlike those of blood kinship, can be made and unmade [my emphasis, TC ]”. 28 Taking up the sense in which even kinship ties can be made and unmade, Mary Beth Mader thinks through the familial confusion into which Oedipus’ incest had thrown his generational line. 29 She does so by addressing Goethe’s hope that one day the famous irreplaceability passage would be proven spurious. 30 Contra Goethe, Mader argues that Antigone’s insistence on burying Polyneices was an attempt to make him a brother and only a brother, thereby disambiguating him from the other familial roles which his father’s incest had coalesced. Asking after the implications of Mader’s argument- - which has the not inconsiderable merit of taking Antigone at her word, rather than wishing the argument could be proved spurious-- not only for the legitimacy of symbolic, familial roles, but also for the lines of descent that qualify a king as king, that qualify, in this instance, Creon as king on the death of Polyneices and Eteocles- - I expand the orbit of 24 Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert, Harmondsworth 1960 , p. 203 � 25 Id., pp. 203 - 4 � 26 Alan L. Boegehold, op. cit., 1994 , p. 57 � 27 Sophocles, Antigone, ed. Andrew Brown, Warminster 1987 , l� 569 , quoted in: William Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, op. cit., 1998 , p. 114 � 28 William Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, op. cit., 1998 , p. 114 � 29 Mary Beth Mader, “Antigone’s Line”, in: Bulletin de la société Américaine de philosophie de langue Française 14 , 2 ( 2005 ), pp. 1 - 32 � 30 Quoted in William Blake Tyrrell and Larry Bennett, op. cit., 1998 , pp. 112 - 3 � <?page no="97"?> Tina Chanter 91 Mader’s interrogation to include heredity as it affects the political realm. As Butler points out, Antigone insists not only on burying Polyneices, but in publicizing her act of defiance, and in doing so she defies the expectation that women play no part in politics. At the same time (and this is not an aspect that Butler emphasizes), she challenges Creon’s sovereignty. In effect, she proves herself more adept at understanding the relation of interdependency of polis and oikos than Creon (and in doing so, shows herself to be more of a Hegelian than Hegel can bring himself to admit! ). In this sense, she proves herself to be a more worthy inheritor of the throne than Creon, except, of course, her character is created in a culture that would not have countenanced a woman’s political leadership, in a culture where women were not deemed worthy of citizenship, let alone government. Yet Antigone’s justification of her burial of Polyneices, her appeal to the sanctity of the bonds of philia, bonds that also prove to be decisive for determining the sovereign authority of Thebes, takes shape and is heard only at the price of corroborating the inferior status of slaves. A slave would not deserve the honour of burial, nor would a slave elicit Antigone’s violation of Creon’s law, but Antigone’s brother, Polyneices, does. Antigone disambiguates Polyneices not only from a potential son or husband, but also from a slave, a disambiguation which echoes a thematic concern that, once one begins to look for it, shows up throughout the Oedipus cycle. Sophocles’ concern with genos is not restricted to a narrow understanding of kinship, but extends to the differentiation of citizens from non-citizens, freemen from slaves, and Greeks from barbarians. The very clarity that Antigone seeks in ensuring that her brother is recognized as her brother, precisely her anxiety in preserving or reinstating the difference between brother and uncle, is also a way of distinguishing between her family lineage and the deracination of slaves, what Orlando Patterson describes as “social death”, 31 a fate that Oedipus himself narrowly avoided. In exposing Oedipus, in order to avert an oracle, Laius and Jocasta transgress Theban law. Had Oedipus been given to magistrates, to be sold into slavery- - which would have followed a pattern that was not uncommon-- there would have been no such transgression. When Oedipus avoids the fate of abandonment as an infant on Mount Cithaeron, saved from exposure by a shepherd, his feet are bound together. The bodily integrity usually reserved for freemen, for citizens, and which the Greeks held dear-- although beating and torture of slaves was commonplace-- is thereby violated, a violation that Oedipus mimics when he casts out his own eyes. The boundary separating freemen and slaves is also invoked when Oedipus expresses his fear that the mystery surrounding his origins might conceal his lowly birth. Even the Sphinx’s riddle concerning the number of feet man has can be 31 Orlando Patterson, op.cit., 1982 � <?page no="98"?> 92 The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury seen to corroborate the central theme of slavery in relation to Oedipus’s identity (and thus its pertinence for the identity of his children). When we contextualize the term andropodon, a term that “unambiguously” designated slaves, which was formed “by analogy with” tetrapoda (four-footed things), a term used commonly for cattle, and as such, according to Cartledge, clearly imputing sub-humanity to slaves, the riddle of the Sphinx, which goes unanswered, is put in a new light. 32 Antigone’s insistence upon burying her brother takes shape as the effort to preserve his humanity, a humanity that is won, however, at the price of reinscribing the distinctly questionable humanity accorded by freemen to slaves. Her insistence is informed by the cultural representation of barbarians- - Cartledge and Edith Hall, among others, have commented on the elision between barbarians and slaves in Greek thought-- as exposing their dead on funeral pyres, where the corpses were to be stripped by carrion birds. 33 While the evidence points to this representation serving the mythical imaginary perpetuated by Greeks in order to other barbarians-- to subject them to a process of othering-- rather than reflecting a consistent practice, the fact remains that nonetheless, in the popular Greek imaginary, the Zoroastrian exposure of corpses is played out, and informs Antigone’s anxiety that Polyneices receives a proper-- read Greek, non-barbarian (non-Persian), free-- burial. 4. Concluding reflections Consider the picture that can be built up from this accumulation of details: the ease with which Oedipus might have been a slave, his concern that the spectre of slavery does indeed haunt the circumstances of his birth, his bodily impairment, Antigone’s anxiety that Polyneices not be treated like a slave in death, her consequent insistence on distinguishing him from a slave in order to honour him, the pervasive, if mythically hyperbolic representation of barbarian practices of exposing corpses against which the tragedy of Antigone unfolds, and the reminder of how precarious freedom was when so many Athenians found themselves sold into slavery as a result of Pericles’ law-- a law that he successfully argued should be suspended in his own case, a law that is also said to have affected Sophocles’ own family. Consider also the exchanges in the play, including the insult that Creon 32 Paul Cartledge, op. cit., 2002 , p. 151 . See also Frederick Ahl, Two Faces of Oedipus: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Seneca’s Oedipus, Ithaca (New York) 2008 . Consider this in the context of arguments circulating concerning slaves as ensouled property, property barely distinguished from four footed animals, a status that renders the humanity of slaves distinctly questionable (see also Paul Cartledge, op. cit., 2002 , pp. 136 and 151 ). 33 Paul Cartledge, op. cit., 2002 ; Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy, Oxford 1989 � <?page no="99"?> Tina Chanter 93 directs at Haemon, whom he calls a woman’s slave, and the significance of the Sphinx’s riddle in relation to the differentiation of animals from humans with regard to slavery. Given this accumulation, the suggestion that the parameters within which the Oedipus cycle has been interpreted need revisiting, begins to look more than plausible. It begins to look as if those shadowy others, marginalized by the reception of Antigone, the slaves to whom Sophocles, is, after all, indebted for the leisure time to create the play, inhabit it in ways that have not been fully recognized. To acknowledge their shadowy presence is to begin to articulate not only the ways in which the presence of slavery haunts the tragic drama of ancient Greece, but also the ways in which new world slavery and colonialism continue to haunt modern and contemporary western interpretations of Antigone, interpretations to which the system of chattel slavery that helped to make the Athens we celebrate what it was, remains insignificant, and for which the slaves that facilitated the leisure of free men to create tragic dramas remain invisible. <?page no="100"?> 94 Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations Wumi Raji (Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife) In “Africanizing Antigone: Postcolonial Discourse and Strategies of Indigenizing a Western Classic”, which I published in the Winter 2005 edition of Research in African Literatures, 1 I contended that adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone have always centralized the question of political repression and agitations for freedom. This point is obvious enough, and I went on to cite Christian Meier who states in his book, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy, that tragedy and politics appeared to be closely bonded in the Athenian state of fifth century BCE . With regards to my specific concern in the essay, I had argued that Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni, which was first staged at Emory University (Atlanta, USA) in 1994 , much like these other adaptations of the Greek tragedy, focuses on the issues of authoritarianism and tyranny in political leadership, and a people’s struggle to free themselves from such aberrations. The play is studied in comparison with Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island, another African adaptation of the same Greek play which was first staged in 1973 in the context of anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa. Specifically in that essay, Tègònni was located within the context of the Nigerian crisis of 1993 and 1994 , which was a case of military usurpation of political power and, to be more precise, the unjustified annulment of a presidential election. I still believe in the validity of the position I expressed in this earlier paper. There is no questioning the fact that the original Antigone example as dramatized in Sophocles’ play of the same title continues to provide inspiration for artists and writers searching for a metaphor appropriate for denouncing totalitarian tendencies in political leadership in different parts of the world, and that it serves Òsófisan well in Tègònni. I have, however, observed that this clearly legitimate obsession has over the years continued to block, if inadvertently, more subtle interpretations to which different variants of Antigone could be subjected, and it is for this reason that I have decided to return to Òsófisan’s own adaptation in this paper. This time around, I am taking it together with Sophocles’ original. Both plays are tragedies, even if of different kinds, and a love story is critical to the unravelling of the conflicts in each of them. In this paper, my concern is to undertake a comparative exploration of the formal and visionary continuities and 1 Wumi Raji, “Africanizing Antigone: Postcolonial Discourse and Strategies of Indigenizing a Western Classic”, in: Research in African Literatures 36 , 4 ( 2005 ), pp. 135 - 154 � <?page no="101"?> Wumi Raji 95 transformations between these two related tragedies, where one has been inspired by the other. Focusing specifically on the private theme of inter-racial love, as opposed to that of political dictatorship which I have dealt with in the earlier essay, this paper will commence with a brief discussion of the social and philosophical assumptions informing the creation of each of the plays as tragedies, taking note of the continuities and differences between them, before proceeding to investigate how the assumptions are underlined through a close discussion of the two dramatic works. Òsófisan’s Tègònni will of course attract relatively greater attention, as a composite, more recent translation of both the pre-existing myth of Antigone, and Sophocles’ transformation of the story in his play of the same title. 1. In an essay titled “Ideology and Tragic Epistemology: The Emergent Paradigm in Contemporary African Drama”, Biodun Jeyifo distils three major paradigms out of the innumerable attempts at speculating on the nature and forms of tragedy in Western theory and criticism. The first he expectedly describes as Aristotelian. This, as he says, presents tragedy as an ‘organic’ form of art which dramatizes an eternal truth about life and existence and which, being timeless, remains unaffected by the vicissitudes of history. Aristotelian theory, as Jeyifo says, presents two core concepts as central to any tragic work, the first being a tragic hero who, consequent upon an act of hubris, must violate the cosmic and moral order of his society and thus invite calamity upon himself. The second, which Jeyifo also rightly articulates, is the tragic issue, representing the factor which provokes the protagonist’s act of hubris. The hero falls consequently-- but Jeyifo fails to mention this-- engendering catharsis in the audience, causing a feeling of powerlessness and resignation. The Hegelian postulation on tragedy represents both a departure and continuity of the Aristotelian conception. It is a departure because it recognizes the ‘hand’ of history in the tragic confrontation; and represents continuity because it insists on the inevitability of such an occurrence even without the specific human agents involved. Tragedy is simply “the satisfaction of Spirit”, 2 to quote Hegel’s specific words, an experience which, if I can now turn to Jeyifo, “racial or national communities must go through in its self-actualisation in history”. Heroes and those who oppose them are not just themselves but, on the contrary, “reflect the con- 2 G. W. F. Hegel, “The End of Art”, in: Bernard F. Dukore (Ed.), Dramatic Theory and Criticism: From Greeks to Grotowski, New York 1974 , p. 540 � <?page no="102"?> 96 Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations tradictions which must be ‘annulled’, must be negated for spirit to realize itself in an age or epoch”. 3 The postulation by Marx and Engels is completely historical, and consciously dialectical. It differs from the Hegelian theory because it disagrees with the view that tragedy occurs as a consequence of a process of historical self-actualization. In Marx-Engels, the tragic confrontation is located between personalities and groups who embody irreconcilable visions and aspirations of different social groups. In other words, and as Jeyifo argues, tragic action takes place between individuals and groups of people who are fully conscious of the dialectical operations of history, and understand the scientific explanation underlying the collision. The actors in the drama, individually and as a group, mean more than as presented. Rather, they represent social classes and forces. At this point, I think I need to quote Biodun Jeyifo at some length: The third point is Marx-Engels: when tragedy confronts history it is on solid ground and loses its abstract, ‘artistic’ purity: protagonist and antagonist forces are not agents who carry an ineluctable ‘tragic flaw’ which destroys them. Rather, they are individuals who carry the concrete goals and aspirations of social groups, forces or classes. 4 Before moving on, I would like to add, importantly, that while insisting that any tragedy, of whatever form, “can be placed at approximate points along this continuum”, Jeyifo takes care to point it out that the paradigm no longer observes any form of historical chronology. What it has retained however is its “theoretical dimension”. 5 2. It will clearly be right to suggest that it is anachronistic, employing the Aristotelian principles in analyzing Antigone since the play itself happens to be one of those from which Aristotle extrapolated his points in the first place. However, it also ought to be conceded that the ideas put forward in the theory are penetrating, detailed and precise; and, as such, have been of tremendous assistance to scholars over the ages in their investigations of the works of classical Greek dramatists. This being the case, I personally do not see the need spending time defending the anachronism. Until that moment when Creon promulgates the decree barring the burial of Polyneices, there is nothing in Antigone’s antecedents indicating that she could be capable of the kind of confrontation she stages against Creon in the play. There is 3 Biodun Jeyifo, The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama, London 1985 , p. 24 � 4 Id., p. 26 � 5 Ibid. <?page no="103"?> Wumi Raji 97 no doubt, to be sure, that she is extremely sensitive to the series of misfortunes that have befallen her immediate family at different points in time, and that she carries this about like a bold scar on the face. Indeed, going by the evidence presented in the play, Antigone has virtually led her life wallowing in utter sorrow. Beside this, however, she seems to be ready to comply with the codes of existence of her society and abide by the rules set down to guide the life of all women, which is to lead an entire life under the full control of a man. She is already betrothed to Haemon and is, from all indications, ready for marriage. Following her wedding, the next thing would have been for her to subject herself to a quiet life of wifehood. Then occurs the incidence of the decree barring Polyneices’ burial and something gives, finally, in the young woman. In going ahead to violate the public proclamation, however, it is clear that Antigone’s motivations are more personal and religious than they are political. As opposed to that of commitment to the moral order, the young heroine feels compelled, rather, by a sense of duty to her conscience as well as her brother’s memory. When told by Creon that her punishment for her act of transgression would be death, her reaction is to submit readily. And no sooner she finds herself thrown into the cavern than she commits suicide. It is consistent with the nature of Greek tragedy that the needless death of two young lovers, which in itself ought to be subject of much lamentations and sorrows, never really constitutes the focus of attention, except in relation to the fall of Creon, the tragic hero. Objectively, Creon’s downfall could be said to have been compelled by his large ego and an absurdly vindictive inclination. And, in this case, and as has already been pointed out in my earlier essay, his situation is not helped by the fact that the person who has crossed him belongs to a gender that normally should be excluded from political decisions. But the object of Greek tragedy is never the immediately objective or the obviously sensible. Its concern always is the eternal interpretation of the human condition. Creon falls, as all men in any clime or time must do, having committed an act of hubris. He sets himself up in confrontation with the supernatural, violating, specifically the law of Hades, the Greek god of the netherworld. The final words of the choral odes drive home the point: Our happiness depends on wisdom all the way. The gods must have their due. Great words by men of pride bring greater blows upon them. So wisdom comes on the old. [My emphasis, WR ] 6 6 Sophocles, Antigone in Greek Tragedies: Volume I, edd. David Green and Richmond Lattimore, Chicago 1968 , p. 226 � <?page no="104"?> 98 Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations 3. The materials appropriated by Fémi Òsófisan in Tègònni are drawn from concrete historical experience and the play, I need to point it out straightaway, belongs therefore in the third part of the theoretical continuum. To restate the point briefly, and as Jeyifo puts it, the tragic conflict is located between people who embody the visions and aspirations of forces and groups that are much larger than their individual selves. The play is located in the colonial period and dramatizes the confrontation between agents of imperial domination and a local African community. Tègònni came up at a critical moment in Nigeria’s history, a period when a military dictatorship had just annulled a free and fair election, descending heavily on forces trying to resist the development, killing many, and clamping others in detention. For this reason, clearly, Òsófisan declares that his concern in the play is not so much with colonial history as it is with the question of the struggles for political freedom in Nigeria specifically, and Africa, generally. In an interview he granted Biodun Jeyifo (again! ) shortly after the play’s premier production in 1994 , the playwright asserts that his recourse to the past in the play is nothing but a “ruse”, a device which he, as at then, had to employ in order to “better focus the present”. In doing so, as he states further, his purpose was to shield himself from “the menace of present terrors, from the unruly, armed bullies currently at loose in the corridors of power”. 7 He goes on: If you listened well, you must have heard in the wailings of Tegonni, an echo of familiar lamentations once on the headlines of newspapers now unhappily proscribed, and also, I imagine, in the numerous jails where our pro-democracy fighters are being wasted. Through her stubborn, resolute and eloquent articulation of the will to freedom, you would not have failed to hear the chords of similar resistance in our country and elsewhere against these “leaders” who are currently holding our people hostage. 8 It is impossible, to be sure, to sideline the issue of the “will to freedom” in Tègònni� But while this is so, it is at the same time difficult to accept the argument that the exploration of colonial history which the play undertakes at length represents only a mere camouflage for the political theme. Indeed, the major confrontation in the play is constructed along racial lines, and is a consequence of the dimensions of human relations which the colonial encounter threw up. “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments”, says Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth� 9 The colonial state, as Walter Rodney puts it now in his own How Europe 7 Biodun Jeyifo and Fémi Òsófisan, “The African Antigone on the Stages of the New World”, in: Olakunbi Olasope (Ed.), Black Dionysos. Conversations with Femi Osofisan, Ibadan 2013 , p. 32 � 8 Ibid. 9 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, London 1967 , p. 29 � <?page no="105"?> Wumi Raji 99 Underdeveloped Africa, “had a monopoly of political power,-[…] [having crushed] all opposition by superior force”. 10 Given this reality then, the codes regulating relationships were always strict and precise, enforced as they were by brutal force. The colonial occupiers constructed a hierarchy of races with the invaders occupying the top rungs of the racial ladder, and the ‘native’, having been subjugated by use of force, were treated with absolute contempt, considered, as they were, as savages and primitives. In returning to the situation in Tègònni, the important question which Òsófisan seems to have posed to himself as he delineates the conflict in the play, is whether it is in actuality possible to keep the line of racial demarcation intact in a situation where the two antagonist groups live exactly in the same environment. His response to the question seems to be in the negative. 4. In his African translation of the Greek classic, Òsófisan sets out by inviting Antigone down through the long route of history to meet her Nigerian incarnate and to actually participate in the new play. “My name is Antigone” she answers in response to a question from Antigone’s friends and sisters regarding her identity. When, however, she adds that she “heard you were acting my story”, Yemisi quickly counters her: “Your story! Sorry, you’re mistaken. This is the story of Tègònni, our sister” (T, p. 16 ). 11 Yemisi goes on to add that it is her wedding and that they are the ones leading her to her husband’s place. Antigone does not dispute this. Instead, she simply asks if she and her entourage could join. With this, she becomes part of the new play and is later to be seen performing the role of the director, allocating roles to players. Through one of the characters then, Fémi Òsófisan cleverly underlines the originality of his own play, but without denying his indebtedness to the earlier version authored by Sophocles. Tègònni takes off from the story of Antigone, but it differs in several fundamental ways from the original classical script. In the interview with Biodun Jeyifo, which I have earlier cited from, Òsófisan spends time to explain how he arrives at a name for his own heroine, a name that at once establishes the similarity between the two female protagonists and, as well, the difference in their attitudes and careers. Directly, Òsófisan claims to have explored the complex possibilities which the tonal character of Yoruba, his mother tongue, made available to him. After he has considered and rejected a number of options including ‘agan’, the Yoruba word for 10 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Abuja/ Lagos 2005 , p. 178 � 11 All references to Tègònni: An African Antigone (refered to as T) are to Fémi Òsófisan, Tègònni: An African Antigone, Ibadan 2007 � <?page no="106"?> 100 Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations a barren woman, and ‘agonni’, a derivative of the first word but which actually denotes contempt, the playwright says he arrives at the word ‘aaganna’ which is normally used to describe a slightly abnormal woman. For a while, as he says, it seems to be quite appropriate to him for capturing the new heroine’s “vivacious, iconoclastic personality, and for a while, I considered calling her ‘Anti Aaganna’”. 12 But then, says Òsófisan, and I quote him: I was still not satisfied with that, till ‘Tenniegon’, and ‘Tegonni’ came up. At this point I consulted my wife, and she opted for the latter. So I finally settled for ‘Tegonni’-[…] ‘egon’ immediately evokes the statement, ‘egon o ni koyin ma dun’ which would roughly translate as ‘spite cannot make honey taste otherwise than sweet’. Or the other, ‘tegan ni ko je ki won o yin wa a,’ that is: it is because of spite that they won’t appreciate us.’ From there the link is obvious with hubris-- the pride or arrogance before the fall, or, the pride that leads to the fall. 13 From the above, it is clear that Òsófisan deliberately constructs his heroine as a self conscious and proud woman, one who does not hesitate to transgress boundaries. In the Antigone original, the tragic conflict develops as a consequence of the decree that Creon promulgates over the body of Polyneices. Antigone’s decision to violate the order represents her first and only act of hubris and, as I have earlier indicated, is consequent upon her sense of commitment to her brother’s memory. In her own case, and by the time the play opens, Tègònni has established a reputation for wilful acts of transgression of constituted order and traditions. She is unusually gifted in talents, and fiercely independent in disposition. Her being a princess also means she would have access to certain privileges and advantages to the exclusion of her mates. The playwright presents her as a protégé of Yemoja, the Yoruba goddess of the sea, and it is this factor that explains the presence of the latter character in the play. Here is Baba Isokun, a respected elder within the community and the court historian trying to explain the issue to Governor Carter Ross, a man most unlikely to respect such interpretation: Right from childhood, she’s always been like that, a problem child. She’s a gift from our Mother, Yemoja, and such children are never bound by the normal rules the rest of us live by. It’s the goddess inside them, they can’t be controlled. (T, p. 62) Tègònni’s first act of hubris becomes manifest when the time came for her to decide on a career. She had chosen to be a bronze caster, a profession hitherto regarded as an exclusive preserve of men. The entire community is taken aback by this act of daring, a fact which makes them to consequently brand her as a witch. They would in fact have gone ahead to burn her fingers but for the intervention, again, 12 Biodun Jeyifo and Fémi Òsófisan, op. cit., 2013 , p. 83 � 13 Ibid. <?page no="107"?> Wumi Raji 101 of Isokun, the only person in a position to understand her unusual behaviour. To protect her, the old man takes her to Allan Jones, the white district officer. As it turns out, the young colonial officer is simply too willing to grant her the request. In other words, Tègònni’s first contact with the man who would later become her fiancé has been necessitated by her desperate need for protection from her own people. Having helped in setting her up in her chosen profession though, the two begin to discover each other. Here is how Allan Jones explains the encounter to Carter Ross at a particular moment of desperation: She came to me for refugee. At the beginning that’s all it was. A terrified woman, trying to affirm her independence against an unreasonable tradition. They were going to have her fingers burnt out, as they treat witches. So she ran to me and when I listened to her, I decided to offer her our protection. I helped her to build her workshop, and got some tools for her from Lagos. And then I began to see the products of her work. General, you’ve got to see them! I’m not exaggerating, when I say it’s a work of genius! If she was white, she would be a major discovery. (T, p. 99) But Carter Ross would not show more interest in this account any more than he had done in the one earlier proffered to him by Isokun. As a typical colonial officer, he has only a literal interpretation of his mandate. His mission in the colony is to protect the Union Jack and defend the interests of the Empire. The natives are nothing other than savages and brutes and cannibals and are therefore to be treated with utter contempt and scorn. Rules are rigid and precise and options are simple. You are right once your skin happens to be white and on the other side of the law once it is not. To try to cross the line of demarcation is to be guilty of treason and be ready to bear the consequences. In fairness, Carter Ross actually does respond to Isokun’s explanation, of the unusual spirit which he believes drives Tègònni. This, however is to say, simply, that “the Empire cannot be run like that, on the caprices of possessed children”. Laws are made to be obeyed and rules, as he states further “cannot be twisted to the tics of eccentrics” (T, p. 62 ). Carter Ross is Creon all over again. Like his alter ego created some two thousand five hundred years before, he insists on absolute obedience. Like him, he is totally autocratic in attitude, a disposition which makes him brook no opinion that happens to run contrary to his own. Well, there is one important respect in which the two differ from one another. Creon, in his desperate determination to punish Polyneices even in death sets himself against a divine stipulation, a clear act of hubris. In his own case, Carter Ross wouldn’t dare violate any law set down by the Empire. And while it is true that he also issues an order banning the internment of the body of Oyekunle, he does so only because it runs counter to the belief of the people over whom he rules like a conqueror. The effect of a total absence of the spirit of hubris in Carter Ross <?page no="108"?> 102 Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations is to make it impossible for him to assume the status of a tragic hero. This clearly is deliberate on the part of Fémi Òsófisan, his creator. As a fellow colonial officer, Allan Jones represents the direct opposite of Carter Ross. For him, the opportunity to serve as a district officer in Oke Osun is no more than that of a learning experience, a process of discovering the humanity of the natives. This much is evident in his response, quoted above, to the Governor, the latter having sought to know how it came to be that he finds himself going into marriage with a black woman. Allan Jones’s first duty toward Tègònni, as already stated, was to assist in rescuing her from her own people and helping to set her up in her chosen career. Following this, his next decision is to observe her at work. Astounded, he has no hesitation declaring what he has seen as products of a genius! In the colonial context, the kind of relationship that Òsófisan creates between Tègònni and Allan Jones would be taken as abominable. To be sure, several colonial officers did have relationships with native women during the period, but these were in direct contravention of the codes regulating social relations between the two racial groups at the time. In “The African Antigone on the Stages of the New World”, the same interview the playwright had with Biodun Jeyifo and which I have been referring to, Fémi Òsófisan cites the example of the circular issued by Lord Crewe, the Colonial Secretary to the Northern and Southern protectorates of Nigeria at about the turn of the nineteenth century, which expressly banned inter-racial relationships. To follow this was the one issued by Lord Lugard, where the Governor General himself openly described sexual liaisons between colonial officers and native women as bestial. But such formal proclamations never served in actuality to check such racial intercourse. They never could, especially since we were dealing with situations where, and as Òsófisan rightly notes, most of the officers were bachelors, or married men who refused to bring down their spouses. In many cases, the officers were just in search of fun, looking for something exotic or simply yearning for release. A number of officers lost control in a few instances though, with the relationship subsequently becoming intimate. As an example, Òsófisan cites in the interview, “the case reported by Ian Brook in The One Eyed Man Is King of the ‘scandalous’ affair between a white Assistant District Officer and a Benin woman, till the officer had to be sent home”. 14 It ought to be conceded, on the other hand, that the reactions of the native community to those among their own women who got involved with white officers was not in any way better. Mostly, they were treated as women who were both cheap and weak and who consequently allowed strangers about whom they knew little or nothing to exploit them sexually. Additionally, and in several instances, 14 Biodun Jeyifo and Fémi Òsófisan, op. cit., 2013 , p. 39 � <?page no="109"?> Wumi Raji 103 they were considered as traitors who would not hesitate to betray their own people to agents of imperial domination. When such happened to be the case, what the community did was to quietly ostracise the women involved. Òsófisan has clear difficulty accepting that the interpretations held true in all such situations. His position in fact is to the effect that there were moments when the relationships had far more depth. In some, as he would state, the women involved in such liaisons saw them as strategies of “hitching themselves onto the saddle of power, of enhancing their own social status, and by implication that of their families”. 15 He would go further to suggest that, in fact, while there might not have been too many examples of when the relationship blossomed into actual marriages, a significant number of them had serious emotional contents. An important focus of Tègònni therefore, and the playwright finally states, “was this ambiguous arena where the women, far from spontaneously being traitors to their communities, used their relationships in fact as weapons to demystify the colonial propaganda of omnipotence”. 16 The purpose of the foregoing is to establish the historical context of Tègònni, thus leading me to my major focus in this paper- - which is to establish the archetypal nature of the love relationship between the joint protagonists in the play. The love between Tègònni and Allan Jones blossoms against the background of intense hostilities towards such relationships by the people on both sides of the racial divide. On the side of the natives, even Isokun who had supported the young woman when she took the decision to become a sculptor finds her decision to marry a white man completely unacceptable. In response to the plea by Tègònni’s friends that he makes himself available to offer her blessings when on her way to her husband’s house, Isokun asks rhetorically how it is that she could not find someone to marry from “among her own people”. Reminded by Yemisi and Faderera how men started avoiding Tègònni following that strange choice of a profession by her, Isokun again responds by submitting that it has “never been heard of, that a woman of our land, and a princess at that, would go and marry one of these ghosts from across the seas-…” (T, pp. 12 - 13 ). But as opposed to what typically obtained in actual historical context, Tègònni’s relationship with the district officer is shorn totally of any form of opportunism. This much is borne out in the heroine’s highly critical attitude toward the ideology that powered the project of colonialism, and the absolute contempt in which she holds Carter Ross, the man who embodies the worst form of the assumptions behind imperial domination. Standing before the Governor in tableau 13 of the play, Tègònni is as defiant as any person could ever be. In response to his rhetorical 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. <?page no="110"?> 104 Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations question to the effect that she really wishes to die, she replies: “You conquered us. So you make the rules. We know our lives are in your hands, and we’ve resigned ourselves” (T, p. 59 ). During a second encounter, and with the advantage of the gun she has in her hands, Tègònni shouts down the Governor when he suggests her people would be wiped out if she dare shoot him. “Why do you think it will matter to me”, she says by way of providing reason for being impatient with the man, “if you wipe out our town? What you’ve done already to our men, and to our pride, is that not sufficient damage? When our souls are in bondage, what does it matter again what happens to our carcass? ” (T, p. 86 ). And when, desperate to save himself, Carter Ross restates what everybody knows: “I’m the Governor, a British Officer-… symbol of the Empire” (T, p. 86 ). Tègònni’s response is calm, sarcastic, and I quote her in full: And I, am just a little African primitive, from a lost village in the jungle. I represent no power and no empire. Just a small girl, tired of being trampled upon by invaders like you, whom we once welcomed as friends, but tricked us into signing off our freedom. Just because you have guns-… (T, pp. 86-87) But precisely as he is critical of the project of the Empire, so does she demonstrate a keen awareness of the contradictions inherent in her relationship with a man whose presence in their community was exactly for the purpose of furthering the project. “Yes, I knew he was not one of us”, she declares in tableau 26 where she is brought to the public square to apologise to the Governor, “that he was of the race of our masters, those who continue to trample over us” (T, p. 103 ). In spite of this knowledge, however, and as she confesses, she found herself melting like jelly when the man approached her with a marriage proposal. Her reason? Allan Jones, “unlike his countrymen, was always so humane and so gentle! ” (T, p. 103 ). In other words, it is the positive qualities which Tègònni finds in Allan Jones which has won him her love. His humanity has trumped such other considerations as his racial background. It is exactly the same thing that happens on the other side. For Allan Jones, Tègònni’s talents and humanity are far more important to him than the fact that she belongs to a race he is supposed to hold in contempt. This much is revealed in what he says about Tègònni while discussing with Governor Carter Ross in tableau 25 , a speech I have earlier quoted. Having seen the products of her work, Allan Jones feels convinced that he is standing before a genius and he cannot but allow himself to be overwhelmed by the soft feelings which eventually grew up within him. Carter Ross just cannot believe his ears when Allan Jones declares to him that he will “never love another woman again in my life” (T, p. 99 ). Clearly then, Tègònni and Allan Jones are forerunners of inter-racial love. Both are individuals of strong convictions, and neither of them would agree to renounce the marriage even on the point of death! <?page no="111"?> Wumi Raji 105 5. As is well known, the quarrel between Polyneices and Eteocles over the throne of Oedipus, their father, serves as the critical background to the crisis that eventually unfolds in Antigone. Òsófisan’s version of the rivalry between the two brothers is based on an actual historical incident which occurred in Okuku, a small Yoruba town in 1916 . This incident occurred at a period when colonial authorities had just succeeded in establishing firm administrative control over the town, and the crisis that almost overtook the town was a consequence of the lack of insensitivity demonstrated by the foreign invaders to the order of succession put in place by the indigenes to the traditional stool in the town. As Karin Barber reports in I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town, her book that examines the history and tradition of this relatively small town, colonial administrators were both meddlesome and authoritarian in their approach to the traditional system. With their sole aim being that of introducing an indirect system of administration, many of the actions taken by colonial agents were often hasty and ended up literally disrupting the balance of power inherent in the traditional system. Karin Barber writes: The various colonial administrators had very definite ideas about the ‘traditional order’, and their selections and distortions, though often conflicting, had the same end in view, to bolster up what they saw as a fixed hierarchical system in which power flowed in one direction, from the top down. 17 As Barber further reports, one of the very first persons to exploit the ignorance of the colonial masters was a man known as Oyekunle. Following the death of Oba Oyewusi that year, it became the turn of another lineage-- that of Oyeleye-- to produce the next traditional ruler. After a thorough process of selection, the kingmakers eventually settled for Oyeleye, a man who actually carries the name of the lineage literally on the head, and thereafter headed for Ibadan, the provincial headquarter, to report their choice to the District Officer. But, as Barber reports, Ajiboye, at the time a small boy, and actually a son to Oyekunle, one of those who lost out in the selection process, took a short cut and arrived at the D.O’s office ahead of the kingmakers. He was to tell the white administrator that the Okuku chiefs were on their way to present the wrong candidate they had selected in place of Oyekunle, his father who, legitimately, should take over the throne following the death of the former king. As Barber says, the “D. O. accepted this on the spot because he knew Oyekunle (having put him in charge of the Okuku railway station in 1904 ) and afterwards would brook no opposition to the candidate whose 17 Karin Barber, I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town, Edinburgh 1991 , p. 222 � <?page no="112"?> 106 Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations appointment he had endorsed”. 18 This act of subversion of people’s will generated intense crisis within the town and Oyekunle started his reign with all his chiefs bitterly opposed to him. In adapting the story in Tègònni, and beside making the two brothers wage a war against each other over the selection, Òsófisan shifts the actual date of the historical incident back by some decades, consequently fixing the action of the drama at a time before the onset of the twentieth century. He retains the central aspect of the story which is that of imposition by a British officer of an unpopular candidate on the people but gives the name Oyekunle to the brother who has a legitimate claim to the throne and Adeloro to the usurper. Sticking now to the details of the Greek myth and the Antigone original, he makes the two brothers wage war against each other with the colonial officers mobilizing forces in support of their candidate. In the end, and precisely as it happens in the Greek version, the two brothers bring each other down in battle. Now in Tègònni, and in opposition to Antigone, Òsófisan only employs the issue of an order promulgated by the colonial Governor to complicate an already existing crisis. As the discussion earlier on would have shown, the real problem in the play is generated by the wedding ceremony that is being consecrated between the joint protagonists. Carter Ross, determined to scuttle the marriage, finds an instrument with which he could cause chaos within the community in Oyekunle’s dead body, and it is for this reason that he orders that, rather than burying it, the corpse be placed in front of the palace, precisely on the road which members of the bridal train are sure to take as they lead the new bride to her husband’s home. Carter Ross knows quite well that leaving a dead body unburied represents an abomination among the ‘native’ people, and that a great likelihood exists for at least one person to flout the order banning its internment. Once such a person is arrested and put on death row, the marriage will naturally be put on hold. As it turns out, it is Tègònni herself who carries out the act of violation, a development which suits Carter Ross even better since it now means that he can issue an order for her to be publicly executed on charges of treason. “Christ, I understand it now! ”, cries Allan Jones when eventually the truth dawns on him: “You planned it! You sent that corpse here deliberately to stop my wedding! ” (T, p. 91 ). The elders of the community, however, make a mistake in trying to negotiate on Tègònni’s behalf, and make her agree to apologise publicly for her act of defiance. Even Isokun, the man who has always shown understanding for Tègònni’s consistent acts of iconoclasm fails to realize at this point that no archetype ever agrees to capitulate. At the end of tableau 26 where the action of the play climaxes, the stage instruction reports that following sudden bursts of gunfire, Tègònni, 18 Id., p. 223 � <?page no="113"?> Wumi Raji 107 who hitherto has been hoisted aloft by other women, “tumbles from her ride” (T, p. 105 ). She falls as a hero, and in a way clearly different from that of Antigone. But, as earlier stated, Òsófisan’s tragic vision differs markedly from that of Sophocles. In Antigone, the tragedy that befalls Creon serves the purpose of instilling a lesson in the audience: the gods are inviolable; and any act of hubris on the part of any mortal, however highly placed, can only lead to a disaster. In Tègònni, Òsófisan moves away from a metaphysical interpretation of events, and shares the same page with Marx and Engels. Here, and if I may return to Biodun Jeyifo, “protagonist and antagonist forces are not agents who carry an ineluctable ‘tragic flaw’ which destroys them. Rather, they are individuals who carry the concrete goals and aspirations of social groups, forces and classes”. 19 For the moment, Tègònni and Allan Jones might have failed in their aspirations to get married but several people will come afterwards who will trod the same path that they have cut. This is the significance of the epilogue where, and as Òsófisan instructs, Antigone comes down from the boat of Yemoja, undertakes a “symbolic dance,-[…] wakes Tègònni and leads her, together with her retinue, to the boat” (T, p. 106 ). 6. I close here by re-affirming my political reading of Tègònni in “Africanizing Antigone”. The same Carter Ross who wants to maintain racial purity as seen in my current take on the play also represents the dictator who annuls the people’s choice thus precipitating a crisis. His decree which bans the internment of Oyekunle’s body intensifies the crisis. The attempt to execute Tègònni in public for defying his order by undertaking a symbolic burial of Oyekunle’s body makes the crisis to degenerate into violence. As the hero of the struggle, Tègònni falls in the end. Carter Ross however deceives himself if he thinks he can win the battle. This, precisely, is the relevance of Ozymandias, the sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, jointly recited by Antigone and Tègònni at a strategic moment in the play. Shelley’s poem reports the experience of an “antique traveler” who runs into the relics of the carved image of a once powerful king “in the desert”. On the pedestal, and to quote now from the poem, are the words: “My name is Ozymandias, king of Kings/ Look on my works, ye mighty-- / And despair” (T, p. 97 ). For the first eight lines of the sonnet, Antigone and Tegonni each recite one line and wait for the other to take the next. The last six lines which drives home the point of the poem are however taken together by the two women: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away (T, p. 97) 19 Biodun Jeyifo, op. cit., 1985 , p. 26 � <?page no="114"?> 108 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society Izuu Nwankwọ E. (Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Igbariam) Sophocles’ Antigone has been given multifarious perspectives that cut across epochs and locations through adaptations. Directors and performers of the text(s) in various societies have also brought multiple interpretations that not only further define the story but also pluralize ways in which the heroine’s actions are seen. However, studies of these renditions often dwell on the persona of the eponymous heroine and the nature of her defiance, thereby scarcely mentioning the manner in which the opinions of her associate(s) hemline her ultimate decision. For this reason, almost every credit goes to Antigone, which grossly negates the contributions of other characters in the constitution of her own acts of resistance. This enquiry looks beyond the heroine to other characters who surround Antigone to determine how their (in)actions shape hers. In doing this, the essay deploys Derrida’s différance in its examination of two adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone-- Òsófisan’s Tègònni ( 1999 ) and Carson and Stone’s Antigonick ( 2013 ). Each of these authors transmutes the original narrative into his or her socio-cultural ambience and in so doing endue their creations with definite peculiarities. Consequently, for the purpose of this study, I am interested in the manner the authors construct the personas that surround the heroine and how the traits of such characters frame the defiance of the heroine. It should be noted that one is not referring to Creon or his equivalents but to the characters that equate Ismene in these adaptations. In Tègònni, such personas include Kunbi, her friends, the elderly Isokun and then Allan Jones, the British colonial officer with whom the heroine has an affair, all of who form a nucleus of kith and kin that, at once, emboldens and mitigates the heroine’s revolt. In Antigonick, on the other hand, even in its preference of a multi-artistic approach, the Chorus functions as advisors to the heroine as she races with and against “the Nick of time”. Hence, in both plays, one finds the relevance of the Other in the framing and construction of the heroines’ defiance. The study thus privileges a comparative analysis with a view to determining how the authors’ socio-cultural realities influence their creations. It then finds that, in line with contemporary Occupy Movements and protests, defiance in the face of tyranny and oppression is more communal than individualistic. It concludes with the faulting of the prevailing view of Antigone as an individual who stands against abuse of political authority all by herself as an incomplete observation since it does not take the contributions of her kith and kin into consideration. <?page no="115"?> Izuu Nwankwọ E. 109 1. Introduction Antigone, the archetypal heroine of resistance against terror from established authority against the people, has found expression in myriad epochs and regions. It is, for instance, instructive that Jean Anouilh’s version was written for performance in Paris during the German occupation of France. Other examples are accurately documented in George Steiner’s classic book, Antigones. At the level of dramatic experiments with the Antigone myth, Athol Fugard’s The Island is outstanding in its ground-breaking stage craft, especially its appropriation of a minimal cast for agit-prop performances in Apartheid South Africa. This work exudes revolt not only by its heroine but also through its manner of presentation. Nevertheless, Anne Carson’s Antigonick, far exceeds Fugard’s experimentation. Carson does not see her version of Antigone’s tale as an adaptation like Òsófisan’s Tègònni or Fugard’s The Island, but rather as a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone� Whether this is so or not depends on the denotative differences critics ascribe to translations and adaptations. Be that as it may, with its multi-artistic presentation mode, Carson’s work reads like a ‘Western post-modernist’ rendition of Sophocles’ Antigone, while Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni is indubitably African (there’s a certain level of discomfort referring to it as postcolonial), because it is based on a more traditional theatrical convention with evident fusions of European theatre traditions. In the two accounts here, the authors created their works well around the resistance impetus which is the hallmark of the Antigone myth. Each of the two plays selected for study here, however, possesses individual differences which posit them as distinct works from their obvious source. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction provides the framework for appropriating meaning in a work of art through the presence/ absence mix propounded by the preceding structuralists. The idea of différance is an attempt to merge the differing and deferring aspects of signs in their conveyance of meaning. Though specifically employed in the definition of written and spoken aspects of language-- especially on the play of a and e in différance and différence, which is only obvious in writing and inaudible in speech-- this is employed here to wring out meaning from the plays being studied with an eye on ‘difference’ and ‘deference’ of meaning within them. One striking aspect of Derrida’s thesis is that within the a and e variants lie the observation that “it is always on the basis of différance and its ‘history’ that we can claim to know who and where ‘we’ are and what the limits of an ‘epoch’ can be”. 1 Being used in the most basic of terms here, différance serves the purpose of enlisting the differing and deferring aspects of meaning in the two adaptations under study. The point being made is that just as Sophocles’ Antigone found rel- 1 Jacques Derrida, “Différance”, in: Michel Foucault et al., Théorie d’ensemble, Paris 1968 , p. 283 � <?page no="116"?> 110 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society evance within its immediate society, even though it ‘differs’ from the myth from which it was pillaged; its global and historical significance is ‘deferred’ hence the multifarious (re-)interpretations it has received prior to and in present times. In turn, these newer versions also hold great significations for their immediate societies even with their ‘differing’ attributes from the Antigone myth and Sophocles’ version and their full meanings are equally ‘deferred’ since they could be understood differently by succeeding generations with their own peculiar cultural realities. To this we shall return presently. 2. Existing studies on the texts Wumi Raji reads Tègònni and Fugard’s The Island as “indigenized” African versions of Sophocles’ Antigone. He sees Tègònni as a product of the crisis caused by military dictatorship and of annulled elections in Nigeria, 2 especially after observing that: Adaptations of Sophocles’s Antigone have always foregrounded the questions of political freedom and human rights. Rightly so, perhaps, since the original work itself seems to be deeply political.-[…] The work centralizes the question of political authoritarianism and tyranny as well as the strategy of undermining such developments. 3 The foregoing is representative of the reading of Òsófisan’s work as a response to instances of oppression within the author’s immediate society. One notes that Nigeria’s dark military years reached its peak at about the time that Òsófisan conceived this adaptation; an indication that Òsófisan wrote the play with an eye on the prevailing official high-handedness of the military and the need for the people to resist every form of coercion and human rights abuses. About the work itself, its sources and influences, James Gibbs posits: Tegonni is the work of a Nigerian playwright, who with supreme confidence, has raided the store-house associated with the former colonial power and stolen what he wants, and he has used history, names, theatrical conventions, and goddesses to surprise, disconcert and stimulate.-[…] Tegonni, profoundly indebted to Sophocles, achieves its aim of provoking thought about contemporary issues with wit, and with insidious theatrical panache. 4 2 Wumi Raji, “Africanizing Antigone: Postcolonial Discourse and Strategies of Indigenizing a Western Classic”, in: Research in African Literatures 36 , 4 ( 2005 ), p. 143 � 3 Id., p. 137 � 4 James Gibbs, “Antigone and After Antigone: Some Issues Raised by Fémi Òsófisan’s Dramaturgy in Tègònni”, in: Sola Adeyemi (Ed.), Portraits for an Eagle: Essays in Honour of Fémi Òsófisan, Bayreuth 2006 , p. 87 � <?page no="117"?> Izuu Nwankwọ E. 111 For Gibbs, Òsófisan’s work parallels other stories of Antigone that have been told in different eras and locations. He finds astounding ingenuity in his stage craft and dramatic technique, especially the manner in which he shocks his audience with unexpected outcomes. Gibbs avers that this author ambushes his audience by lying in wait for them, giving “them a false sense of security, sets traps, springs surprises, takes unawares”. 5 For a play set in the colonial period, for instance, one would ordinarily expect the usual tongue-lashing of colonialists for Africa’s interminable woes, but this author’s interest lies elsewhere. He is more concerned with finding contemporary answers to today’s problems rather than pouring blames on a long gone colonial dynasty. According to Gibbs, Òsófisan asks the audience to consider if the heroine could really go against the norm to become a carver of brass, a masquerade, wife of the British District Officer or defy the Governor-General. He then adds: “The implied follow up question, the ‘ambush’, is ‘if not, why not? ’” 6 Implicit in Gibbs’s observation here is the enumeration of the iconoclastic traits of Òsófisan’s heroine, Tègònni. Unlike her Sophoclean parallel, she is a woman who prefers to live against social norms, especially those that categorise and limit her as a woman, princess and citizen of the Oke-Osun community. Gibbs further mentions historical happenings in Africa where women have been known to have asserted their authority: the Amazon warriors of Dahomey, the women in the Aba Riots of 1929 and the tax boycott in Abeokuta between 1948 and 1949 � 7 Mentioning this serves a dual purpose: a. To show that acts of resistance amongst women have also taken place in Africa within women who have no knowledge of the Greek myth of Antigone. b. In addition to the positive portraiture of Antigone (not Tègònni) within Òsófisan’s text; to point out the borderlessness and timelessness of resistance impetus. In other words, resistance is what people do when they are oppressed irrespective of epoch, colour, creed, race and location. Barbara Goff concurs with the second point by observing that the boat which ferries Antigone and her retinue to the land of Oke-Osun, clearly refuses to be confined to the historical dimension, and takes on a mythical or symbolic aspect. At the end, for instance, when Antigone takes Tègònni on to the boat, the boat may be understood as moving through space and time as a kind of spiritual haven for, and commemoration of, all those who have resisted the many manifestations of tyranny, and have paid the price. 8 5 Id., p. 84 � 6 Id., pp. 84 - 85 � 7 Id., p. 84 � 8 Barbara Goff, “Antigone’s Boat: The Colonial and the Postcolonial in Tègònni: An African Antigone by Fémi Òsófisan”, in: Sola Adeyemi (Ed.), Portraits for an Eagle: Essays in Hon- <?page no="118"?> 112 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society Hence, no matter the name the character bears, whether in the dramatic space or within real life existence, there is a kindred spirit amongst personas who withstand tyranny and oppression in whatever guise. It is notable that during the 1929 Aba Women Riots in South-eastern Nigeria, one of the major tools used was ‘sitting’, in which the women went to the houses of the colonial warrant chiefs and sit there interminably until their demands were met. Such acts of resistance have found increasing relevance in contemporary Occupy Movements and uprisings in different parts of the globe. Perhaps it is for this purpose that it has been averred that Sophocles’ Antigone “can be adapted into any situation in which a group is oppressed, or in which, in the aftermath of struggle, the forces of community and social order come into conflict the forces of personal liberty”. 9 Carson’s Antigonick has been described as a “multi-dimensional artistic work, not a study of or a gloss on Antigone”� 10 Chelsea Allison says that in other of her works, Carson relied on her “Classical training by grounding a modern story with the sensibilities of Greek literature; but in Antigonick, she has done quite the opposite: pulling the Greek squarely into modernity”. 11 She further observes that the play is “an art book-- the author has hand-written the text on the page, and the text is accompanied by vellum pages inked with vibrant, eerie illustrations by Bianca Stone”. 12 Perhaps it is for the non-traditionalist presentation of this play that George Steiner reads it as “a palimpsest drawing us into an opaque, turbulent vortex”. 13 His description of the text itself is poignant and interesting: In Antigonick, Anne Carson and the designer Robert Currie aim at a ‘comic-book presentation’. Blocks of words have been hand-inked on the page, embedding the identity of the speaker within the block. The actual typography lacks all distinction; it borders on the illegible. Punctuation is fitful. Possibly all this is meant to suggest lettering on papyrus. Bianca Stone’s drawing overlay the words. At best they imply a spectral domesticity or haunted landscape. Their pertinence to Sophoclean action, to its intricate intensity, is hard to decipher. 14 our of Fémi Òsófisan, Bayreuth 2006 , p. 119 � 9 Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Jefferson (North Carolina) 2002 , pp. 170 - 171 � 10 Amanda Shubert, “Antigonick-- Anne Carson”, in: Full Stop ( 27 . 06 . 2012 ), http: / / www.fullstop.net/ 2012/ 06/ 27/ reviews/ amanda/ antigonick-anne-carson (accessed 21 . 11 . 2014 ), paragraph 3 � 11 Chelsea Allison, “Book Reviews: Antigonick, Translated by Anne Carson”, in: KGB Bar Lit Magazine, http: / / kgbbar.com/ lit/ journal/ antigonick (accessed 21 . 11 . 2014 ), paragraph 2 � 12 Id., paragraph 2 � 13 George Steiner, “Anne Carson ‘Translates’ Antigone”, in: The Times Literary Supplement ( 01 . 08 . 2012 ), http: / / www.the-tls.co.uk/ articles/ public/ anne-carson-translates-antigone/ (accessed 21 . 11 . 2014 ), paragraph 2 � 14 Id., paragraph 1 � <?page no="119"?> Izuu Nwankwọ E. 113 Steiner thus reads Carson’s work as an all-in-one kind of text that incorporates written drama on one page, and paintings that do not correspond to it, on the other. His reading is largely negative due to his conviction that a translation “should embody an act of thanks to the original” by elaborating “its own dependence on its source”. For him, a translation or adaptation concentrates scruples and trust, however recreative or anarchic its instincts. It is an informing craft which, sometimes enigmatically, reveals within or adds to the original what was already there- - particularly where the text has been translated, imitated, adapted a hundredfold. Anne Carson has often achieved this exigent ideal. But not this time. 15 This assertion is symptomatic of the conservative view of Carson’s experimental play. Amanda Shubert absolves Carson and heaps the blame on Stone: “Carson’s work is so erudite, and Stone’s elliptical, that the composite effect is frustratingly opaque”. 16 Another reviewer thinks the “problem” is with the book designer, Robert Currie. She first calls Carson “an exceptionally rhythmic writer” before then stating that it is “unfortunate” that Currie set her [Carson’s] text as handwritten block capitals. This damages the rhythm, as decoding the handwriting entails fits and starts-[…] This is a shame, because Carson’s taut, nervy version of Sophocles’ drama is far from whimsical. 17 There are positive reviews too. Fiona Simpson sees the experiments in this text as fascinating, “and this interesting, risk-taking book is unignorable.-[…] Her [Carson’s] vocabulary veers between archaism and the contemporary. But it does so without pause or punctuation”. 18 Moreover, Rachel Galvin believes that as Antigonick is in conversation with the original, it is “fiercely” its own because even though Carson “appropriated Sophocles” her text turns out to be “Carsonian”. 19 Its uniqueness is underscored in Emily Stokes’s statement, where she asserts that this work “dramatises its own eccentricity, evoking a portrait of the author in a state of distraction”. 20 Furthermore, Rachel Galvin says it does “not only resuscitate 15 Id., paragraph 7 � 16 Amanda Shubert, op. cit., 27 . 06 . 2012 , paragraph 4 � 17 Fiona Simpson, “Antigonick, By Anne Carson. The Watch, By Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya”, in: The Independent ( 26 . 05 . 2012 ), http: / / www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/ books/ reviews/ antigonick-by-anne-carsonthe-watch-by-joydeep-roybhattacharya-7785712. html? origin=internalSearch (accessed 21 . 11 . 2014 ), paragraph 3 � 18 Id., paragraph 13 � 19 Rachel Galvin, “Looting”, in: Boston Review ( 01 . 03 . 2013 ), http: / / bostonreview.net/ poetry/ rachel-galvin-looting (accessed 21 . 11 . 2014 ), paragraph 11 � 20 Emily Stokes, “Antigonick by Anne Carson- - Review”, in: The Guardian ( 08 . 06 . 2012 ), http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2012/ jun/ 08/ antigonick-anne-carson-review (accessed <?page no="120"?> 114 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society Sophocles- […] in the language of the present, but also recast [it] visually”. She adds that Carson is “in the business of subversively recreating a canonical text by a long-dead male author”. 21 The sexist undertone of this latter statement is worthy of note: a female rewriting the play of a once dominant male playwright, especially one that featured prominently in a society where being a woman means nothing, perhaps. As to the status of Carson’s work, I am taken by Galvin’s reading which sees it as a “transcreation”, a term borrowed from a Brazilian writer, Haroldo De Campos, who posits that a transcreation “is at once a critical reading and transformation or re-creation of the original”. She adds: Carson “has a distinctive voice and [she] has placed her hallmark upon” her book. 22 She further holds that this translation is “not only in dialogue” with the original, “but also with the entourage of translations amassed over time, which the originals carry with them, in our collective imagination”. 23 By these, Carson has proven that in adapting or translating classical or other earlier works, the author does not have to stick to any of the already established traditions, but he or she can veer off in any direction that is necessary for conveying the message. Hence, if one has to accede to Steiner’s view of “remaining true to the original”, then there may be little or nothing to get out of the Antigone myth since it has been translated, adapted, imitated and pillaged variously in several epochs and geographical locations. Suffice it to say that Carson’s Antigonick draws more attention to its non-conformity than to the story it is telling. 3. Tègònni, her parallels and partners In Òsófisan’s Tègònni, Sophocles’ Antigone makes an appearance with a multi-racial retinue. Her presence in Òsófisan’s version is both for thematic and theatrical convenience. At the level of theme, Òsófisan uses her to underscore the universality of resistance against tyranny as noted above. It is therefore not fortuitous that the author brings her in before the eponymous heroine herself, rather it is a way of establishing that the Tègònni who will soon be encountered is an archetypal persona replicated in several societies where oppression resides. Moreover, to further validate this, she announces on entry, in tableau 3 : 21 . 11 . 2014 ), paragraph 4 � 21 Rachel Galvin, op. cit., 01 . 03 . 2013 , paragraph 1 � 22 Id., paragraph 13 � 23 Id., paragraph 14 � <?page no="121"?> Izuu Nwankwọ E. 115 Antigone: My name is Antigone- … […] It’s a very long way through the channels of history. The road at many points is unsafe.-[…] I heard you were acting my story. And I was so excited I decided to come and participate. (T, p. 16) 24 As a theatrical technique, Antigone and her entourage are part of the dramatic action. The companions play soldiers of the West African Constabulary at different times, while Antigone holds a highly enlightening discourse with Tègònni on the resistance to tyranny and the compelling impetus that drives it. On their relevance and suitability for the roles given to them, Antigone says: "We’ve had long rehearsals about your customs-…" (T, p. 17 ). She goes further to admonish her crew in the following words with an underlining indication that she and her retinue are already accustomed to the re-telling of her myth at various other times and places: Antigone: -… Please remember all we said, for I may not be able to see you again, I’ll be busy with my own role. The script is the story we rehearsed, as it’s happened at other times, in other places-… (T, p. 19) Furthermore, Antigone and her crew also provide water (as their contribution to the dramatic action) for Tègònni and her friends when they are tied to the stake for their revolt against the Governor’s orders. She also encourages them not to give up hope (T, pp. 53 - 55 ). At the height of her predicament, Tègònni goes to look for Antigone who, at first sounds defeatist in order to test her resolve, but afterwards they embrace themselves saying: Antigone: ( Jubilant) Come, my sister, embrace me! I was testing you. And now I find you’re a true believer, like me! Yes, it is true that many tyrants have marched through history. That for a while, people have been deprived of their freedom. But oppression can never last. Again and again it will be overthrown, and people will reclaim their right to be free! That is the lesson of history, the only one worth learning! Tègònni: My sister! You’re my sister, Antigone! (T, p. 96) These statements at once intertwine Tègònni’s tale with that of Antigone while also establishing the fact that Òsófisan is addressing the tyranny in his immediate society. Hence, in Tègònni, one is confronted with a version that has not only seen many other adaptations and translations, but has taken each of these into cognizance in the process of its own emergence. Specifically speaking, Tègònni is aware of Odale’s Choice, The Island, and so many other Antigones that precede it. It might also be aware of George Steiner’s reading of extant Antigone tales in his book. Having the knowledge as well as the presences of her other selves makes 24 All references to Tègònni: An African Antigone (refered to as T) are to Fémi Òsófisan, Tègònni: An African Antigone, Ibadan 2007 � <?page no="122"?> 116 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society Òsófisan eponymous heroine a composite personality who is more cosmopolitan than merely African. Tègònni is an African maiden, living in an imaginary location in south-western Nigeria, during British colonialism in the country. There are however indications that Òsófisan intends her to be a single multi-character and that he has a more contemporaneous location and period in mind than the one in which the play is set. In the first instance, Tègònni is highly literate in both traditional and Western education even though historically such ladies are rare within colonial Western Nigeria. Secondly, in an age where women barely raised their heads in public, Tègònni is a non-conformist princess who becomes a bronze carver, dares the Governor-General and then pushes towards marrying not only a foreigner, but one of the same white people that are colonising her land. Her revolutionary zeal is way ahead of her time. Here, one is not questioning Òsófisan’s right to alter, invent and re-define. Of course, he possesses poetic license to apply his source material in any way he deems fit. What is being brought to the fore here is that having seen all other variants of Antigone, Tègònni is equipped with commensurate revolutionary impetus for the gravity of tyranny in present times. Specifically, Sophocles’ heroine simply gave her brother a symbolic burial. She has no prior crime, except her father’s, Oedipus’. But Òsófisan’s is an established deviant, though she is portrayed in a sympathetic, positive way. Placing her within the colonial era is, thus, a form of distanciation, which aids the author to evade the censure of the repressive military junta in power at the time of the play’s initial production. Statements like the one below point to this fact, even though it is ostensibly directed at the colonialists represented by Capt. Allan Jones: Bayo: Yes, you’ve built an Empire, as you boast to us. You’ve conquered our people. But so what? That’s the power of guns not civilisation. Any brute with a gun can give orders! (T, p. 39) Apart from Antigone, Tègònni has many other accomplices who helped to sharpen her resolve not to cower under the threats of the tyrant. Her three very supportive friends, Kunbi, Yemisi and Faderera, are not in any way like Sophocles’ Ismene. Their first act in the play is to waylay Chief Isokun as he is about to sneak out of the community under the pretext of going to pluck some medicinal leaves (T, p. 11 ). Baba Isokun has always supported Tègònni in her deviant ways, but the thought of having her marry a white man was more than he could bear. So he decided to leave before Tègònni arrives for prayers at her father’s grave, a prerequisite for her wedding. Being the only elder who could lead the prayers, the girls are aware that if Baba Isokun leaves, their friend’s marriage would be in jeopardy. Hence, they decide to stop him very early in the morning and he acquiesces to their request after an extended exchange of wit and logic: <?page no="123"?> Izuu Nwankwọ E. 117 Isokun: All right then, I surrender. You young ones, you’ve grown so cunning! Whose idea was it to come and waylay me like this? Ah, no matter, you’re probably all equally bad. Go and prepare your friend. I’ll be at the palace to receive her. Kunbi: (Hailing him). Baaba-o! (T, p. 15) The commitment of these girls to Tègònni is further heightened as Faderera takes a bullet for Tègònni as she attempts to symbolically bury her brother (T, p. 48 ). They suffer the same punishment as her as all of them are tied to stakes at the market square (T, p. 50 ); mourn the passage of her two brothers, Adeloro and Oyekunle, with Tègònni (T, pp. 66 - 67 ); and then try to cheer her up as their mood becomes increasingly sorrowful, by prompting her to tell them a story (T, p. 68 ). The highest point of their participation in Tègònni’s revolt is when they are asked to go after being pardoned by the Governor. The girls refuse to leave Tègònni’s side, even when threatened by gun-wielding soldiers. The stand-off continues until Tègònni herself asks them to go. They acquiesce, with the promise that they will return (T, pp. 74 - 75 ). And indeed, they return as masquerades wearing bronze masks, prompting the soldiers guarding Tègònni to take to their heels, while they go ahead to set their friend free (T, pp. 81 - 82 ). It is noteworthy that women do not participate in masquerading in most parts of Africa. The act of these girls is thus another form of defiance which is emboldened by Tègònni’s initial act. These are girls who will do anything they can to support their friend, not because they are compelled by any external force, but by their sense of responsibility and friendship. However, Òsófisan gives them a different mask from the regular ones the community uses. He would not want to be embroiled in a sacrilege scandal, would he? Isokun: I knew it! When I saw the unusual masks! Bronze! I guessed it was you, my daughters! Kunbi: Yes, baba. We went to Tegon’s workshop and got the masks. We knew the white men would not know the difference! Bayo: Me too, you fooled me, what with the bull roarer and all! Isokun: Women in masks! Our world is changing fast, reverend. So what happens now? (T, p. 82) Baba Isokun would not have asked this question if he knew what was coming. He thinks that seeing the women in masks is the height of their ‘desecration’ of norms, but their response takes him aback: they want to hide in the sacred grove of egungun in order to escape the long arm of the Governor. This prompts him to say that the world is “on its head” (T, pp. 82 - 83 ). And how correct his observation <?page no="124"?> 118 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society is for every society that stubbornly supports a status quo that has become oppressively unbearable, every act of defiance is often interpreted as treason. Those who support the old ways also always think that those who are not with them are against them, when in actuality they are presenting better alternatives for achieving goals that will be beneficial to the entire community. In addition, apart from the possibility of creating a sacrilegious scene, Òsófisan’s use of bronze masks instead of the regular ones used by the community, further ties the girls’ act to Tègònni who made those masks as observed from Kunbi’s statement above. Both Tègònni and her friends inspire themselves by being supportive and rising in defence of each other. 4. Carson’s Antigone, Nick and others In a text as non-traditional and as disruptive as Antigonick, characters are not often ‘properly’ created. But one’s knowledge of her Antigone is enhanced by the reader’s familiarity with Sophocles’ version. Her play starts with the entrance of Antigone and Ismene: [ ENTER ANTIGONE AND ISMENE ] ANTIGONE : WE BEGIN IN THE DARK AND BIRTH IS THE DEATH OF US ISMENE : WHO SAID THAT ANTIGONE : HEGEL IS- MENE : SOUNDS MORE LIKE BECKETT ANTIGONE : HE WAS PARAPHRASING HE- GEL ISMENE : I DON ’T THINK SO -… ( AN ) 25 Carson’s Antigone is the kind of girl that does not only know philosophers like Hegel, but one that quotes him and others like him copiously. She, like her other historical namesakes, is irrevocably revolutionary. She says to Kreon 26 : ANTIGONE : ACTUALLY NO THEY ALL THINK LIKE ME BUT YOU ’ VE NAILED THEIR TONGUES TO THE FLOOR -… ( AN ) She is also a very confident person. After asking her sister, Ismene, to join her in honouring their brother the first time and the latter refuses, she assumes the responsibility alone and rejects her offer of help afterwards. She is not deterred in spite of the numerous threats that Kreon throws at her. As it dawns on her that death has become inevitable, she has this to say: 25 All references to Antigonick (refered to as AN) are to Anne Carson and Bianca Stone, Antigonick, Highgreen (Northumberland) 2012 . No pages are mentioned in the original. 26 Creon’s name is written as “Kreon” in Carson’s text. The author’s spelling will therefore be used when referring to Antigonick in this article. The same applies to the names of Haemon (“Haimon”), Polyneices (“Polyneikes”), Tiresias (“Teiresias”) and Eurydice (“Eurydike”). <?page no="125"?> Izuu Nwankwọ E. 119 ANTIGONE : HEGEL SAYS PEOPLE WANT TO SEE THEIR LIVES ON STAGE LOOK AT ME PEOPLE I GO MY LAST ROAD I SEE MY LAST LIGHT LOOK , DEATH WHO GATHERS ALL OF US INTO HIS OLD BENT ARMS IN THE END IS GATHERING ME BUT I AM STILL ALIVE � NO WEDDING SONG NO WEDDING CHAMBER YET I SHALL LIE IN THE BED OF THE RIVER OF DEATH WHILE I AM ALIVE ( AN ) Antigone’s resolve not to budge even in the face of open threats to her life is not in doubt. She has honoured her brother, Polyneikes, and will not apologise for her actions. She is determined to take whatever consequence Kreon has stored up for her. Before discussing Nick, it is evident that Antigone receives support from unexpected quarters. Unlike Òsófisan’s Capt. Allan Jones who at certain moments tries to dissuade Tègònni and make her apologise to the Governor, Haimon supports the actions of Antigone against his own father. He says to his father: HAIMON : IF YOU WEREN ’T MY FATHER I’D SAY YOU WERE MAD KREON : THOU WOMAN ’S CHATTEL SEEK NOT TO TICKLE ME HAIMON : YOU TALK AND TALK AND NEVER LISTEN KREON : SAYEST THOU SO , WELL NOW I SAY THOU SHALT REVILE ME TO THY COST FETCH OUT THE LOATHED CREATURE LET HER DIE HARD AGAINST HER BRIDEGROOM NOW THIS VERY INSTANT BEFORE HIS EYES HAIMON : NEVER ( AN ) From here, he goes to kill himself: first for his devotion to Antigone, and second, to make his father eat his pride. He is successful because by his death, he forces Kreon to regret his actions, something he is not able to achieve while alive. His suicide turns his mother against the king too. It is only at this point that Kreon realizes that by his obstinacy, he has taken himself to the point where his actions cannot be reversed. But before Haimon kills himself, Kreon is warned by the seer, Teiresias that he is standing on a razor. Yet Kreon prefers to call him a “profiteer” and a “fake” rather than heed his warnings. Even the chorus tells Kreon that Teiresias’ prophecies are historically never false. All these fall on deaf ears because Kreon has already made up his mind about what he wanted to do. Kreon exits, then the chorus starts their tirade about time: <?page no="126"?> 120 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society ANOTHER/ AN HOUR/ AN HOUR AND A HALF/ A YEAR/ A SPLIT SECOND/ A DEC- ADE/ THIS INSTANT/ A SECOND/ A SPLIT SECOND/ A NOW/ A NICK/ A NECK-[…]/ WE ’ RE STANDING IN / THE NICK OF TIME (large space) [ ENTER MESSENGER ] ( AN ) The entrance of this Messenger marks the turning point for Kreon. It is the end of Haimon, soon to be followed by that of his wife, Eurydike. The Messenger here represents that moment when everything Kreon has believed and hoped in comes crashing down all around him. Hitherto, he is convinced that his actions against Antigone and his own son, Haimon, are all justifiable. However, at this "nick of time", the Messenger comes with a tale that changes all that and makes him eat, not only his words, but his pride also. Who then is Nick whom the chorus alludes to? He is a “mute part [always onstage, he measures things]”, so says the cast list ( AN ). But being a “mute part” does not suggest that the character is incapable of speaking, rather it is the part he is playing that is mute. There is thus a possibility therefore that Nick talks, just not in this narrative. His deliberate silence and the fact that he “measures things” indicate that he knows much more about the events of the story and of life generally than the persons involved in them. By inference from the chorus’ song above, if Kreon had acted earlier than he did, he may not have lost his son, wife and daughterin-law in one fell swoop. The chorus concludes the play this way, and they have a whole page to say just this: “ CHORUS : LAST WORD WISDOM BETTER GET SOME EVEN TOO LATE ” ( AN ). Even the last vellum page that comes after this statement, which is also supposed to have a painting on it, is unsurprisingly blank. It overlays the last stage direction of the play, written at the top and the bottom of a full page: “[ EXEUNT OMNES EXCEPT NICK WHO CONTINUES / MEASUR- ING ]” ( AN ). Thus, the Chorus also forms part of Antigone’s support base in the play. As much as it interprets stage action, its bias in favour of the heroine is not in doubt because it openly cautions Kreon. But in his suicidal rigidity, he fails to heed the warnings. It is noteworthy that from the beginning of the play, there are paintings overlaying almost every page of the written text; interjecting and disrupting understanding of the drama since they hardly correspond to the story being told. But at this last part, the importance of Nick’s act of measuring is underscored by the presence of a blank vellum page. Here, one encounters a page that says a lot in its blankness just like Nick, who himself is mute. The play of blankness and muteness at this point herald the completeness of Antigone’s defiance. What else is there to say when everyone can now see that she was actually right and Kreon was wrong? Is it not now obvious that if the king has listened, his tragedies would not have occurred? Since these have been made apparent, what more is there to say? <?page no="127"?> Izuu Nwankwọ E. 121 Nothing, basically nothing, because the story has told itself and the comeuppance of undue recalcitrance has taken place in the "Nick of time". One often ignored act of revolt is the author’s. The heroine’s defiance pales in comparison with that of the author herself, against normative adaptation, translation and writing dictates in contemporary times. Carson’s ‘translation’ attains its own kind of grandeur by its groundbreaking deviation from norm. Hear Ismene, “We girls cannot force our will against men! ” when she was asked by Antigone to join her in burying Polyneikes ( AN ); but here is a writer who forces her will against tradition. With reference to Rachel Galvin’s sexist reading of Antigonick above, one also avers that being women, also underscores the gendered undercurrents of Carson’s and Stone’s deviant style of play presentation. In this text, classical language is recast in present-day language, paintings interrupt the text because the pictures remain visible even after the page has been turned, there are no page numbers, elliptical play division with just episode five which is written at the bottom of the page, epileptic punctuations, and then the entire drama is inked in free-hand in bold block letters. As if these are not enough, Carson calls the work a translation rather than an adaptation. Then she collaborates with Bianca Stone (who does the paintings) and Robert Currie (who is the book’s designer), not to produce an aesthetically cohesive text, but one with piebald representations. With all these, the text calls attention to itself rather than to the story it is telling. 5. Applying Derrida Going by Derrida’s différance, both Òsófisan’s and Carson’s texts differ from Sophocles’ and their uniqueness is based on the appreciation of the characteristics they possess. For Derrida, meaning is differed and deferred. In specific terms, our understanding of these texts is based on the spatial differences which refer to absences and presences from one text to the other, and then (what one calls) ‘time’ differences, which means that certain additional enlightenments are also possible based on events that have or would still take place. These are very simplistic definitions elected for the study here. On spatial differences of the texts, there are characters they share in common with Sophocles’ whereas a good number of them are entirely the invention of the newer authors themselves. For example, where Ismene and Haemon are the only characters Sophocles puts around his heroine, Òsófisan and Carson bring in others with whom they make ultra-Sophoclean statements that impact directly on contemporary social realities. In the Yoruba society where Tègònni is situated, it is improbable that a maiden will go about her marriage preparations all by herself, let alone a princess. Òsófisan thus chooses to bring in companions for his heroine, not only for the wedding procession, but as part of the dramatic action so much so <?page no="128"?> 122 Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society that as the play ends, it is increasingly difficult to consider Tègònni’s unbelievable acts of defiance without recourse to the contributions of her friends. Apart from Kunbi and the other two, Baba Isokun and Rev. Bayo, members of the community who represent traditional and Christian religious beliefs respectively, are also brought in to give depth to Tègònni and her society. Carson’s play, on the other hand, has its invention of characters-- Nick. Like has been cited previously, his absent presence is paradox that is reflective of contemporary living which in itself is replete with multifarious contradictions. The Chorus is not Carson’s invention, but its peculiar use in this play is entirely hers. Furthermore, one considers the author and her collaborators as part of the text because their intrusive non-traditionalist stance is evident all over the work. Just like it is common to encounter Tègònni and her friends in Òsófisan’s, one finds it discomfiting to read Carson’s because of the way the text works against meaning-making thereby keeping the creators at the top of one’s thought as the play is being read. In this way, Carson becomes another Nick, a silent presence that asserts itself by non-conformism, non-traditionalism and defiance. It is like she is saying: “ THIS IS HOW I WANT MY OWN ANTIGONE , DEAL WITH IT ! ” Conclusively, in terms of spatial difference, where Carson’s work calls attention to its craft and indirectly, at its creator(s); that of Òsófisan posits a realistic Africanness, one specifically domiciled in his Yoruba heritage. The other component in the process of meaning-making, apart from ‘space’, which concerns Derrida is ‘time’. The present contains traces of the past as well as possibilities for the future. As such, the present is not self-sufficient because its comprehension is delayed in time for further explication by other external factors. In this way, the texts of Òsófisan, Carson and others before them further enhance the appreciation of Sophocles’, but the full import of theirs (especially Carson’s) might lie in the future that we are yet to encounter. Perhaps then, the personality and relevance of Nick would become much more vivid than it is presently. Our understanding of Tègònni and Carson’s Antigone is predicated on earlier projections of her as an archetype for resistance in the face of tyranny. From this, the recent Occupy Movements and mass revolt especially in the Arab world, find historical support in the acts of Antigone and other replications of her person. The fact that in these later works she is propped up by the support of her friends and companions is an indication that revolt has long become a communal rather than individualistic endeavour. Òsófisan lends credence to this assertion by giving us an Antigone that has accumulated a retinue of companions who travel with her through history, epochs and locations; an indication that those who protest against oppression will never stand alone so long as there are others like them who are also being assaulted by tyranny. <?page no="129"?> Charlotte Gruber 123 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies Charlotte Gruber (Ghent University) When Antigone buries her brother Polyneices against Creon’s decree in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, she appears to be performing an act of rebellion and resistance, undermining the authority of the ruler and reclaiming the rights that she holds to be her own. For more than 2000 years, the tragedy has fostered interpretations in art, academia and beyond. And still, over a decade into this new millennium, an abundance of recent reinterpretations can be found, of which many take a fresh look at the material and provide insights that shed new light on the shadowy corners of past perceptions of Antigone� This article provides analyses of two European performances that are based on the tragedy Antigone but shift and distort the focus on the heroine, especially in favour of the position of her sister Ismene. I claim that such a shift renders visible the marginalization of a theatrical figure and the agency her actions and non-actions bear. Ismene, the seemingly hesitant shadow of the bold and reckless heroine, can then be identified as Antigone’s neglected and underestimated Other. 1 This shift of perspective reflects on the performativity of privilege (and the privilege of performativity) and engenders empowerment and turmoil, throwing the very idea(lisation) of Antigone as a heroine into crisis. In a postdramatic manner, these performances play with form, content and theatrical expectations to the extent that they overturn what has become so familiar as the canonical of an ancient classic. In doing so, the performances address authority and authorship as being critically intertwined. They further investigate ancient Greek tragedy as an essentially Western heritage against the background of Eurocentrism and search for an actualization of the tragic outside the structural theatrical tradition of tragedy that derives from Aristotle’s Poetics� 2 1 For elaboration on the notion of the ‘Other’, see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Dordrecht/ Norwell 1991 � 2 Aristotle, Poetics, edd. S. H. Butcher and Richard Koss, Mineola 1997 � <?page no="130"?> 124 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies 1. Performing deconstruction: effective ethical acts? The examples from theatre practice discussed in the following tackle a set of key ethical questions of agency: how do we generate agency? Which actions are intelligible? 3 Whose voices are heard and whose are silenced? And who gets to decide? These are questions that are inherent in Antigone ever since it was first performed in 441 BCE . They are at the same time crucial questions that can be found in a variety of works of poststructural philosophy. As such, they have fostered concepts such as Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘the Other’ and ‘the Same’, Jaques Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘subaltern’ and Judith Butler’s ‘intelligibility’, engendering not only an intense diversification of the academic field 4 but also something that been described as an ‘ethical turn’ across disciplines. Especially in the last two decades, the ethical turn has become a central term in performance and theatre studies as well. 5 Political and ethical dimensions of theatre have come to dominate both content and production processes of contemporary theatre and performing arts on an unprecedented scale. This paper approaches contemporary tragedy against the background of the proclaimed ethical turn, showing that, next to being postdramatic, 6 the discussed performances entail elements of poststructural critique that realize effective ethical acts by means of (performing) deconstruction; i. e. performances that reread canonical narratives in order to unearth and (attempt to) undo their hidden legacies. The core argument of this article proceeds from the assumption that contemporary postdramatic performances actualize a renewal of the tragic within the dilemma articulated by deconstruction- - a liminal non-term, which, as Derrida insists, cannot be defined as a concept, strategy or method and cannot be reduced 3 For an explanation of the notion of ‘intelligibility’, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble� Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York 1990 � 4 E. g. gender and queer studies, feminism, postcolonial studies, etc. 5 An impressive amount of publications dealing with the ethical component of (especially) postdramatic theatre can be cited here, such as Helena Greham, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age, Basingstoke 2009 ; Dorothea von Hantelmann, How to do Things with Art, Dijon 2010 ; John Matthews and David Torevell (Edd.), A Life of Ethics and Performance, Newcastle upon Tyne 2011 ; Katharina Pewny, Das Drama des Prekären: Über die Wiederkehr der Ethik in Theater und Performance, Bielefeld 2011 ; Benjamin Wihstutz, Der Andere Raum: Politiken sozialer Grenzverhandlung im Gegenwartstheatere, Zürich 2012 ; Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll and Steve Giles (Edd.), Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, London 2013 ; Guy Cools and Pascal Gielen (Edd.), The Ethics of Art: Ecological Turns in the Performing Arts, Amsterdam 2014 ; Nina Birkner, Andrea Geier and Urte Helduser (Edd.), Spielräume des Anderen: Geschlecht und Alterität im Postdramatischen Theater, Bielefeld 2014 ; with Performing Ethos, which released its first issue in 2010 , there even exists An International Journal of Ethics in Theatre and Performance� 6 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, New York 2006 � <?page no="131"?> Charlotte Gruber 125 to any clear definition, since “all the defining concepts-[…] are also deconstructed or deconstructible”. 7 Derrida stresses that: [T]o deconstruct was-[…] a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it was also an antistructuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented (all types of structures, linguistic, ‘logocentric’, ‘phonocentric’-- structuralism being especially at that time dominated by linguistic models-[…] socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical.) 8 Hence, though far from providing a clear method, deconstruction expanded the understanding of the practice of writing and reading and “allowed and increased [the] descriptive efficacy and transformative power to analyses of a wide array of human actions and fields of knowledge”. 9 Deconstruction then touches upon the precariousness of agency and authority, and their challenging and empowering effects. With this paper, I thus want to show that the elusive term of deconstruction is a thought engine for a critical mindset, but nonetheless one that brings forth crucial ethical practices by destabilizing power structures and the injustices enforced therein. It will become clear that deconstruction exceeds the frameworks of literary and legal theory and can find powerful and effective realizations by means of the creative and ephemeral form that is theatre. With regard to Antigone, it is noteworthy that the development of deconstruction can actually be traced back as being related to this tragedy, which formed one of the main focuses of the research I conducted. As part of the research project Antigone in/ as Transition at Ghent University, 10 I worked on a detailed analysis that has unraveled the ethical turn in performance practice and philosophy as being related to Antigone, which is, for example, apparent in the shift from Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s reading of dialectics to Derrida’s text collage Glas ( 1974 ). 11 In Glas, Derrida reveals that a deconstructionist thread always already runs through the dialectical logic, which is, according to Derrida, the case with all metaphysical theories, which are always essentially fragile. It is noteworthy that Antigone is shown to be the very point of destabilizing rupture in Hegel’s writing, 7 Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend”, in: Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (Edd.), Derrida and Differance, Warwick 1985 , p. 4 � 8 Id., p. 2 � 9 Peter Baker, Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn, Gainesville 1995 , preface. 10 Antigone in/ as Transition. A Study on the Performing Arts Status Quo in Europe (in its Transcontinental Contexts), supervised by Katharina Pewny and co-supervised by Kristoffel Demoen. 11 See also Kati Röttger in this volume and Sina Kramer, “Derrida’s ‘Antigonanette’. On the Quasi-Transcendental”, in: The Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 , 4 ( 2014 ), pp. 521 - 551 � <?page no="132"?> 126 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies for she becomes the constitutive ground of his analysis, while at the same time exceeding his appropriation. Here, Derrida attempts to show that within any dialectical situation there remains an element which does not allow itself to be integrated into the systematicity of the dialectic but which presents non-oppositional diference [sic! ] that exceeds the dialectic which is itself oppositional. 12 It is especially the element of difference in deconstruction that reveals its ethical implications. This is also where Derrida’s work connects with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Simon Critchley, for instance, demonstrates that in terms of the ethical components of deconstruction, Levinas’s notion of the Other is most essential. Critchley claims “that Derridian deconstruction can, and indeed should, be understood as an ethical demand, provided that ethics is understood in the particular sense given to it in the work of Emmanuel Levinas”. 13 This is especially true for Force of Law, in which Derrida, with references to Levinas, explains that “justice always addresses itself to singularity, to the singularity of the other, despite or even because it pretends to universality”. 14 Rethinking ethics with the Other as point of departure is understood by Levinas as an act against the ontological ethics that is “suppressing or reducing all forms of otherness by transmuting their alterity to the Same”. 15 As I will show, the following case studies go even further than Antigone’s precarious position, posing that it is Ismene, Antigone’s unheard sister, who in traditional readings and performances of the last centuries has been assigned a place of ‘constitutive excluded’. 16 These works deconstruct the binary opposition between the hero and the coward that has rendered the two sisters unequal. Interestingly, this shift has also been discussed in contemporary philosophy, in particular in Bonnie Honig’s Antigone Interrupted� 17 In her analysis of the original text, Honig does not only point out the genuine possibility of Ismene having performed the first burial of Polyneices, she also brings our attention to the neglected solidarity among the two sisters and the bond of sisterhood. This shift towards overlooked aspects in canonical texts and marginalized figures and their actions is central to 12 Martin McQuillan, Deconstruction without Derrida, London/ New York 2012 , p. 147 � 13 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Edinburgh 1992 , prefatory note. 14 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”, in: Law Review 11 ( 1989 - 1990 ), p. 955 � 15 Simon Critchley, op. cit., 1992 , p. 6 � 16 For an extensive explanation of the term ‘constitutive excluded’ in relation to Derrida’s work, see Sina Kramer, op. cit., 2014 , pp. 521 - 551 � 17 Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted, Cambridge/ New York 2013 � <?page no="133"?> Charlotte Gruber 127 the more general ethical turn to the Other in both philosophy and performance studies. 2. Ismene’s silenced Antigone by Lot Vekemans and Alan Zipson The Dutch-Flemish Antigone adaptation Zus van, written by Lot Vekemans and originally produced by Allan Zipson in 2005 in Ghent, won the Mr. H. G. van der Vies-prijs in 2005 and has ever since gained acclaim throughout Europe. 18 At the annual Autorentheatertage at Deutsches Theater Berlin in 2014 , Stephan Kimmig produced a German performance of the text, titled Ismene, Schwester von. The title of Vekeman’s text translates best as “sister of ”. It is entirely spoken by Ismene. This monologue lets her tell for the first time her story about having existed and continuing to exist in the shadow of her sister, whose name-- as she promised to herself-- she never wants to mention again. This act is crucial to the performance and is already indicated in its title. “Sister of ” leaves out the name that used to give the title to the story for more than 2000 years and that dictates, right from the beginning, who the story is going to be about: Antigone. All this time, the fact had been ignored that this story is actually also about Ismene, something she openly laments. Having Ismene directly addressing the problem that, up to the point of this monologue, hardly anyone considered giving attention to her story, establishes a link between Ismene and Lot Vekemans, who wrote the text, gave Ismene a voice and hence accomplished the change. Throughout the performance, it is hard to ignore that Vekemans at her desk at some point in the past is Ismene’s voice as much as Ismene on the stage is Vekemans’s voice, both wondering why there was so little interest in Ismene’s point of view. This alienating relationship between Ismene and Vekenmans brings to mind the poststructuralist insight into the connection between authorship and authority, making clear that “All writing enacts agendas of power”. 19 Here, the author Vekemans chose to give authority to Ismene instead of Antigone by creating a monologue as an empowering speech of a neglected character. By resisting to say Antigone’s name, Ismene at the same time resists the tradition of calling her back to life, an attempt to reveal and counter the reinscription of power latent in performances and canonical writings. She seems to try to weaken the meaning, the significance and the memory of Antigone-- i. e. the signified-- by simply silencing her name-- i. e. the signifier. Ismene believes that a name is 18 Katharina Pewny has published an analysis of the Flemish production, see Katharina Pewny, “Das Theater der Anderen: Antigone”, in: Nina Birkner, Andrea Geier and Ute Helduse (Edd.), Spielräume des Anderen: Geschlecht und Alterität im postdramatischen Theater, Bielefeld 2014 , pp. 211 - 222 � 19 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, New York 2002 , p. 143 � <?page no="134"?> 128 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies powerful, that the significant and its use or non-use is important with regard to meaning. Meaning is not fixed but in flux and can, consequently, be changed, and with it the structures of power it articulated and maintained. This belief echoes iterability, one of the foundations of deconstruction. A performance about Ismene reflecting on the hegemonic mode of performances of Antigone is itself a proof that “iterability alters”. 20 The entire monologue is a performative utterance, not just because it is a performance, but also because it foregrounds Antigone’s Other and the fact that this Other had been made invisible by the dominance of its privileged counterpart. 21 The public space of the stage, which Antigone had occupied, is temporarily made Ismene’s home. As a theatrical means, the form of the monologue works as a technique of deconstruction too. This happens on two levels. Firstly, on the level of content, the monologue creates a shift of speech, agency and authorship: it is only Ismene’s story that is told and it is only told from her point of view. Secondly, on the level of form, it creates a shift of visibility or presence: only Ismene is allowed to appear onstage. Deconstruction, however, is not successful if a binary is just turned around, substituting the hegemony of the one by the other. Rather, the sharp contrast between the two concepts that were introduced as opposites is to be taken ad absurdum. Vekemans’s Ismene is not a loud, confident or convincing hero celebrating her independence. She appears as broken, confused and insecure. The words do not come easily, she stumbles, rambles and stutters, as if she has to learn to talk for the first time. Rather than a speech, Ismene gives a traumatized testimony of her struggle. Actress Elsie de Brauw emphasizes with great skill that Ismene did not choose to be left on her own with howling dogs and biting flies as her only company and that the strange, empty in-between world from which she speaks to us discomforts and even scares her. No matter how hard Ismene tries to make it a story about herself and withholds her sister’s name, she cannot help talking about her. Although Ismene speaks badly of her, the way she falls back on very detailed memories reveals that she suffers from unbearable loss and mourning and finds it impossible to free herself from her sister. The story might not be all about Antigone, but it can also not be Ismene’s story alone. The story can be told from different perspectives, but no perspective can deny the fact that the story always ties together the two sisters. Vekemans’s performance successfully makes clear that the two sisters cannot be reduced to simple opposites of each other. This manifested reductionism in reception history has met criticism from Bonnie Honig: 20 Ibid. 21 In her analysis of the performance, Katharina Pewny contrasts the view of Ismene as Antigone’s Other with the traditional perception of Antigone as Polyneices’ Other (Katharina Pewny, op. cit., 2014 ). <?page no="135"?> Charlotte Gruber 129 Perhaps no element of Antigone’s reception history is more settled than the belief that Antigone’s sister, Ismene, is an anti-political character who lacks the courage or imagination to act when called upon to do so. Critics split the two sisters into active and passive characters, treating them respectively as heroic and withdrawn, courageous and cowardly. 22 Zus van works through this reduction and shows that there is always a remainder. It shows the sisters as an example of what Jack M. Balkin calls a ‘nested opposition’, in which “two [seemingly contradictory] terms bear a relationship of conceptual dependence or similarity as well as conceptual difference or distinction”. 23 Eventually, the performance has not been simply entitled “Ismene” but Zus van, pointing out that both personas share the fate of being the “sister of ” the other. This title, which is reluctant to name a hero, mirrors différance, 24 by presenting an absence, which is productive. It differs from the well-known form of the title being the name of the hero by posing the question of who: “Sister of ? ” It also defers its meaning: by posing the question “Sister of whom? ”, it points at the variety of possible meanings and how these depend on interpretation, such as sister of Antigone versus sister of Ismene, versus sister of Oedipus, versus sister of Polyneices and Eteocles, versus sister of Lot Vekemans and so forth. The performance addresses the fact that meaning is never complete. The story of Antigone or of Ismene can never be fully told but is always going to be just one version, one reading. 3. A mute Bunraku-Antigone by Nicole Beutler and Ulrike Quade The performance addressed in the following provided the cover image of this publication. Antigone by German-Dutch choreographer Nicole Beutler and Dutch director Ulrike Quade is a hybrid between dance and puppet theatre, based on Sophocles’ work. Its premiere was at Frascati in Amsterdam in 2012 . In this piece, the artists break with the conventional techniques of tragedy on different levels, creating a rupture of aesthetic expectation, while at the same time drawing attention to the powerful effect of such conventions. A friend of mine, who joined me to the premiere, afterwards said that she felt confused and disappointed, without being able to actually determine why. What could have triggered such an experience in the audience? To draw conclusions regarding the experience of contemporary audiences, it is helpful to consider the 22 Bonnie Honig, op. cit., 2013 , p. 151 � 23 Jack M. Balkin, “Deconstruction”, in: Dennis M. Patterson (Ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Chichester 1996 , p. 3 � 24 For elaboration on the concept of différance, see Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago 1982 � <?page no="136"?> 130 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies conventions of such tragedy, which are rooted in ancient Greek culture and continue to influence expectations in present-day perception. It is therefore essential to know that Greek tragedy originated in a rhetoric, agonistic culture. In Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric, David Sansone even suggests that tragedy is the very root of the development of rhetoric in ancient Greece. 25 The element of dialogue onstage was something very new and a fundamental criterion in defining the quality of a tragedy. A good tragedy provided skilfully mastered agonistic dialogue, i. e. an advanced rhetoric of struggle and conflict, an oratorial contest between protagonists. Therefore, Greek tragedy has widely been understood as a form of art that is more driven by narrative or even rhetoric than by acting. The actors were also wearing masks and clear but sporadic gestures created the maximum of action. The tremendous acts of violence fundamental to tragedy were rarely performed onstage but rather reported in the speeches of messengers or in laments. Though scholars such as Oliver Taplin invested great effort to stress the exceptions to this rule, this convention still widely holds. 26 Having chosen the means of puppet theatre and dance, Beutler and Quade reverse this order. While during the largest part of the performance, nothing is said at all, violence and suffering are intensely and creatively made physical, for instance when the dancers become body parts of a puppet figure that is torn apart in battle. The metatheatricality of the puppet players, who are visibly in control of the puppets and at the same time affected actors in the performance, creates confusion over the coherence of cast and characters. At first, the appearance-- gender and hair colour-- of the three dancers suggest that each one can easily be assigned to one of the specific puppets, namely Antigone, Ismene and Polyneices. But during the performance, they seem to constantly change roles and suddenly become, for example, a horse ridden, the dismembered body parts, the cruel guards, an unknown outer force, an inaudible inner voice, or dead disco-ghosts dancing in Hades. Yet sometimes, they completely disappear behind the puppets. This dilution and dissolution of the theatrical sign of the actor/ character has been pointed out by Hans-Thies Lehmann as being one of the characteristics of postdramatic theatre. The fact that there is not one stable unity of theatrical character or personality and that it cannot clearly be said which theatrical signs refer to the characters of Antigone, Polyneices and Ismene throws into crisis the relationship of fate and individual responsibility that is crucial to tragedy. What can be seen onstage are puppets and dancers, who create a beautiful picture of struggle over mastery. The question who or what is in charge remains open. Beutler and Quade create a rather 25 David Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric, Chichester 2012 � 26 Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action, New York 1989 � <?page no="137"?> Charlotte Gruber 131 rhizomatic network of agency. 27 It is rhizomatic in the sense that causality and linearity are disturbed. The lines between active and passive, agent and victim, the one and the other are blurred, making the question of right or wrong at the bottom of Sophocles’ text nearly impossible to answer. It is, using Lehman’s words, the “[r]enunciation of conventionalized form” 28 that, as I want to suggest here, is not only a postdramatic technique but also a performative act of deconstructionist reading that reworks canonical material. By combining contemporary dance and electronic music with elements of traditional Japanese Bunraku puppetry, Beutler and Quade create an inversion of conventional theatrical opposites such as absence and presence, noise and silence, here and there. The Bunraku puppets were created in Japan specifically for this performance. The directors use a tradition from the Far East to deconstruct normative modes of representation inscribed in and maintained by a classic that is a founding myth of Western thought. This can be read as a critique of the tragedy’s complicity in the development and retention of a Eurocentric mindset and aesthetics; a critique of a dominant Western heritage against the background of a very alive Eastern tradition that is rendered absent on European stages. When developing his philosophy of deconstruction, one of Derrida’s main targets was “Western globalization, conceptual in form but material in its effects, and the Eurocentrism of Western culture ‘nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism in the process of imposing itself upon the world’”. 29 Though not a method, it is the agenda of deconstruction to ask which element is privileged over the other and why, which interdependencies between opposites are concealed and who gets a say and who does not. The goal is then to destabilize such orders of domination or rather to put into play the instability, which is always already inherent in these orders. It is therefore notable that Beutler and Quade’s Antigone starts with the coming to life of Polyneices, whose dead body has been banished in the original-- banned to lie outside the city wall and, therefore, to only exist offstage. King Creon, on the other hand, the threefold authority and symbolic father (Antigone’s custodian, a superior male citizen and a ruler, i. e. representative of the law) who, alongside Antigone, dominates Sophocles’ text, does not make a single appearance in this performance. The only person who actually gets to raise her voice-- and even gets to have the last word-- is in fact Ismene. She ends the mute performance with a quite surprising monologue in which she addresses the irony 27 For an explanation of the term ‘rhizomatic’, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis 1980 � 28 Hans-Thies Lehmann, op. cit., 2006 , p. 90 � 29 Robert J. C. Young, “Deconstruction and the Postcolonial”, in: Nicholas Royle, Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, Basingstoke 2000 , p. 189 . The quote is from Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Baltimore 1976 , p. 3 � <?page no="138"?> 132 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies of her sister’s death being the reason that Antigone is constantly kept alive in the cultural memory, reinscribed by performance, while she, who actually survived, finds herself buried alive, experiencing a never-ending symbolic death and being time after time presented as an agent of insignificance. This performance addresses in a deconstructionist manner the problem of legacies and inheritance, revealing how reading always is a process that generates structures of power. They make tangible what Derrida has described in Spectres of Marx: An inheritance is never gathered, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can only consist in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing� You must [il faut] means you must filter, select, criticise, you must sort out among several of the possibilities which inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in contradictory fashion around a secret. If the legibility of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not simultaneously call for and defy interpretation, one would never have to inherit from it. One would be affected by it as by a cause-- natural or genetic. One always inherits a secret, which says ‘Read me, will you ever be up to it? ’ 30 In the case of Antigone’s legacy, and the legacy of how the sisters have been read through its reception history, one of these secrets has been the agency of Ismene. The shift in the perception of Ismene, which is achieved through the performances, forms an example for the processual and historic authority and agency of reading and interpretation. 4. Antigone’s deconstructed legacies in academia The deconstruction of Hegel’s reading of Antigone, which Derrida himself accomplished in Glas, is probably the most obviously deconstructionist contribution to the discourse on Antigone. However, on closer investigation, deconstructionist approaches can be found in many recent readings as well. In her publication Antigone’s Claim. Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler for instance presents Antigone as the key figure of a disturbed family structure, using her to address and support the deconstruction of the norm of kinship, which is still generally understood as the nuclear family based on blood ties. Recently, also a deconstruction of the Oedipal theme seems to take place in psychoanalysis. This is of course partly related to critiques of Jaques Lacan’s reading of Antigone, 31 especially Luce Irigaray’s feminist reinterpretation. 32 A “Turn to Antigone” as the Other of Oedipus, a 30 Geoffrey Bennington, “Deconstruction and Ethics”, in: Nicholas Royle, Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, Basingstoke 2000 , p. 66 � 31 Jaques Lacan, The Seminar of Jaques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959-1960, New York 1991 � 32 Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’Autre Femme, Paris 1978 � <?page no="139"?> Charlotte Gruber 133 shift from an Oedipal to an ‘Antigonal’ understanding, has been addressed in 2004 by Cecilia Sjöholm’s The Antigone Complex. Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire. 33 In The Antigone Complex: From Desire to Guilt and Back, Vlasta Paulić attempts to rewrite psychoanalysis on the basis of Antigone instead of Oedipus. 34 As mentioned in the introduction, Bonnie Honig’s Antigone Interrupted indicates a shift similar to the one in the case studies. Honig’s publication appeared in 2013 and elaborates on arguments from her article “Ismene’s Forced Choice”. 35 Honig carefully rereads Sophocles in a way that acknowledges Ismene’s complicity in Antigone’s deeds, unravelling parts in the text to prove the possibility that the first burial of Polyneices was performed by Ismene. 36 As a result, Honig frees Ismene from the reputation of dull passivity and even presents her subtle agency as being more considerate than Antigone’s. Another recent reading of Antigone can also be understood as deconstructionist for it successfully brought to light an overlooked principle of marginalization hidden in Sophocles’ text and its reception, namely Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery by Tina Chanter. Chanter shows how Antigone’s arguments for burying Polyneices are based on a differentiation between her status and that of slaves, emphasizing that “even as Antigone attempts to write herself back into the political structures that have produced her excluded status she herself confirms and reproduces the structure of slavery”. 37 It is remarkable that she not only thoroughly reinvestigates the almost inexhaustible reception of Antigone with regard to this neglected aspect but also draws on performance practice, especially African postcolonial adaptations of Sophocles’ play. The development of deconstruction is deeply rooted in the historical context of the Algerian War of Independence and therefore essentially intertwined with postcolonial critique. Postcolonial theorist Robert J. C. Young noted that, “preoccupied with justice and injustice”, Derrida “developed Deconstruction as a procedure for intellectual and cultural decolonialization”. 38 Postcolonialism may be the moment when performances of and discourses on Antigone mingled most strongly under the roof of deconstruction. 39 33 Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex. Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire, Stanford 2004 � 34 Vlasta Paulić, “The Antigone Complex: From Desire to Guilt and Back”, in: David Henderson (Ed.), Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Newcastle upon Tyne 2012 � 35 Bonnie Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’ Antigone”, in: Arethusa 44 , 1 (Winter 2011 ), pp. 29 - 68 � 36 Bonnie Honig, op. cit., 2013 � 37 Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery, New York 2011 , p. 131 . See also Chanter’s contribution to this volume. 38 Robert J. C. Young, op. cit., 2000 , p. 193 � 39 The relevance of Antigone in postcolonial discourse can be traced in this publication as well, particularly in the second section “Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance”. <?page no="140"?> 134 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies All these approaches show that deconstruction, though not a method, is an ongoing activity of rereading and rewriting that undermines or unravels truth claims and (the injustices of) the hierarchies and power mechanisms that they engender. The assumption that deconstruction plays a crucial role in the contemporary discourse on Antigone raises the question of the reason why it is particularly Antigone that has become the subject of such an approach. Three reasons for this will be proposed and sketched out in the three concluding sections. 5. Reason I: inheritance and legacies Derrida declared that deconstruction especially targets the “founding concepts of the whole history of philosophy”. 40 The deconstruction of such concepts consists in conserving-[…] all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. 41 Since the tragedy of Antigone has inspired a large number of philosophers and has been a major influence on metaphysics, 42 Antigone might well be understood as one of those founding (metaphysical) concepts. Additionally, the fact that a source has been interpreted for more than 2000 years poses the challenge of finding what is yet missing. To say it in Derrida’s words: “[to] show up against the usurpers the very thing that in inheritance, has never yet been seen: to the point of bringing to light, by the unheard-of act of a reflection, what has never seen the light”. 43 The discourse on Antigone is obviously very much alive. The variety of contributions to this anthology and the existence of many other anthologies on Antigone reveal that a frequently interpreted text does not cease to be relevant and puzzling. Quite the contrary: every new interpretation bears in it new questions to be addressed, contradictions to be pointed out and remainders to be found. It has already been pointed out that writing is authority. Derrida further made clear that reading is a responsibility and inheritance is a task that will always remain before us. 44 Every reading has been affected by its historical contexts and every 40 Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science, Chicago 1980 , p. 182 � 41 Ibid. 42 See also Kati Röttger in this volume. 43 Geoffrey Bennington, op. cit., 2000 , p. 67 � 44 Ibid. <?page no="141"?> Charlotte Gruber 135 rereading will affect and be affected. Readings can manifest effects, rereading can dismantle or reinforce them. “One can recognize an authentic inheritor in he who conserves and reproduces, but also in he who respects the logic of the legacy to the point of turning it back-[…] against those who claim to be its holders”. 45 Deconstruction has been described by Derrida as a “delimiting of ontology”. 46 Due to the long history of Antigone’s reception and the strong connection to philosophy, 47 this heritage brings with it certain ideologies, power structures and truth claims: effective legacies, which may pass us by while being passed on unknowingly. To draw attention to them seems to be one of the main interests in discourse on Antigone today. 6. Reason II: structure The ancient Greek tragedy in the classical sense has widely been understood as an art form based on and defined by a certain protocol, a specific structure. This view has been strongly influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics. Therein, tragedy is said to be composed of five or six different parts (prologue, parodos, episode, stasimon and exodos), alternating between the chorus (mainly using lyric speech) and the individual actors (mainly using iambic triameters), with both groups of characters having a specific number of participants. Furthermore, there are the principles regarding duration, place and action and the convention that content should be related to conflict, with the motifs of error and misfortune. In the Poetics, Aristotle claims that only if the crucial elements of character and plot are structured in a certain way, the tragedy can be effective in the sense of provoking pity and fear in the audience. According to him, this is the main effect of a good tragedy. 48 Aristotle understood Sophocles to be the dramatist who mastered this art the best. For Hegel, this was particularly true for Antigone, which he claimed to be the finest of all tragedies. As mentioned in the introduction, this is essential with regard to Derrida’s attempt to deconstruct Hegel’s reading of Antigone-- and with it, the metaphysics of Hegel’s philosophy- - in his publication Glas. The essential link between deconstruction and structure has been a cornerstone of Derrida’s work ever since his quintessential lecture “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. When Derrida first presented it in 1966 at the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, US ), it “simultaneously announced the opening and closing of 45 Ibid. 46 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 1985 , p. 4 � 47 See also Kati Röttger in this volume. 48 Aristotle, op. cit., 1997 , Part VII-X. <?page no="142"?> 136 The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies structuralism in the Anglophone world”. 49 It seems that especially the ‘structurality’ of the texts and aesthetics of tragedy has served as the fertile soil of a wave of postdramatic, deconstructionist theatre. These performances do not abandon the text but reread and rewrite it, actualizing its meaning in the double sense of, on the one hand, understanding and, on the other hand, significance. They do so with the result of showing that meaning is a doing. 7. Reason III: binary oppositions and indecisive conflict Antigone is laden with conflicting oppositions: female versus male, religion versus state, young versus old, honour versus condemning, death versus life and so forth. The story is also truly haunted by confusion, liminality and paradoxicality: Antigone is the daughter and at the same time the sister of her father. The love for her brother is stronger than the love for the fiancé or the love for the sister. The dead brother remains unburied while the living sister is buried alive. Let us, besides, not forget the blind man who sees it all coming! Moreover, there seem to be two heroes, two cases of hubris and two downfalls: both Creon and Antigone can be viewed as being the hero of this tragedy. In fact, one might say there are three (or more) when we consider Ismene, the forgotten sister (and others, such as Haemon). The tragedy successfully creates an infinite indecisiveness of conflict. All the while, the awareness of hierarchy and hidden power structures installed simply by means of binary oppositions, by privileging one term over the other, is one of the most graspable themes when following a deconstructionist agenda. In the turmoil of fragile oppositions in Antigone, the centre can ultimately not be localised, the solution withdraws itself and the discourse is kept open. The tragedy remains in play, 50 and the ever-present play, which bears in it the cradle of destabilization, is what is tragic; the promise of impossible response-ability, 51 which comes with agency face-to-face with the Other. 49 Russel Daylight, What if Derrida was wrong about Saussure, Edinburgh 2011 , pp. 1 - 2 � 50 For an explanation of Derrida’s use of the notions of ‘centre’ and ‘play’, see Jacques Derrida, op. cit., 1980 , p. 182 � 51 A concept by Levinas, see Bettina G. Bergo, “Emmanuel Levinas”, on: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http: / / plato.stanford.edu/ entries/ levinas/ (last modified 03 . 08 . 2011 ). <?page no="143"?> Charlotte Gruber 137 Antigone’s Scenes of Death <?page no="145"?> Francesca Spiegel 139 Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother Francesca Spiegel (Humboldt University, Berlin) Antigone, we often hear, is stubborn. Creon, on the other hand, has a strong will, but is capable of a change of heart. This difference in character between the two protagonists in Antigone has captured the imagination of many readers. In the 1940 s, for example, Jean Anouilh wrote an adaptation of Antigone that stood within a vogue of classical drama adaptations at that point in time in the cultural life of Paris. One thinks of other Greek drama adaptations for stage and screen by contemporary authors like Giraudoux, Cocteau or Sartre. Anouilh’s Antigone certainly captured aspects of the existentialist philosophy of that time, best known through Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings. Anouilh’s play highlights the simultaneously attractive and repulsive qualities of political decision-making, its inextricable complexity and messiness, and introduces the “dirty hands” motif so central to Sartre’s play Les mains sales ( 1948 ). “Je vais te dire, à toi. Ils ne savent pas, les autres; on est là, devant l’ouvrage, on ne peut pourtant pas se croiser les bras. Ils disent que c’est une sale besogne, mais si on ne la fait pas, qui la fera? ”, 1 Anouilh’s Creon rhetorically asks a pageboy in the last quarter of the play, when Antigone and Haemon have left him alone on the stage. Anouilh’s Antigone foregrounds the contrasts between a Creon character acting very much in line with an existentialist philosophy and getting his own proverbial hands dirty, and an Antigone astonishingly unbending in her resolve, showing all the signs of being a “tortured idealist thirsting for a world of purity and eternal innocence”, as Barbara Bray writes. 2 To look at this situation from a Freudian angle, we can say with Françoise Meltzer that “Anouilh’s Creon misreads Antigone much as Freud’s Thanatos, or death drive, is frequently misread: as a desire for death”. 3 Indeed, when it comes to Antigone’s character and its psychology, scholars and critics have commented upon her latent death wish, in the Freudian and Lacanian sense, which becomes more and more manifest. 4 In Anouilh’s play, this character 1 Jean Anouilh, Nouvelles Pieces Noires, Paris 1958 , pp. 205 - 206 � 2 Jean Anouilh, Antigone, edd. Barbara Bray and E. Freeman, London 2005 , p. xlii. 3 Françoise Meltzer, “Theories of Desire: Antigone Again”, in: Critical Inquiry 37 , 2 ( 2011 ), p. 171 � 4 On this topic see Charles Segal’s classic treatment “Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus”, in: Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles, Norman (Oklahoma) 1981 , pp. 152 - 206 , especially p. 166 and the following pages. <?page no="146"?> 140 Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother trait converges with the idealistic quest for purity, which stands in opposition to Creon’s own attitude towards life and human affairs. “Purity? ”, one might ask. In Sophocles’ Antigone, Antigone would like to bury her brother Polyneices, although this has been forbidden by Creon, the regent king of Thebes. Polyneices has been declared an enemy for having killed the ruler of Thebes, who happened to have been Eteocles, his own and Antigone’s brother. While Eteocles was given a state funeral, Polyneices is not allowed in the city, not even his dead body. Antigone’s psychological motivations for desperately wishing to bury her unburied brother are not difficult to see, and have already been explored in more depth by scholars. First of all, Antigone has emotional ties with her brother, and suffers at the thought of his soul being restless, as the Greeks are thought to have believed would happen to the souls of the unburied and outcast dead. “Although any rite was better than none, as Antigone knew, great people demanded great rites that would befit their lofty stature”, Sarah Johnston writes on the ancient practices and beliefs, 5 and “the dead demanded libations, tears, dedications-[…]. Those who mistreated the dead-[…] would suffer dreadfully: illness, madness, and other, unspecified evils befell them, sometimes brought directly by haunting ghosts”. 6 Secondly, Antigone has survived the suicide of her mother Jocasta, the shame-laden demise of her father Oedipus and now also the mutual killing of her twin brothers. As a result, she remembers the prophetic words that a curse hung over her family, one which would continue to perpetuate disaster in the family unless it was cleansed. 7 This increases the urgency of Antigone’s need for purification in the form of a burial and religious rituals, even more than usual. 5 Sarah I. Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece, Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London 1999 , p. 151 � 6 Id., p. 27 � 7 The study of pollution or ‘miasma’ and its cleansing as a religious motif has been amply discussed by scholars, spearheaded by Jean-Pierre Vernant’s influential anthropological analyses of Greek religion, mythology and literary fiction. On Sophocles specifically, see for example Jean-Pierre Vernant and Page duBois, "Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex", in New Literary History 9 , 3 ( 1978 ), pp. 475 - 501 . For a more recent study, see Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett, "Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and Ismene", in: Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 15 / 16 ( 2008 - 2009 ), pp. 1 - 18 � <?page no="147"?> Francesca Spiegel 141 1. Polyneices: enigmatic touchstone figure? These interpretations, in broad brushstrokes, are at the basis of many scholarly treatments of and reflection on Antigone, 8 but my feeling is that this approach does not go the whole way in one small regard. The understanding of Antigone as a person with mostly private, and Creon a person with mostly public motivations, rests on an understanding of their respective relationship with Polyneices, and their respective conceptualization and judgment of who Polyneices is. Their opposed views of Polyneices help us better understand how Antigone and Creon understand themselves, the world, etc. But what do and can we know about Polyneices? Polyneices is already dead when Antigone begins. And yet, the presence of his dead body and indirectly also his spirit, is central to the play’s peripety, its debates and its plot, so much so that Jonathan Strauss speaks of a "sentient corpse". 9 We should consider the possibility that Polyneices, the object and root of all debate, and a dead body that cannot act or speak, is himself a deeply misunderstood figure (by Antigone, by Creon, by the audience, by ‘us’), whom the audience at least should see from a different perspective than the way Antigone and Creon each portray him. In Antigone, Polyneices’ presence is certainly a disturbance in an otherwise more or less clear world order. From the perspective of everybody in the play except Antigone, and echoed and further sustained by the chorus of Theban elders, Polyneices was a traitor, and even dead he is not welcome. Not only had he and his brother committed mutual fratricide, which is already enough cause for one to be disturbed by the thought of his personality, but also-- and this is what truly sets in motion the heated debates and tragic events of Antigone-- had he come to the city of Thebes in hostile aggression. 2. What about Polyneices’ point of view? Disturbing as these things may be, none of this would have come as a surprise to the audience. “The story of Oedipus and his two sons, who fought over the throne of Thebes after their father relinquished power, was well known in Sophocles’ time”, writes André Lardinois, stating also that “it was part of several famous epics and made up the plot of one of Aeschylus’ trilogies, of which the last play, Seven 8 For a fuller appraisal of the scholarship on Antigone and its history, with ample bibliographic information, see Tina Chanter and Sean D. Kirkland, "Introduction", in: Tina Chanter and Sean D. Kirkland (Edd.), The Returns of Antigone: Interdisciplinary Essays, New York 2014 , pp. 1 - 15 � 9 Jonathan Strauss, Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality, New York 2013 , p. 57 � <?page no="148"?> 142 Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother against Thebes, survives”. 10 In fact, a glance at the events in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes reveals a chorus offering detailed information about the genealogy of the Labdacid family and about a curse that haunted this family. 11 The death of their father Oedipus is outlined, himself the murderer of his own father; and we hear of the dying Oedipus’ last words, which prophesied that Eteocles and Polyneices would one day kill each other, for the pair of twins would be unable to agree upon who of them should succeed Oedipus to the throne of Thebes. In Seven Against Thebes, we are informed that the twins had agreed to rule Thebes in alternating years. Eteocles had started by taking the crown first for a year, while Polyneices travelled to Argos, where he married Argeia. When Polyneices returned to take up his year of power, Eteocles refused to give up his crown. 12 In Seven Against Thebes, this conflict is played out at the seven gates of Thebes, Eteocles being inside the walls of Thebes, and Polyneices coming in from outside; but not exactly as an outsider, in the light of the circumstances we have just described. Their battle and mutual homicide is the tragic end of this tale. Seven Against Thebes ends with Antigone and Ismene appearing onstage, as they are about to begin the preparations for the burial. This is so strikingly similar to the beginning of Sophocles’ Antigone that some scholars have disputed that this was the original ending of Seven Against Thebes and argued that it was altered in Sophocles’ time, 13 perhaps with Antigone’s success in mind. Although this hypothesis has to be treated with the utmost caution, what is highlighted here is the special role played by the sisters Antigone and Ismene in the aftermath of the mutual killings of Eteocles and Polyneices. These textual questions are only relevant to us insofar as they indicate with some certainty that Seven Against Thebes had been relatively well known to Sophocles and his audience; and thus indicating that they were familiar with what interests us most here, namely the back stories of the feud between Eteocles and Polyneices over the Theban throne and of how Polyneices came to attack Thebes in the first place. In Antigone, Polyneices is squarely represented as someone who had gone against Thebes with ill intent: he had come "with intent to destroy", "bringing death", as the chorus puts it 10 André Lardinois, "Antigone", in: Kirk Ormand (Ed.), A Companion to Sophocles, Boston 2012 , p. 55 � 11 Aeschylus, Aeschylus, with an English translation: Vol. 1. Seven Against Thebes, ed� H. W. Smith, Cambridge (Mass.)/ London 1926 , ll� 785 and following, on: http: / / data.perseus. org/ citations/ urn: cts: greekLit: tlg0085.tlg004.perseus-grc1: 785-791 (accessed 31 / 03 / 2015 ). 12 Richard E. Braun, Sophocles: Antigone, London 1973 , pp. 96 - 97 � 13 On this debate, which has been very much laid to rest nowadays, and on the scholars involved, see R. D. Dawe, "The End of Seven Against Thebes", in: Classical Quarterly 17 , 1 ( 1967 ), pp. 16 - 28 � <?page no="149"?> Francesca Spiegel 143 (Soph.Ant. 117 and 135 , translation FS ). 14 The back story of Polyneices’ legitimate claim to the throne at that point in time is barely touched upon. This omission begins to look even more deliberate when it is viewed as coordinated with Creon’s assertion of his own claim to the throne and his authority in Antigone. Creon is regent of Thebes, and as such, he is in a position to decide what the propaganda (so to speak) should be. It is not in Creon’s interest to remind others that Polyneices had a claim to the throne, since doing so might underscore the tenuousness of his own authority in the circumstances. “Creon’s shaky claim to the throne puts one in mind of a Greek tyrant, best defined as king who has assumed power rather than inherited it”, writes David Carter, also pointing out Creon’s “cruel and autocratic style of government”. 15 Perhaps some had hoped that Polyneices would never come back. When he left Eteocles to rule Thebes for a year, Polyneices’ life had been rerouted via a different city: he had married Argeia of Argos and had built a new life there. This gave him a new identity that was difficult to categorise, a kind of hybrid between Theban and Argian, and the newly acquired foreign element became an excuse for excluding Polyneices from Thebes and its politics and for withdrawing the communal sympathy for his tragic misfortune. As the king’s twin brother who would alternately reign Thebes, Polyneices had an unusual and a somewhat ambiguous place in the city. The perceived estrangement between Polyneices and Thebes is at the very foreground of Antigone, where Antigone is tirelessly arguing that Polyneices deserves to be rehabilitated and reintroduced into Thebes through an appropriate funeral. But a good part of the story has been truncated and remains completely in the dark, and in Antigone, there are no mitigating circumstances for Polyneices’ hostility towards Eteocles and Polyneices is dismissed on both a political and a civil level. In this back story, there is a fictionalized social process of group hostility and of demonizing a particular individual, a frequently used motive in tragedy. When tragic events have occurred in the story and continue to occur, it becomes of the essence to identify and exclude the guilty person from the community. When this social process sets in, characters and chorus alike begin to highlight how deeply estranged from the community the guilty person really is, so that s/ he can in good conscience be considered to no longer belong to the community. In the case of Polyneices, his already existing status as an exile is the first pillar of his exclusion; 14 All references to Antigone (Soph.Ant.) are to Sophocles, “ ΑΝΤΙΓΟΝΗ ”, in: H. Lloyd-Jones & N. G. Wilson (Edd.), Sophoclis Fabulae, Oxford 1990 , pp. 181 - 238 . All translations from Greek are my own, unless otherwise stated. The numbers behind the abbreviation refer to line numbers in the original Greek text. 15 David Carter, “Antigone”, in: Andreas Markantonatos (Ed.), Brill’s Companion to Sophocles, Leiden/ Boston 2012 , p. 122 � <?page no="150"?> 144 Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother secondly, now he would be denied burial at Thebes because of his declared hostility against the city. If a scapegoat was needed for the tragic events in Antigone, one can see how it could be found ready-made in the character of Polyneices, and by proxy, in Antigone herself, since she defends his honour, and acts as his representative after his death. 3. How the chorus profiles Polyneices A detailed analysis of each character’s attitude and utterances individually and in conjunction with one another, could reveal the extent of how this social exclusion process is engineered within the community. Taking the first choral appearance of Antigone (Soph.Ant. 100 - 160 ) as a test case, we can discern ideas and rhetorical devices that work to enforce a mechanism of emotional distancing to deny responsibility for any tragic consequence and that also function as a rationalization of the practice of social exclusion they promote. Some of the poetic images and themes that appear here are programmatic and continue to weave themselves into the chorus’ various lyric interludes throughout the whole play; indeed, some of the images or arguments are echoed across characters’ speech everywhere. The rhetoric of exclusion that the lyric seems to employ rests upon several pillars of thought: denigration, for instance by the use of contrast between the two brothers; intentional blurring and deliberate oblivion of mitigating circumstances, which is put forward as a serious way of dealing with the problem; and, thirdly, the attribution of guilt to Polyneices takes place in an over-simplified way. Hubristic character traits are inflated beyond proportion while more congenial ones are left unmentioned by everyone but his sister, Antigone, still living in Thebes and wishing to offer him funeral rites with all the due ceremonies, despite his late affiliations with (from a Theban perspective) foreign places and dissident political ideas. Briefly summarized, the structure of the parodos contains an invocation to daylight, an expression of joy at the departure of the Argian host, which Polyneices had been the leader of. Then, moving into symbolism and the ambiguous language of imagery, the image of "the man in the white shield, who came in full panoply" mutates into the mental image of a white eagle covering the plain "with his snow-white wings" and indeed his "many horsehair-crested helmets" (Soph.Ant. 111 - 115 ). The demonization grows more intense as the chorus raise before our eyes the murderous intentions that they saw in Polyneices’ war, but which were averted. The reason they give is that "Zeus detests the boasts of a proud tongue" (Soph.Ant. 127 - 128 ), and that Polyneices was allegedly guilty of this. This set of posthumous attributions of ill intentions and the relief at the death of a hostile force based upon knowledge of these ill intentions, although it only encompasses a few lines here in the parodos of Antigone, can be particularly well <?page no="151"?> Francesca Spiegel 145 set in comparison with the debates and feelings exposed in the second half of Ajax� After the death of Ajax, Agamemnon and Menelaus appear and begin to discuss the great danger that Ajax had been to the community, indeed, the entirety of the second half of Ajax presents many parallels with the constellation and themes of Antigone, from the proud sibling forcefully defending the deceased’s right to burial, to themes like averted murder and the broken-down relationship between individual and community-- something which has not escaped the notice of many scholars. "In the arrogance of clashing gold", the chorus say, Capaneus arrived as one of the seven against Thebes. Polyneices, another one of the seven against Thebes, is thus characterized extrinsically through his proximity to Capaneus, now the target of much vitriol from the chorus. They describe him as breathing "malignant winds" from his lungs, and as being all the opposite of right-handed (Soph.Ant. 134 - 140 ). In other words, he was engaged in some left-handed endeavours. This carries the full weight of negative connotations and superstitions relating to bad luck and doom that the thought of left-handedness had to the Greek ear. According to the chorus, there are those whom Polyneices associated with, and there are the others, "on the right side of Victory". Victory is invoked at line 149 . The entirety of antistrophe B (Soph.Ant. 134 - 141 ) builds upon contrast as a means of characterization by opposition, and in particular the final sentence reflects this in the choice of words, prefixes and grammatical constructions involving parallelisms and pairs of opposites. Antistrophe B inaugurates a new topic: forgetting about it all, and turning to bacchic celebrations. Then, all attention is turned towards Creon, whose entrance is announced, and it seems then that the very idea of Polyneices and the problems he caused have vanished from everyone’s mind- - deliberately, of course. Even metrically, at line 147 , the end of the second strophe is reached and the rhythmical pattern lends itself to closing off a topic, so that the content can be made to follow the form and a closed choral ode can stand for a closed discussion. But does this really provide closure? The interpretation somewhat begs the question. In addition to this, with the chorus’ language being more lyrical than that of the characters’ speech and having fewer particles and definite articles, a type of associative rhetorical gravitas inhabits all choral utterances and lends them a particular air of authority. In Mark Griffiths’s words, "the lyric utterances of a chorus-[…] carry a special authority of their own, by reason of the traditional function of choruses as performers of communal wisdom and memorialization". 16 Thus, in spite of the stark and denigrating description of Polyneices in the earlier parts of the parodos, 16 Mark Griffiths, "Authority Figures", in: Justina Gregory (Ed.), A Companion to Greek Tragedy, Oxford 2005 , p. 346 � <?page no="152"?> 146 Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother here it is announced that all shall be forgotten about, and that victory shall be celebrated in an orgiastic manner. With the help of these devices, the chorus work to create an emotional and social distance between ‘us’ and Polyneices, and prepare a particularly inhospitable ground for Antigone herself to begin stating her views on the importance of restoring the body of Polyneices to the city for due burial. The chorus do not miss the opportunity to couple the two concepts of overbearing confidence or arrogance with divine wrath and ultimately the demise of the individual, which, as an idea, is a classic stronghold of archaic Greek thought and its conceptual framework. It should be added that in terms of language and poetic metre, the choral parts of tragedy are presented in a near-Doric dialect which is distinct from the Attic dialect of the characters’ speech. The traditions and origins of choral lyric, which can be traced back via Pindar or Bacchylides, also give their distinctive colouring to the conceptual and moral framework navigated by the chorus, as scholars have shown. 17 In later choral odes and utterances, we hear further arguments and thoughts about Antigone and Polyneices, for example that their family is beleaguered by a curse that perpetually threatens their existence. However, this curse, it seems, is connected to the recurrence of arrogant or overbearingly self-confident behaviour in the family. It is not clear whether the curse consists of a character trait and the behaviours it engenders, or whether the curse is an external force of destiny driving the fate of these persons, regardless of their behaviours. 18 The third stasimon adds more to the subject, as readers can find here pronouncements such as "sorrows fall on dead men’s sorrows, one generation does not release the next, a god overthrows it, and there is no deliverance" or mention of the family being "cut down by the bloody knife of the gods below, by folly of speech and a Fury in mind" (Soph.Ant. 595 - 600 ). On the one hand, this seems to refer to the transgressions committed by individuals of the family. On the other hand, there seems to be a curse, conceptualized less as a sort of human agency and more as a disembodied ghost that brings with it the loom of impending destruction in their lives. Here, we get a glimpse of rhetorical and ethical denigration in action, which, again, rids the tragic scenario-- whatever it might be-- of human 17 Seminal studies on this are chapter IV in E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley/ Los Angeles 1951 and J. H. Finlay, Pindar and Aeschylus, London 1955 . Up-to-date discussions on the subject can be found in Douglas Cairns (Ed.), Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought, Swansea 2013 � 18 The secondary literature on curses, guilt and hamartia in Greek tragedy is vast and goes back a long time. One fairly recent monograph is N. J. Sewell-Rutter, Guilt by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy, Oxford 2007 . Michael Lurje, Die Suche nach der Schuld, Munich 2004 also includes a discussion of the scholarship to date. <?page no="153"?> Francesca Spiegel 147 responsibility, almost making the tragic events a necessity, indeed a biological or genetic factor that never fails to come into effect within this particular family. The chorus, in reckoning this, appear somewhat susceptible of oversimplification, especially in the attribution of guilt. 4. Critical evaluations William Allan has made interesting remarks on the questions of moral responsibility and its expression by the chorus in Oedipus the King. In a 2013 volume on archaic thought in Greek tragedy edited by Douglas Cairns, he writes: Moralizing critics, too influenced perhaps by the chorus-- not to mention misinterpretation of Aristotle’s comments on hamartia- - seek to find some fault in Oedipus that justifies his demise. I do not mean to deny that Oedipus’ bad qualities, particularly his anger, do indeed contribute to his ruin-- note especially his recollection of the encounter at the crossroads (O. T. 810-3). However, these bad qualities hardly justify his downfall in the righteous terms envisioned by the chorus. 19 The insights of this reading also apply to the situation of Polyneices in Antigone� The reasons why Polyneices went into exile in the first place, and the cause of the estrangement from his brother, are only very lightly alluded to in the play Antigone and somewhat obscure in other accounts of the myth. To summarize the (admittedly obscure) accounts, it seems that a dispute over an inheritance lies at the origin of the separation of and feud between the two brothers. If we are allowed to see a direct continuity between how Aeschylus and how Sophocles treated the myth (which ‘we’ are usually not, of course), we can consider Polyneices’ case as a fairly formulaic situation of ancient literary storytelling. In fact, this kind of exile story is structurally similar to the story of Ajax in Ajax or the story of Achilles in the ninth book of the Iliad, to name two of the most wellknown and relevant examples. With Ajax, we have a second play by Sophocles that incorporates the same theme of the burial of a dissident that was a previously well-regarded person of the aristocracy who fell from grace badly, ending up turning himself against the community and being no longer accepted, even as a dead body. The character constellations, and dramatic situations, are structurally similar. If Ajax zooms in on the inner thoughts of Ajax during the first half of the play, when Ajax is still alive, then we have with Polyneices a silent character. However, in both Ajax and Antigone, we are in the presence of the body of a dead hero, who, expelled from the community, is enjoying an ardent posthumous eulogy and defence by a sibling. In both cases, one could speak of an attempt to rehabilitate 19 William Allan, “‘Archaic’ Guilt in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus”, in: Douglas Cairns (Ed.), Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought, Swansea 2013 , p. 178 � <?page no="154"?> 148 Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother the honour of the deceased and to reintroduce the shamed and shunned deceased into the community where he once was a very important member of. Sophocles’ Ajax, in turn, is not without its similarities to the Homeric embassy to Achilles in the ninth book of the Iliad, where a delegation of heroic messengers seeks to convey Agamemnon’s apologies to Achilles after he decided to leave the army because Agamemnon withheld his war spoils. There exists then, in Greek fiction, a specific character constellation and a specific type of character that emerges from these three cases I just sketched: a young man retreating from his duties (civic, military, political) because of the pain of having been short-changed by members of his own community. Was it the humiliation over an unfairly divided inheritance that drove Polyneices into exile? Did the two brothers die in the way that is described in Seven Against Thebes, at each other’s hands while fighting over the throne of Thebes, which they were going to share, but Eteocles did not want to give up? Versions of the myth contained in Antigone only very faintly suggest this as a reason, and one should not extrapolate more than already ventured. At any rate, nothing could be further from the chorus’ mind than to acknowledge that there might be ambiguities in the black-and-white depiction of good and bad people. Instead, the chorus delivers the standard explanation that Polyneices simply was too proud, excessive pride being hubris, which lead to a disaster. The possibility that some of Polyneices’ acts were committed in response to prior injuries suffered is deliberately disregarded. The chorus’ repeated recall of a family curse also functions as an extrinsic characterisation device in the play. This colours the audience’s perception of the character. As such, this too deserves a critical review. As mentioned before, the curse as it is presented here by the chorus of Theban elders is also tied to behavioural specificities and certain mental structures that are said to be handed down through the Labdacid family: arrogance and excessive self-confidence, the chorus claim, are continually returning and are directly related to tragic necessity, so that disaster is as good as preprogrammed for any member of this family. One might counterpoise this interpretation with the idea that where there is an individual in crisis, the entire community suffers, because the person in crisis is merely an ambassador of tensions and impossibilities that concern the entire group. In this light, the crisis of one person becomes the megaphone of the entire community’s contradictions and vulnerabilities. With Polyneices and Antigone, we can clearly see which social nerve it is that they might be inadvertently and rather uncomfortably hitting: Polyneices had gone into exile, and became so estranged from Thebes that eventually he found himself leading an army against his own former home town, in the hope of seizing power there. Antigone, his sister, believes that in spite of his attack on Thebes, Polyneices deserves to be reinserted <?page no="155"?> Francesca Spiegel 149 posthumously into the Theban community by way of an orderly burial within the city walls. Antigone’s compliance with patriotic duties may perhaps end where the respect for kinship duties begins. But Polyneices himself appears to have undergone a different trajectory, and does not place much value on patriotic loyalty at all. As mentioned before, he shares this trait with Ajax, Achilles, and various other mythological characters who decided to remove themselves from the roster of civic duties after suffering some unsatisfactory or offensive treatment at the hands of their peers, which caused them to become mutually estranged. The moralizing stance of the chorus needs to be checked for its own agenda. The vocal denials of responsibility and protestations of impartiality can easily be regarded as cover-up strategies intended to dampen the awareness of social problems or internal tensions, and the repetitive, one-tracked focus on hubris and blame almost mnemonically functions to divert attention from ambiguity or mitigating circumstances. When discussing Antigone, the focus can easily stay upon either Antigone or Creon as a character, as a symbolic representative of an attitude, etc. Yet, for all its literary finesse and timeless appeal, Greek tragedy was anchored and flourishing in the cultural life of ancient Athens during a time when democracy and empire, war and peace, politics and society were in a state of turmoil. The dead Polyneices does not speak in Antigone, but the presence of his body and of his spirit weigh heavy on the whole character constellation. Even though Polyneices is not the most important character of Antigone, his life, and the end of his life, is ultimately what provokes all of the arguments, crisis and tragedy of Antigone. I gave a fairly specific analysis of the way that other people speak about Polyneices in his absence, in order to highlight the group dynamic, which is just as much political and ideological as it is social. The majority opinion as it is voiced by characters who are inside of the play, is to be taken with a pinch of salt, like any group agreement more generally should be, that rests upon the plan to exclude one person, while the others stay happily within. Sophocles’ plays are dramatic microcosms, which thrive particularly on the audience’s ability to see all the events unfold from a bird’s-eye view and from the outside. Armed with outsider knowledge, the audience of Sophocles’ drama often knew more about the way a myth would end than the characters onstage could know, and the audience also had insight into each characters’ discrete motivations that the characters themselves could not know of each other. In this regard, ‘we’ as the modern readers or audience, are likewise held to observe the action from the outside and ask our own questions, rather than to accept versions from inside the dramatic microcosm as true, or to accept some versions as more true than others. <?page no="156"?> 150 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber Małgorzata Budzowska (University of Lodz) 1 Problems with past and present, recurring demons of the near and far past, mournful theatre about heroes buried a long time ago-- in short: problems with memory seem to be a central part of the Antygona (Antigone) production by Marcin Liber in the New Theatre in the Polish town of Łódź (March 2013 ). In contemporary societies, the political management of memory, which is in fact history management, is subjected to the socio-political conditions of the present. Who and what is worth remembering? How to remember? How to remind? How to disregard? How to commemorate? All these questions, which contribute to the creation of an image of the past and which are essential tools of the binary logic of memory, form the object of political engineering. In such a defined space of memory administration, there is no place for true emotions. Instead, there is a demand for spectacular gestures of contempt and despair, a compulsion to create a theatre of death elevated on monuments. Statues with catafalques enable political and social leaders, 2 comparable to the mythical Creon, to construct an identity based on fear, on desire for revenge and on contempt for everyone who does not participate in this danse macabre� Significantly, memory management in the globalized world is becoming fear management. Suitably administrating the past is connected with the successive gradation of present and future societal anxieties. Globalization, based on a vision of a world tossed by unruly, unrestricted and spontaneously moving forces, is a 1 This article is a part of the research project Reception of ancient myths from Mediterranean Culture in Polish theatre of XXI century founded by the National Science Centre (decision no. DEC- 2012 / 07 / D/ HS 2 / 01 106 ). 2 The great example is the contemporary ‘war on terrorism’. This key expression allows political leaders of the West (George W. Bush) and East (Vladimir Putin) to manage social fear. Civil victims of terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid, London or Moscow were used in the political creation of new enemies, followed by social anxieties between different cultures and religions. The dead body of Saddam Hussein was (officially) buried at an unknown place. The dead body of the ‘Boston bomber’, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was refused by the community and local authorities to be buried in the state of Massachusetts and was buried at an undisclosed location. A more recent example is the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. After this, obviously political, deed of murder, media started to ask: “How will the Kremlin play with Boris Nemtsov’s coffin? ” (see: Michał Kacewicz, “Jak Kreml zagra trumną Borysa Niemcowa? ”, in: Newsweek. Polska ( 03 . 03 . 2015 ), http: / / opinie.newsweek.pl/ jak-kremlzagra-trumna-borysa-niemcowa,artykuly,358264,1.html (accessed 04 . 03 . 2015 ). <?page no="157"?> Małgorzata Budzowska 151 process of constant searching for a single stable global scenario. However, as Zygmunt Bauman has observed, in the present world, globalization can be associated more with the unintended and unpredictable global effects of human actions than with so-called global projects. 3 In this new “world disorder”, using the words of Kenneth Jowitt, 4 either the harmful clash between or the peaceful coexistence of global and local trends can be discerned. The homogeneity of the world and the heterogeneity of nations and cultures create a situation where globalization and localisation blend. 5 It is a dialectic phenomenon in which global trends adapt to local circumstances. Considering this correlation between global and local in the context of theatre, Erika Fischer-Lichte states that “[t]hrough localization, the parity of cultures is not merely postulated and proclaimed, but actualized. The act of rewriting becomes an eminently political phenomenon”. 6 Today, however, according to Tadashi Suzuki, we live with a paradox of globalization, since nations underline their own locally distinct and unique identities, whereas lifestyle is globally standardized. 7 Culture and art, as Suzuki notes, are becoming powerful tools in the hands of politicians and this observation is particularly important in the case of theatre: For any nation, the people and incidents of its past never remain unchanged matters of historical fact. Things that are reinterpreted or modified to suit each political purpose or to justify the actions of a particular group are forever referred to as past historical fact.-[…] [T]heatre makes possible a variety of interpretations of past reality, making it a powerful weapon for enabling the individual to participate freely in the creation of history. 8 “A variety of interpretations of past reality” might as well refer to a variety of interpretations of past myth. Interestingly, in the production by Marcin Liber, these two models of localization and of globalization, are connected to each other to create a glocalized setting, in which the focus lies on death and its political usage. 3 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Chichester 2013 � 4 Kenneth Jowitt, The New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley 1992 � 5 Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity”, in: Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (Edd.), Global Modernities, London 1997 , pp. 25 - 44 , especially p. 40 � 6 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, Oxford 2014 , p. 136 � 7 Tadashi Suzuki, “Globalization and the Theatre’s Mission”, 2010 , on: http: / / www.scot-suzukicompany.com/ en/ philosophy.php (accessed 25 . 03 . 2014 ). 8 Ibid. <?page no="158"?> 152 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber 1. Antigone’s myth onstage Antigone’s deed is a revolutionary gesture that claims the most simple and natural thing: respect for a dead man and for the feelings of his family. This is the demand of an individual who was forbidden by the law to remember her relative. The established norm has appropriated the right of an individual to mourn, refused her the time for remembering the deceased and obliged her to forget. At the same time, the established norm, represented by Creon, orders to remember a hero (Eteocles). This creates a schizophrenic situation for Antigone in which the memory of one brother causes the exclusion of the memory of the other-- she can neither remember nor forget. Sophocles’ Antigone constructs the archetypical situation of a double bind in relation to simultaneous compliance with human and divine laws. In the ancient drama, this is featured in the characters of the two brothers, Polyneices and Eteocles. Based on Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s interpretation that “omnis determinatio est negatio”, everything can be determined only in relation to its negation. 9 This reflection is associated with the previous statement about two models of interpretation, global and local, creating a glocalized context. What is local is always mediated by the global and vice versa. In the ancient myth, Antigone is mediated by her female negation (Ismene) and by her male reversal (Creon), and this subversive dynamics directs the staging of Sophocles’ Antigone by Marcin Liber. The two sisters, Antigone (Agnieszka Kwietniewska) and Ismene (Dominika Biernat), are the locus around which stage actions are performed in the production. Both women are signs of meta-theatrical beings that break through the theatrical illusion and comment on the world that is presented onstage. These comments, through which the characters come out of their scenic roles and become symbolic constructs, inscribe the staging by Liber in the intellectual discourse on the figure of the mythical heroine. Starting with Hegel, 10 and followed by Jacques Lacan 11 and Judith Butler, 12 Antigone has constantly inspired the discussion about the essence of resistance considered on a sociopolitical and a gender-related level. Marcin Liber goes back to this tradition and introduces the ancient heroine into contemporary contexts of post-memory, seen from a local and a global perspective. The clash between after-war social traumas and intimate individual despair constructs a space for the development of the action onstage. The director uses signs and symbols from different historical systems which are related to each other through the common framework of mourning in its public and private form. 9 Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, ed. J. B. Baillie, London 1910 , vol. II, p. 554 � 10 Id� 11 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960: the Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 7, ed. J. A. Miller and D. Porter. London 1992 � 12 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York 2013 � <?page no="159"?> Małgorzata Budzowska 153 The plots performed onstage have an intertextual connection with other audiovisual works of art. One of them is a movie by Artur Żmijewski entitled 80 064 ( 2005 ), in which a former captive of Auschwitz is forced by the director to renew the tattoo of his prisoner’s number on his forearm. Another one is the photo report by Todd Heisler entitled Final Salute ( 2006 ), which documented (sic! ) the feelings of despair in families of American soldiers that were killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both works deal with the issue of appropriating an individual tragedy for a political discourse and thereby relate to the core of the myth of Antigone, who protests against such a demonstration of public violence imposed on a private tragedy. Furthermore, as a strictly private supplement, the director includes an intimate monologue of a woman who tells a story about parents deprived of the right to mourn their miscarried child, which is treated, according to procedures, as a kind of medical waste. All these elements constitute the background for the postmodern adaptation of the ancient myth by Liber. Their multiplicity adds to the density and simultaneity of stage signs. Scenic images are doubled by camera close-ups that are displayed on the screens at both sides of the stage. Additionally, on a big screen located at the back of the stage, an image of a decomposing body is shown. Despite the fact that all these components can distract the audience and disrupt the logic of reception, Liber has been consistent in selecting signs and symbols and staging them through scenography, gestures, language and images. A possible focal point in this seemingly chaotic spectacle is the motif of the body, regarded as a medium of humanity. However, in this case, it is a dead body that nourishes the choices and actions the living in the play undertake. 13 A dead body drives the necrophiliac political engineering that finds its satisfaction in enforcing prescriptions on how and when people are allowed to remember a deceased person and the symbolic meanings the deceased one carries with him. Through this act of engineering, knowledge about past events is transmuted into a history or a myth. 2. Post-memorial work As Marianne Hirsch notes, knowledge about the past is very often embodied by bodily, psychic and affective traumas described on and within a body, 14 and it is transferred to the next generations as a part of a genetic code. This kind of memory, called “prosthetic”, “belated” or just “post-memory”, 15 can be transformed into a burden when it is forbidden to forget, because this attitude can be regarded as 13 The dead body is also shown on the screens as food for the living, which makes it a kind of figurative sign. 14 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory”, in: Poetics Today 29 , 1 ( 2008 ), p. 105 � 15 Ibid. <?page no="160"?> 154 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber being disloyal to memory, and when, at the same time, it is extremely painful to remember. This memory is always mediated by small individual narrations and by the great ideological narrations such as the collective memory. However, it still exists more in the realm of the imaginary than in the intellectual sphere. 16 The kind of memory that becomes a history or a myth in the public sphere denies affective and bodily experiences and focuses on useful symbols, whereas post-memory considered as “emanations” is “communicated in ‘flashes of imagery’ and ‘broken refrains’, transmitted through ‘the language of the body’”. 17 The audience of Liber’s production is constantly reminded of this observation by the number on the forearm of the Auschwitz prisoner and especially by the character of Tiresias, who is played by a woman (Monika Buchowiec) whose predictions are written on her body (fig. 1 ). As Hirsch remarks: Postmemorial work-[…] strives to reactivate and reembody more distant social/ national and archival/ cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. 18 Fig. 1 Tiresias’ prophecy in Antigone by Marcin Liber, The New Theatre in Lodz, Poland. Photograph by Bartłomiej Sowa, 2013. ©-Bartłomiej Sowa. Reproduced with permission. 16 Id., p. 107 � 17 Id., p. 109 � 18 Id., p. 111 � <?page no="161"?> Małgorzata Budzowska 155 Hirsch underlines that post-memory is primarily the experience of family in the intergenerational vertical line between parents and child (“familial” post-memory), but that it also can be experienced in the intragenerational horizontal line (“affiliative” post-memory). 19 Surprisingly, these two kinds of post-memory are juxtaposed in the staging by Marcin Liber. 3. Post-memory onstage Familial post-memory is the experience of Antigone who has ‘imprinted’ in her brain an awareness of the curse on the Labdacid family and who carries the burden of Oedipus’ incest. Obviously, the fate of Antigone and her sister and brothers is conditioned by her family inheritance. This familial experience is diffused among others-- i. e. among the community of Thebans, especially Creon and his family. As the brother of Jocasta, he is indirectly infected by the Labdacid curse, but the fate of him, his wife and his son expresses a kind of affiliative post-memory, mediated by both national and individual memory. Antigone tries to defy the Labdacid curse when she begins a relationship with Haemon, the son of Creon. This character wants to live a normal life but cannot forget the fate of her family; post-memory demons are deeply embedded in Antigone’s mind. The ancient myth conceals this determination under the name of curse and fate, but it is actually the real experience of an individual who faces the familial and social memory. As a child born from an incestuous relationship, Antigone is genetically predestined to be a visible sign of the family curse. Her significant name can mean in the place of generation/ family/ ancestry, in the name of generation/ family/ ancestry or because of generation/ family/ ancestry. 20 Her behaviour to preserve the memory of both brothers is a manifestation of her sense of duty in the name of and because of her familial memory. Antigone’s involvement in the family fate is irretrievably entrenched in her life, even against her own will. Her resistance to Creon’s rule is a revolt against the family curse, against the post-memory emanations manifested in the fratricidal struggle and, afterwards, in Creon’s order to leave the body of Polyneices unburied. The abandoned body of Polyneices is a sign of the incessant 19 Id., pp. 114 - 115 � 20 Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott (Edd.), Greek-English Lexicon, New York 1883 , terms ‘ ἀντί ’ (p. 140 ) and ‘ γονή ’ (p. 315 ). The “ethymological polyphony” (Gourgouris) of Antigone’s name drew the attention of many scholars. See Judith Butler, op. cit., 2013 , p. 22 and her quotation from Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era, Stanford 2003 ; see also Audroné Žukauskaité, “Biopolitics: Antigone’s Claim”, in: S. E. Wilmer and Audroné Žukauskaité (Edd.), Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, Oxford 2010 , p. 68 � <?page no="162"?> 156 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber curse that cannot be undone. This situation of suspense between life and death symbolizes a being in a liminal position. This image is almost literally repeated when Antigone is buried alive in the tomb. Both Antigone and Polyneices remain “between two deaths” according to Lacan’s terms. 21 They are socially dead, deprived of their status of citizen and member of society, just as their father. But they are not yet buried and therefore their lives and deaths are not sacralised. However, as Žukauskaité has noted, this situation is caused by their sovereign decision. 22 In this “state of exception” 23 they represent exceptional resistance, especially Antigone, who has “passed beyond human daring” (A, v. 689 , p. 26 ). 24 The chorus considers to what extent the “shape of your father’s guilt appears in this” (A, v. 692 , p. 27 ). Creon is aware of the position of Oedipus’ family and uses this liminal state for personal benefits. He collides with the strong personality of Antigone who extends her liminality in the context of gender. She acts in a political way that was regarded as a male action. Even if Lacan 25 and Žižek 26 want to recognize Antigone’s resistance in the terms of pathology (death instinct or totalitarian act), I am inclined to agree with Žukauskaité that Sophocles’ heroine tends to transgress the limit that is “the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious public sphere as its scandalous future”. 27 Therefore, her resistance can be seen as “a universal claim opposing power structures”. 28 The figure of Antigone in the production by Liber holds a wake at the coffin of Eteocles (fig. 2 ), clearly showing that her action refers to both brothers. Her mattress disturbs the theatre of public ceremony and becomes a sign of her objection to the binary logic of memory imposed by Creon. The private tragedy of Antigone appropriates the political discourse of Creon on the corpses of the killed warriors. Her demonstration at the coffin of Eteocles does not allow to forget about the abandoned corpse of Polyneices, who was condemned to oblivion and to a phase between life and death. A symbolic handful of earth, thrown over the brother’s corpse, initiates the time of death. But this is also a gesture of disregard towards the norm established by the ruler and, therefore, it simultaneously initiates the time of death for the revolt. 21 Jacques Lacan, op. cit., 1992 , p. 280 � 22 Audroné Žukauskaité, op. cit., 2010 , p. 77 � 23 Ibid. 24 All references to Antigone (referred to as A) are to Sophocles, Antigone, edd. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, Harcourt 1938 � 25 Jacques Lacan, op. cit., 1992 , p. 282 � 26 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real. Selected Writings, edd. R. Butler and S. Stephens, London 2005 � 27 Audroné Žukauskaité, op. cit., 2010 , p. 73 � 28 Id., p. 76 � <?page no="163"?> Małgorzata Budzowska 157 Fig. 2 Antigone lying on the mattress next to the coffin of her brother in Antigone by Marcin Liber, The New Theatre in Lodz, Poland. Photograph by Bartłomiej Sowa, 2013� ©-Bartłomiej Sowa. Reproduced with permission. 4. Inter-texts Antigone’s wake at the coffin of her brother can be associated with a well-known picture of Todd Heisler’s photo report. In this picture, the widow of a US soldier lies on a mattress and listens to the songs that were her and her deceased husband’s favourites. 29 Even if her husband was a soldier and his death is a part of politics, she adopts the public space of the funeral ceremony to create a small private interval and to celebrate her own time of mourning. By using this image onstage, the director seems to express a kind of post-memory that works through emotions and through the imaginary 30 and that belongs to individuals, not to society. Just as Antigone perceives Polyneices as a brother while Creon sees him as a warrior, the woman on the picture by Todd Heisler says goodbye to her husband while the American nation considers him a soldier. This clash between public/ 29 The photo (report) was published as part of an article: Jim Sheeler and Todd Heisler, “Final Salute”, in: Rocky Mountain News ( 11 . 11 . 2005 ), http: / / todd-heisler.squarespace.com/ fs-inprint/ (accessed 09 . 02 . 2016 ), pp. 20 S- 21 S. 30 Marianne Hirsch, op.cit., 2008 , p. 105 � <?page no="164"?> 158 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber collective and private memory is the primary clue for understanding the staging of Antigone by Marcin Liber. From the very beginning of the performance, Antigone stays on the stage together with her sister, Ismene. Both women prove a great attachment to each other. Ismene takes care of her sister, who awaits her death. While Antigone wears a dirty white dress, Ismene wears a dark dress that indicates her affiliation to the group subjecting to the will of Creon and attending the official theatre of funeral ceremony. Both sisters sit on the mattress and recall memories of events in their lives, paying no attention to the public ritual happening around them. They drink wine and listen to songs of the punk rock band The Misfits. Disco balls hanging above the women and the coffin create a confusing atmosphere of different emotions, but this corresponds with the behaviour of Antigone. During the whole performance, Antigone shows her fear of death and her meta-theatrical aversion to be a symbol of self-sacrifice. Being a symbol of self-sacrifice is a burden for the character who has been forced to play the theatre of her own death for over 2000 years. The staging by Liber exposes a social tension between communitas, regarded as an existential human community co-responsible for the remembrance of every single member of this community, and the community’s institutionalized structure, which tends to establish a hierarchy and standards. Liber’s production shows a contemporary public theatre immersed in the poetics of graves, strongly associated with the necrophiliac historical politics that try to gain political capital by manipulating history and memory. Antigone begs for silence, for an intimacy of mourning, for an individual memory and for a possibility to forget. In the context of an escape from a patriotism defined on graves, the director shows a young girl frightened of the vision of a cruel death that deprives her of the experiences of life, and especially the experience of love, initiated by her relationship with Haemon (Piotr Trojan) (fig. 3 ). The phrase “It is my nature to join in love, not hate” (A, v. 418 , p. 16 ) becomes an answer opposing to the necrophiliac patriotism. The director develops a plot of love between two young people that should constitute the most natural basis for the new patriotic thinking. The love between Antigone and Haemon and their mutual suicide become tragic signs of opposition to the norm that proclaims a patriotism of victims. They do not want to be the victims of politics and be used for ideological propaganda, and therefore they decide to commit suicide, to be killed by their own hand and their own decision. The liminality of their situation is caused by them being deprived of the freedom of speech: Antigone-- because she is a woman who tries to speak as a man-- and Haemon-- because he defies the authority of a ruler and a father. Gender conflict and generational conflict form additional elements that constitute an important supplement to the question of contemporary patriotism that this production essentially deals with. <?page no="165"?> Małgorzata Budzowska 159 Fig. 3 Antigone and Haemon in Antigone by Marcin Liber, The New Theatre in Lodz, Poland. Photograph by Bartłomiej Sowa, 2013. ©-Bartłomiej Sowa. Reproduced with permission. The theatre of death and mourning over the coffins is represented in the scenes of lamentation on command. Here, the ancient chorus consists of men in black suits, who are ordered by a soldier to cry in a standardized way. The power of Creon’s authority is based on fitting an individual into the standards that facilitate the social and political mechanisms of control. In postmodern times, the modern panoptikon of rulers changed its mask for a panoptikon of media that supervise if individuals behave according to current trends and norms. Kaleidoscopic postmodern standards and their violent nature exclude from social life those individuals that do not keep up with these principles or that reject their pervasiveness. Antigone, with her mattress, contaminates the theatre of death directed by Creon and his wailing chorus. Using the dirty white dress, disco balls and laptop with favourite music as visual scenic signs, Antigone demonstrates her own opposition to the standards Creon imposes, and she celebrates her own intimate funeral ceremony and mourning. The mythical figure becomes a contemporary dissident who opposes to the order of the postmodern world that was created without anyone attending and agreeing on it. Her white dress and mattress pollute the unambiguously black world of Creon’s theatre. <?page no="166"?> 160 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber As an additional element to these scenic images, the director introduces the motif of the prisoner number tattooed on the chest and the forearm of detainees in Auschwitz. This topic seems to correlate with the main idea of this production as another symbol of human cruelty and death caused by one man to another. It significantly directs the performed idea to the background of totalitarianism established by the ancient ruler Creon and by the modern ideology of Nazism. According to Nazi ideology, the other, non-German(ic) nations were treated as a pollution in a new system of eugenics. By juxtaposing the ancient Greek myth and Nazism, Liber perversely connects anti-gone with eu-gone, because the mythical figure of Antigone can be simultaneously staged as meaning ‘in the name of generation’ (anti-gone) and as a sign of the totalitarian idea of ‘good generation’ (eu-gone) proclaimed by Creon. The Greek word eu (‘good’) refers here to a standard established by the totalitarian system that appallingly corresponds with the contemporary trends of globalization. The totalitarian sign of the tattooed number in the production is written by Antigone on the forearm of Ismene, who becomes to a substantial degree a mental prisoner of Creon’s standards. As is said in Miro Gavran’s play Creon’s Antigone, Ismene smells more of fear than Antigone and, therefore, she is a living prisoner whose resistance will always be limited to words, while Antigone’s resistance is performed through deeds. 31 Active resistance against power always causes a ‘state of exception’ when a rebel is not only going to be killed but also exterminated, deprived of his or her identity. Nameless graves of Polish soldiers killed by communist troops in World War II , mass graves and nameless ashes of Jewish prisoners of Nazi concentration camps represent the tendency of power to annihilate these human beings even in memory. Only the tattooed number on the forearm of survivors can prove their existence. This part of Liber’s production relates to the documentary 80 064 by Artur Żmijewski. Żmijewski persuaded a surviving prisoner of Auschwitz to renew the tattoo of his prisoner number (fig. 4 ). This action was judged a perverse game with memory but should rather be seen as a perverse work of post-memory, which renews trauma according to the contemporary aesthetics of shocking cruelty. Nonetheless, both contexts relate to the question of surviving a great human catastrophe: how to be a survivor when lots of heroes have died? Political management of memory often uses this issue, making survivors feel a sense of guilt. Both Ismene and the former prisoner of Auschwitz from Żmijewski’s film are witnesses to a great tragedy and both can be seen as being treated worse in comparison with the dead heroes. Survivors often feel guilty because of their weakness (like Ismene) 31 “All people spread fear’s odour, but not with equal intensity. You have less of an odour of fear than Ismene does” (Miro Gavran, Creon’s Antigone, 1983 , on: http: / / www.mirogavran. com/ static/ fulltext/ plays/ creons-antigone-miro-gavran.pdf [accessed 09 . 11 . 2014 ]). <?page no="167"?> Małgorzata Budzowska 161 or because of their luck (like the Auschwitz survivors), and politics frequently use these emotions to manage memory and to construct historical myths. Fig. 4 Józef Tarnawa gets his tattooed prisoner’s number renewed. Still from Artur Żmijewski’s 80 064, 2005. ©-Artur Żmijewski. Reproduced with permission. Furthermore, the director adds to the main structure of the spectacle a monologue by Eurydice, who talks about the pain caused by the incomplete mourning after a miscarriage. According to the rules of the medical system, parents are forbidden to bury a child that is regarded as a dead foetus and therefore as medical waste. In Sophocles’ play, Eurydice is subjected to the power of her husband, Creon, but only until the moment of her son’s death. After Haemon’s death, she takes her fate in her own hands and commits suicide. In Liber’s production, Eurydice talks about the death of her child and about her failed mourning, which was forbidden in the case of a miscarriage. Her story is interweaved with the messenger’s report about Haemon’s death. Liber moves a mythical index 32 from a global context to a 32 The distinction between a mythical index and its incidental adaptations is dealt in Jacek Wachowski, Dramat-mit-tradycja. O transtekstualności w polskiej dramaturgii współ- <?page no="168"?> 162 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber most private, local context, but everywhere he contrasts the actions of a totalitarian system with individual wishes, in order to underline how important memory is for a human being. 5. Conclusion Marcin Liber directed his production from the perspective of a postmodern artist-philosopher. In his staging of Antigone, he asks a question and suggests some possible answers. According to postdramatic aesthetics, 33 he formed his own language with simultaneous images and audio semiotics, in which the heavy sound of punk and death metal is juxtaposed with rock ballads. In addition to this, he uses growling and wailing to express the essential meanings of words. Liber masks social contestations with mythical signatures. In this production, the role of Thanatos is played by a musician (Patryk Zwoliński) from the sludge metal band Blindead. He growls the most famous phrase of the Sophoclean chorus: “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none / more wonderful than man” (A, v. 278 - 279 , p. 10 ). The power of a human being is based on the reasonable mind s/ he has. But, as Aristotle already observed, human reason is a double-edged weapon equally powerful in the creation of good as in the construction of the greatest cruelty. 34 Reason can be used to manipulate the world or another man. The fact that, in Liber’s production, it is Thanatos who sings about the human power of reason indicates that the director wanted to add a layer of irony to the Sophoclean anthem about human potency. The combination of all the contexts in the production by Marcin Liber creates a very interesting intertextual collage in which the elements are connected by the idea of the public usage of death. Sophocles’ Antigone is the first manifestation of political involvement in death and of memory management. Even death cannot change the political beliefs of Creon, who states that an enemy after his death is still an enemy, not just a human being who deserves to be remembered. Following his political attitude, he prohibits mourning and memory. The mattress of Antigone introduces the context of the contemporary political use of death, represented by the picture by Todd Heisler. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have a global character as wars against terrorism, but they can also be seen as an implementation of the superpower tendency to unify all cultures under the auspices of Western Culture. Therefore, soldiers who became the victims of these wars are ambiguously seen as heroes or as occupiers. Their death is currently used in czesnej, Poznań 1993 , p. 65 � 33 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, London 2006 � 34 Aristotle, Politics, ed. W. L. Newman, Cambridge 2010 , 1253 a 30 � <?page no="169"?> Małgorzata Budzowska 163 politics, especially American politics, to legitimate morally questionable actions. 35 In this context, it is worth considering the issue of all the people deprived of identity and human rights. As Slavoj Žižek rightly pointed out: “Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who, like the sans-papiers in today’s France, are without a full and definite socio-ontological status-… in our era of self-proclaimed globalization”. 36 Global scale politics forgets that each of these beings and deaths is a private tragedy that is intensified by the conviction that it is caused by an impersonal, virtual enemy called ‘globalization’ or ‘terrorism’. Individual tragedy became subject to the management of global politics and became abject. The pictures by Todd Heisler unveil this pretence by showing the real human tragedy against the background of a public funeral theatre. This scenic image is also legible in the local Polish context, and more precisely the crash of the Polish air force one in 2010 in the Russian town of Smoleńsk. This tragedy, in which the Polish president died together with 95 politicians and accompanying persons, is still a point of aggressive political debate. By the scenic image of the catafalque and the coffin, Marcin Liber indirectly refers to this issue and the whole danse macabre which was (and still is) performed around the coffins of the victims of the Smoleńsk catastrophe. In this specifically local issue, Polish civilians had to take part in the embarrassing discussion about- - and shameful exploitation of- - who the dead bodies were and where they should be buried (some had to be exhumed for this) and the debate about whether to confirm or to deny the presumed causes of the crash. The voices of the victims’ families, who asked for silence and serenity, were drawn in the political struggle. The debated was heated by the fact that the tragedy took place close to Katyń, where Polish military were killed by communist troops and buried in nameless mass graves. We need to deal with the ineligible use of this historical event by politicians who want to create a new myth. The number written on Ismene’s forearm that resembles the tattoo of an Auschwitz prisoner and her monologue place the myth of Antigone in a glocal context, where the global tragedy of the Holocaust meets the individual tragedy of its survivor. Constantly renewed trauma is used as a pseudo-artistic performance that is made to arouse controversy and this shows how the affiliated post-memory can be subversive. The supplementary context of a mother who had a miscarriage and was forbidden to bury her child merges with the character of the mythical Eurydice, who is another victim of Creon’s totalitarianism. 35 The Guantanamo Bay detention camp and abuses and tortures occurred in this place are the most striking example. 36 Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, London 2002 , p. 186 � <?page no="170"?> 164 The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber The intertextuality of Liber’s production focuses on one main point. It is a political, necrophiliac management of dead bodies and memory. Therefore, the most significant recapitulation of this point can be found in the images that are displayed on screens during the play. They show the decomposition of a body and a corpse lying on a table, ready to be eaten. <?page no="171"?> Aneta Stojnić 165 (Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning Aneta Stojnić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna/ Singidunum University, Belgrade) In this essay, I will try to establish a connection between Antigone and Chelsea Manning, arguing that the figure of a whistleblower can be interpreted as a contemporary Antigone. In order to do this, I will firstly address the question of the changing relations between art and politics, after which I will propose the thesis that Antigone functions as a discourse. To conclude with, I will offer an analysis of the case of Chelsea Manning in the discursive framework of Antigone. 1. Antigone and the context of political art Antigone has been the topic of much research and numerous analyses that go well beyond the boundaries of theatre, literature and the arts in general. From philosophy through psychoanalysis to cultural studies, postcolonial studies and so forth, Antigone persisted as a thought-provoking plot or metaphor for the analysis of various aspects of power relations, laws, gender issues, kinship, psychology, etc. 1 However, bringing Antigone back to discussions on art opens up the possibility for an important re-politicisation of the artistic discourse itself. Throughout the twentieth century and especially at the millennial turn, the complex interrelations between the artistic and the political have been widely dealt with by both philosophers and artists. From the historical avant-gardes through the neo-avant-garde to conceptual art and contemporary postconceptual practices, the notion of political art has been crucial for understanding the relevance of the field of art in contemporary society. I will argue here that the central question when engaging with such practices is not “How to do art in a political way? ”, but rather: “What do we do when we do art? ” The need for such re-evaluation of the artistic practice was historically conditioned by a complex set of events, due to which art has lost some of previously attributed functions and had to reinvent its role and position in society. In other words: in order to avoid becoming redundant and/ or completely commodified and appropriated (and thus disempowered) by the capitalist matrix of power, artists turned to various forms of critical practices. 1 The signifier ‘Antigone’ functions on at least three levels: as a play or dramatic text (the ancient tragedy); as a myth; and as a character. I will use the somewhat technical term ‘plot’ to indicate a certain dramaturgical pattern, a chain of events and the type of characters involved. <?page no="172"?> 166 (Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning However, as Jacques Rancière has argued, many of these practices-- and, in my opinion, he is particularly precise in his critique of relational and participatory art-- fail to do this because they presuppose immediate relations between seeing the spectacle and understanding the state of the world and between intellectual awareness and political action-- which, in fact, comes down to a direct connection between content and context. 2 Therefore, they repeat the inner logic of the very system they criticise, and become the unwilling parody of their alleged efficacy. If we follow Rancière’s critique, we can also understand the continuous preoccupation with Antigone as a political play by taking into account its potential for the production of dissensus. 3 For the purpose of this analysis, I will specifically address the phenomena that Rancière calls "paradoxes of political art" 4 in order to propose the point of departure for a critique of the artistic practices that claim to inhabit the actual and the symbolical spaces of the political. This critique is important here, for it should provide us the possibilities of: a) rethinking the relation between art and politics in the present historical moment-- i. e. asking what political art means today and if and why we need it; b) approaching the re-politicisation of the field of art; and c) questioning the way to think about ideology and power relations in the neoliberal conditions of so-called post-ideology and post-politics. We should not ignore the fact that the ‘rise’ of political art or the increasing interest in the concept of political art coincides with the period that was the setting for what some theoreticians (most notably Arthur Danto) called ‘the end of art’ and ‘art after the end of art’. First articulated in the mid eighties of the twentieth century, in the midst of the postmodernist belief that ‘anything goes’, the thesis of the end of art in fact recognises the end of the master narratives of art. Referring to the need of acknowledging certain processes as ‘the end of art’, Danto writes: The objective structure of the art world had revealed itself, historically, now to be defined by a radical pluralism, and I felt it urgent that this be understood for it meant that some radical division was due in a way in which society at large thought about art and dealt with it institutionally. 5 The problem of the radical pluralism of the art world can be understood as a manifestation of consensus as a mode of government. As Rancière defines it: 2 Jacques Rancière, “The Paradox of Political Art”, in: Jacques Rancière and Steven Corcoran (Edd.), Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, New York 2010 , pp. 134 - 152 � 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art, Princeton (New Jersey) 1997 , p. xv. <?page no="173"?> Aneta Stojnić 167 Consensus, as a mode of government, says: it is perfectly fine for people to have different interests, values and aspirations, nevertheless there is one unique reality to which everything must be related, a reality that is experienceable as a sense datum and which has only one possible signification. The context that is invoked to enforce the ideas and practices pertaining to ‘consensus’ is, as we know, ‘economic globalization’. Precisely for the reason that it presents itself as a global development that is clear-cut and irrefutable, regardless of one’s own opinion about it-- good or bad! 6 Just as consensus, the radical pluralism of the art world allows for different interests, values and aspirations as long as they are all related to one unique reality with one possible signification. The art world or the system of art is defined by the conditions of economic globalisation that push forward the agenda of consensus and pluralism in order to establish itself as the only alternative. Therefore, the question arises what kind of radical, critical, or emancipatory practice can be efficient under these conditions. The main critique that Rancière develops in “The Paradox of Political Art” concerns what he diagnoses as a “strange schizophrenia” of the politics of art: In the first place, artists and critics never tire of repeating that art practices have to be re-situated interminably, placed in ever new contexts. Adamantly proclaiming that our context is one of the late capitalism, or economic globalisation or computer communication and the digital camera, they say we must completely re-think the politics of art. In the second place, these same artists and critics are still very attached to paradigms for understanding the efficacy of art that were debunked at least two centuries before these technological inventions appeared. 7 Elaborating his diagnosis, Rancière goes back to the eighteenth-century paradigm of mimetic art, arguing that the inner logic of current practices is not as remote from long dismissed edifying and didactic approaches as artists and critics would claim it to be. The problematic “pedagogical model” of the efficacy of art assumes that-- regardless of the contemporary format or medium of the work of art-- the viewer encounters a fixed set of signs, a situation “staged by the author” that leads to a specific understanding of the world. Whether established as a representational mediation model of the efficacy of art, or as its seeming counterpart, a model of ethical immediacy that asserts that art has to leave the art world in order to be effective in ‘real life’, the pedagogical approach repeats the quest for consensus and thus fails to become truly political in terms of a redistribution of the sensible. 8 Rancière recognises a third model that challenges the two pedagogical models, namely one of aesthetic distance. This model was “first used to refer to the sus- 6 Jacques Rancière, op. cit., 2010 , p. 144 � 7 Id., p. 135 � 8 Id., p. 136 � <?page no="174"?> 168 (Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning pension of a determinable relation between the artist’s intention, a performance in some place reserved for art, and the spectator’s gaze and the state of the community”. 9 The third, paradoxical model that challenges the pedagogical model, establishes what Rancière calls “the aesthetic regime of art”, which suspends determinate relations between the production of forms of art and their social functions. This “aesthetic rupture” constructs a paradoxical form of efficiency-- the “efficiency of dissensus” that assumes a conflict between “sensory presentation and making sense of it”. 10 This means that political art practices are those that generate dissensus, or as Rancière puts it: Art and politics each define a form of dissensus, a dissensual re-configuration of the common experience of the sensible. If there is such thing as an ’aesthetics of politics’, it lies in a re-configuration of the distribution of the common through political processes of subjectivation. Correspondingly, if there is a politics of aesthetics, it lies in the practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience. However, no direct cause-effect relationship is determinable between the intention realized in an art performance and a capacity for political subjectivation. 11 The efficiency of dissensus overcomes the pseudo-tension between ‘art’ and ‘the real’ by recognising that there is no such thing as the real world ‘outside’ as opposed to the art world ‘inside it’. The real is always a construction. While agreeing with Rancière on this point, I would like to emphasize that the possibility for critical action opens up exactly in the perceived gap between the two. During my research, I found it important to address the efficacy of art as an issue that is related to the paradigm of performance studies-- especially Richard Schechner’s early efforts to transform theatre’s function from entertainment to efficacy-- and as a phenomenon that transgresses the limitations of artistic performance, taking into account cultural performance, performance as practice of everyday life, technological performance and the pervasiveness of performance as a central element of social and cultural life. 12 The efficacy of performance has often been defined in terms of liminality. 13 The term ‘liminal’ marks the in-between space that is at the same time a point of joining and of separation, an actual as well as a symbolical space between two sides of the border. It also refers to ‘being in-between’ as a phenomenon in time-- that which is in the process of transition, transitory. Unlike the notion of the bor- 9 Id., p. 137 � 10 Id., p. 140 � 11 Ibid. 12 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, London 2003 , pp. 129 - 136 � 13 Id., p. 159 . For a critique of the development of the concept of liminality in performance studies, see Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance, London 2001 , pp. 49 - 53 � <?page no="175"?> Aneta Stojnić 169 der, which marks a clear separation and differentiation between certain notions, spaces or forms of existence, the liminal marks a hybrid in-between space where differences and similarities are not separated in a clear way. In anthropology, for example, a liminal phase in a ritual-- for instance a ritual of initiation-- happens when one has already left her/ his pre-ritual status but has not yet taken the new status that s/ he will obtain when the ritual is over. 14 If we apply the term ‘liminal’ to political and cultural processes and changes, we can use it to name periods in which the social hierarchies, traditions and established social order are brought into question, shaken and temporally or permanently changed. As such, we can say that revolutions are always liminal periods, i. e. liminal stages. In other words: liminality is a form of activity whose spatial, temporal and symbolical quality of being in-between opens up the possibility for transgression and resistance and perhaps even transformation of social norms. This is not to claim that liminality is emancipatory per se, but rather that it creates the possibility for emancipatory action, or to use Rancière’s terms: for political subjectification. 2. Antigone as a discourse In order to answer the question of what the significance of staging Antigone could be today, I suggest to approach Antigone as a discourse. In his text "What Is an Author? ", Michel Foucault has suggested to think of the author’s name as a certain mode of being of a discourse. 15 Foucault’s text is considered to be a reply to Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author”. 16 Barthes argued that every text is finished by a reader, i. e. in the interaction with the reader, while texts only exist in the network of other texts. He thus proclaimed the death of the author as an authentic creator who possesses the one final meaning of a text. Moving one step further from Barthes’s seminal thesis that emphasises intertextuality, Foucault conceived of the author as a discourse. This means that if we refer to Homer, Sophocles or Shakespeare, that name does not signify a person with specific features but a certain kind of discourse: [T]he author’s name is not simply an element in a discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name 14 Richard Schechner, op. cit., 2003 , p. 159 � 15 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author”, in: David Lodge and Nigel Wood (Edd.), Modern Criticism and Theory, London 2013 , pp. 281 - 293 � 16 Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author", in: Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath (Edd.), Image Music Text, Fontana 1977 , pp. 142 - 149 � <?page no="176"?> 170 (Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. 17 I suggest that we can extend this idea and apply it to symbolically charged figures such as Antigone. This is to say that the name of Antigone functions as a discourse: she is not merely a character in various interpretations of a story or a plot, but rather a name that performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse and assures a signifying function. To ‘occupy’ Antigone, as the title of this volume suggests, can therefore refer to the answer to the question of what the (performative) discourse of Antigone can be today. In an attempt to answer this question, I will focus on the three moments I designate as key for understanding Antigone as the finale of the Theban cycle, seen within the context(s) mentioned above. These are: a) the secrecy surrounding Oedipus’ burial in Oedipus at Colonus- - that prevents anyone from finding the location of his ‘grave’; b) the ban on Polyneices’ burial, as the locus of conflict in Antigone; and c) Antigone’s fate of being sentenced to death by being buried alive. In the following analyses, I will examine the motif of the impossibility of burial as the (im)possibility of repressing a traumatic history. This motif appears multiple times in several variations throughout the Theban cycle. Firstly, there is the secrecy surrounding Oedipus’ final resting place in Oedipus at Colonus. Even Antigone and Ismene, who took care of Oedipus after he blinded himself and left Thebes, could not witness his death. 18 The reason for this secrecy lays in the prophesy that his grave will bring blessing to the city where it is located at. 19 In order to prevent the possibility of his body being taken away and appropriated, 20 his final resting place had to remain secret. According to Derrida: [W]hile recognizing that her father’s body, hidden away like this, is protected from seizure and reappropriation, Antigone thus complains. She complains herself and she complains about the other, against the other (Klagen/ Anklagen). She complains that her father has died in a foreign land and moreover is buried in a place foreign to any possible localization. 21 Therefore, we could say that it is exactly this secrecy surrounding the location of Oedipus’ ‘grave’ that renders him symbolically unburied. Paradoxically, the 17 Michel Foucault, op. cit., 2013 , p. 285 � 18 Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, edd. Robert Fagles and Bernard Knox, New York 1984 , p. 388 � 19 Id., p. 322 � 20 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, Stanford 2000 , p. 111 � 21 Ibid. <?page no="177"?> Aneta Stojnić 171 absent body becomes ever-present, since the question where it could be keeps on haunting the living. A second variation on the motif of the impossibility of burial can be found in the central conflict in Antigone, developing around the ban on the burial of Polyneices, who is considered a traitor and an enemy of Thebes. Antigone breaks the rule of the Law represented by Creon, following the logic of ethics and a higher moral law. Moreover, as Judith Butler has pointed out, she claims the act and in this claim-- i. e. in her speech act-- the actual act becomes performative and as such political. 22 We can consider the impossibility of burial as the impossibility of repression. It is exactly the failure of this act that makes it efficient in the sphere of the political, as it undermines the normativity of the Law that has established the irregular as the legitimate. The third variation on the motif that I will deal with is the punishment of Antigone: to be caved, buried alive. Left to die, Antigone is subjected to a particularly cruel sentence. On a symbolic level, however, this punishment also reflects the ultimate tension between what is present and what is absent and between what is left (un)repressed and what may reappear. Antigone is buried, yet still alive. I suggest that we can conceive of this recurrent motif as an equivalent to the phenomenon of repression as defined in psychoanalysis. In other words: the impossibility of burial is the unsuccessful repression of a trauma that keeps reappearing as a symptom. Repression is a defence mechanism that keeps the traumatic content in the realm of the unconscious and prevents it from appearing and (harmfully) interfering with the conscious. According to Freud, when the conflict in the core of the trauma remains unresolved, repression is unsuccessful and the repressed content surfaces in the form of a symptom that causes problems. In order to treat the symptom, we need to go back to the core of the trauma and bring it back into our consciousness (remember it), so the conflict causing it can be resolved and the memory can finally be forgotten. 23 It is crucial to understand that trauma is not simply a record of a past experience like a memory, but that it “registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned”. 24 According to Cathy Caruth: While the traumatized are called upon to see and to relive the insistent reality of the past, they recover a past that encounters consciousness only through the very denial of active recollection. The ability to recover the past is thus closely and paradoxically tied up, like trauma, with the inability to have access to it. 25 22 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim, New York 2000 , pp. 7 - 10 � 23 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, New York 1920 , pp. 829 - 870 � 24 Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction”, in: Cathy Caruth (Ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore/ London 1985 , p. 151 � 25 Ibid. <?page no="178"?> 172 (Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning In the light of this paradoxical relation we can understand the impossibility of burial in the Theban cycle. The absent body (Oedipus), the unburied body (Polyneices) and the undead body (Antigone) become the bodies active in their death, appearing as a locus and a symptom of the collective trauma. As Cathy Caruth explains: “The attempt to gain access to a traumatic history, then, is also the project of listening beyond the pathology of individual suffering, to the reality of a history that in its crises can only be perceived in inassimilable forms”. 26 Therefore, the impossibility of burial in all three cases analysed above symbolically stands for the struggle to address and access the traumatic history and provide the possibility of a historical transmission. 27 In the following analyses, I will examine what the (un)repressed conflict and the collective trauma in Antigone are, what Antigone can tell us about the present, and who can figure as a contemporary Antigone. 3. From Antigone to Chelsea Manning Private Manning is a whistleblower who was a US Army soldier that released thousands of classified documents, a leak that continues to have an enormous impact on global political affairs. 28 He was serving in Iraq as an intelligence analyst when he came to know information he deemed immoral to keep hidden from the public. He decided then to release this information trough WikiLeaks. 29 In a video that became the most infamous piece of leaked classified information, soldiers in a US Army Apache helicopter can be seen firing on civilians who do not return fire in New Baghdad in 2007 , killing eleven people, among them two employees of news agency Reuters. This video became known under the title Collateral murder and serves as a dramatic illustration of the kind of secrets that are kept hidden under the label ‘classified files’. 30 26 Ibid. 27 Id., p. 156 � 28 The release of documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has gained worldwide media attention, sparking a debate on many levels. For information on the impact of the leaks, see Glen Greenwald, “Bradley Manning Deserves a Medal”, on: http: / / www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ 2011/ dec/ 14/ bradley-manning-deserves-a-medal (accessed 10 . 02 . 2015 ). 29 Manning expressed her moral motives in a pre-trial statement, taking responsibility for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, see: http: / / www.chelseamanning.org/ news/ bradley-mannings-statement-taking-responsibility-for-releasing-documents-to-wikileaks (accessed 01 . 02 . 2015 ). See also a more recent interview with Amnesty International, available on: https: / / www.amnesty.org/ en/ latest/ news/ 2015/ 08/ chelsea-manning-why-speaking-outworth-risk/ (accessed 29 . 01 . 2015 ). 30 Information and videos available on: https: / / wikileaks.org/ wiki/ Collateral_Murder (accessed 29 . 01 . 2015 ). <?page no="179"?> Aneta Stojnić 173 The leaks eventually led to the arrest and prosecution of Manning by US authorities. 31 He was detained in particularly cruel conditions and accused of numerous offences, 32 including the severe charge of ‘aiding the enemy’, which could have resulted in a death sentence for Manning. In July 2013 , he was convicted of violations of the espionage act as well as other offences, including multiple counts of disobeying orders, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Commenting on this case, Slavoj Žižek pointed out the role of whistleblowers in keeping the “public use of reason” free: What we should be ashamed of is the worldwide process of the gradual narrowing of the space for what Kant called the ‘public use of reason’. In his classic text, ‘What Is Enlightenment? ’, Kant contrasts ‘public’ and ‘private’ use of reason-- ‘private’ is for Kant the communal-institutional order in which we dwell (our state, our nation- …), while ‘public’ is the transnational universality of the exercise of one’s reason: ‘The public use of one’s reason must always be free’,-[…] This is why whistleblowers play a crucial role in keeping the ‘public reason’ alive. Assange, Manning, Snowden, these are our new heroes, exemplary cases of the new ethics that befits our era of digitalised control. They are no longer just whistleblowers who denounce the illegal practices of private companies to the public authorities; they denounce these public authorities themselves when they engage in ‘private use of reason’. 33 The leaked documents did not show much information we did not already ‘know’ as a rumour, assumption or supposition. However, publicising this information as a fact had the effect of bringing these issues to the attention of the collective consciousness. Exposing these issues this way could perhaps provide the possibility of or at least open up a space for dealing with them. According to Manning’s testimony: I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crewmembers. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general 31 I will use the masculine pronoun "he" when referring to the period when Manning was known as Bradley Manning and was perceived by the public as male, and switch to the feminine pronoun "she" when referring to Chelsea Manning, Manning’s actual transgendered female identity. 32 According to a UN special rapporteur on torture, Manning was treated in a cruel, inhuman and degrading manner, including being kept in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source. 33 Slavoj Žižek, "Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange: our new heroes", on: http: / / www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ 2013/ sep/ 03/ snowden-manning-assangenew-heroes (accessed 14 . 11 . 2014 ). <?page no="180"?> 174 (Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning public who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled-- if not more troubled-- than me by what they saw. 34 Moreover, the paradox of what was already assumed appearing as unexpected news is precisely what shocks and disturbs us in this situation. This raises the question of how it is possible to assume the existence of such notorious acts and at the same time repress this ‘knowledge’ and, in quiet denial, legitimise the legal and governing structures that commit them. In his pre-trial statement, Manning declared that he did what he considered to be his moral duty, even if this meant breaking the existing law. 35 Like in Judith Butler’s reading of the character of Antigone, Manning claimed his act at the trial, confronting and challenging the very normativity of the law itself, and was accused of treason for doing so. According to Butler, “to say, ‘Yes, I did it,’ is to claim the act, but it is also to commit another deed in the very claiming, the act of publishing one’s deed, a new criminal venture that redoubles and takes the place of the old”. 36 Manning’s case was followed by media worldwide and divided the public opinion in the US and elsewhere. During the trial, numerous supporters, among them many public figures, campaigned for Manning, posing with a statement, or, more precisely, a claim that said: “I am Bradley Manning”. 37 Instead of a claim relating to Manning’s deed, his supporters were making a claim relating to his identity, in which the deed is already identified with the doer and re-owned in a political act of identification. This is a familiar political strategy that is of course not exclusively reserved for Manning’s case. However, the emphasis on Manning’s deed provides us with another striking similarity with Butler’s reading of Antigone: In fact the deed itself seems to wander throughout the play, threatening to become attached to some doers, owned by some who could have not done it, disowned by others who might have done it. The act is everywhere delivered by the speech acts-[…] The only way that the doer is attached to the deed is the linguistic assertion of the connection. 38 Shortly following the ending of the trial, Manning released a statement which could be seen as a dramaturgical turn, a plot twist par excellence: 34 For Bradley Manning’s complete statement on taking responsibility for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, see: http: / / www.chelseamanning.org/ news/ bradley-mannings-statement-taking-responsibility-for-releasing-documents-to-wikileaks (accessed 01 . 02 . 2015 ). 35 Ibid. 36 Judith Butler, op.cit., 2000 , p. 8 � 37 For more information about this Internet campaign, see: https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=UFFkcCh-pCc; http: / / iam.privatemanning.org/ your-photos; and http: / / www.chelseamanning.org/ ourwork/ supporters. 38 Judith Butler, op. cit., 2000 , p. 7 � <?page no="181"?> Aneta Stojnić 175 As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me.-[…] I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun. 39 With this unexpected gender recognition, we see a subject who commits the act and goes through the trial as a male subject, and, only after being sentenced, (re) claims her transgendered female identity. It is precisely this statement that strikingly bring us back to Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, which takes the post-oedipal subject (the sister/ daughter figure) rather than Oedipus as its point of departure, questioning what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result. In Butler’s analysis, Antigone’s rebellious behaviour is seen as “un-feminine” and “manly”. 40 Her act and the claim identifying it, challenge authority not only on the level of legal disobedience, but also through acting at odds with the presupposed norms of her gendered identity. Butler argues that, by the end of the play, Antigone has taken the place of every man in her family. 41 Being imprisoned, Manning, who meanwhile succeeded in legally changing her name to Chelsea, has to wait for an approval to start a hormone therapy. Therefore, we can once again say that her gender becomes performative precisely in her claim, in the publicising of the speech act. This in not to suggest that her act as a whistleblower would be any less honourable whether she was indeed a man. However, her trans-identity adds another layer to the case. According to Butler: Prohibited from action, she nevertheless acts, and her act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm. And in acting, as one who has no right to act, she upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human, implicitly raising the question for us of what those preconditions really must be. She speaks within the language of entitlement from which she is excluded, participating in the language of the claim with which no final identification is possible. If she is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage. And to the extent that she occupies the language that can never belong to her, she functions as a chiasm within the vocabulary of political norms.-[…] She acts, she speaks, she becomes one for whom the speech act is a fatal crime, but this fatality exceeds her life and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising fatality, the social form of its aberrant, unprecedented future. 42 39 Excerpt from Chelsea Manning’s official statement to the public on August 2013 , on: http: / / www.today.com/ news/ i-am-chelsea-read-mannings-full-statement-6C10974052 (accessed 10 . 03 . 2015 ). 40 Judith Butler, op.cit., 2000 , pp. 21 - 26 � 41 Id., p. 62 � 42 Id., p. 82 � <?page no="182"?> 176 (Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning The discourse of Chelsea Manning is the discourse of Antigone. She appears as the political subject that intervenes at the core of the repressive and unjust law, namely its presupposed normality. In doing so, she provided the possibility to access the historic traumatic experience and the possibility of dealing with it in the public sphere. Her act was not an artistic performance, but it was performative on many levels and was efficient in terms of creating a dissensus in the public sphere as well as making a historical impact in reality. However, as Rancière has shown, the efficiency of dissensus overcomes the pseudo-tension between ‘art’ and ‘the real’. 43 Therefore, I would dare to suggest that Chelsea Manning’s act as a whistleblower could as well be seen as one of the most important performances of our times. If Chelsea Manning is a contemporary Antigone, we are left with the question if it would be possible to make a play about her, worthy of her actual deed, a work of art as efficient as her ‘real life’ performance. 43 Jacques Rancière, op. cit., 2010 , p. 140 � <?page no="183"?> Katharina Pewny 177 Ritual Failure Remains? The Inaccessibility of the Dead (Corpse) in Antigone and in Contemporary Post-Conflict Art Katharina Pewny (Ghent University), Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) The recurrent failure of Theban princess Antigone’s request to provide a burial rite for her fallen brother Polyneices is the locus of conflict in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Therefore, the first part of this article discusses the relations between ritual, theatre and tragedy. Central to this discussion is the concept of ‘ritual failure’, which we will think through starting from Judith Butler’s question of which and whose life is “grievable”. 1 The second part deals with the ways in which contemporary works of art represent individual and collective processes of handling (or failing to handle) with a violent death. Which aesthetics can we employ to describe the switching between dehumanised, anonymous corpses and the bodies of beloved ones in contemporary art? Starting from this question, we analyse the novel Frozen Time ( 2010 ) by Anna Kim and the film Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding ( 2013 ) by Sarah Vanagt. Both the novel and the film originated in the post-conflict context of military confrontations and crimes against humanity in the countries of former Yugoslavia. 1. Ritual (failure), tragedy and Antigone Tragic theatre is rooted in ritual sacrifices. While ritual sacrifice was banned from the stage, it was taken up as subject matter in many tragedies. 2 In these, rituals are seen as instruments of the successful mastery of crises, such as the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat. 3 In the Oresteia, the collective crisis of the threat to Athens by the Erinyes is told through the erection of the Areopagus. It was preceded by a sequence of ritual sacrifices (Iphigenia, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra). In Euripides’ Children of Heracles, the city is liberated from war by the self-sacrifice of Macaria, 1 Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? , London/ New York 2009 . For an elaborate analysis of Butler’s reading of Antigone, see Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera in this volume. 2 More on this in the forthcoming publication by Katharina Pewny, “Precarious Responsivity. Ethics and/ of Spectatorship in Contemporary Drama and (post-documentary) Film and Video”, in: Christel Stalpaert et al. (Edd.), Unfolding Spectatorship, Ghent 2016 (in preparation). 3 See René Girard’s influential theory of the scapegoat, in: René Girard, Le bouc émissaire, Paris 1983 � <?page no="184"?> 178 Ritual Failure Remains? and her brothers are granted asylum. Analyses of the examples listed consider ritual as a successful process of transformation-- from life to death, from the threat of war to peace, from being a foreigner to belonging to a community, in favour of Attic democracy, which was based upon the exclusion of strangers and slaves. This is, however, not the case in Antigone: we suggest a reading of the tragedy of Antigone as a failure of the ritually organised transition from life to death. Since the foundation of ritual studies around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, ritual has been conceived of as the organization of individual and/ or collective identity transformation and as ‘rite de passage’ or transition from one way of being to another. 4 Ritual studies acted as the soil for performance studies, which were conceived in the 1970 s in New York by director and theoretician Richard Schechner. He initially developed his theories and concepts starting from cultural anthropology. In theatre studies, by contrast, ritual was given little attention, with the exception of research on Greek tragedy, in which in most cases the anthropological aspects of ritual were taken into account. In one of the few studies of the relationship between twentieth-century theatre, sacrifice and ritual, Erika Fischer-Lichte wrote: It is their [rituals’, KP] purpose to secure a safe passage from one place or state to another when individuals or social groups go through changes of their state and identity-- have to undergo a transformation-- as in life crises, such as birth, puberty, marriage, pregnancy, illness, famine, war or death-- or in seasonal cycles. 5 Fischer-Lichte focuses on examples from the twentieth century, amongst which action art and performance art such as Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater (Orgies Mysteries Theatre) and Marina Abramovič’s self-flagellation pieces, while a rich spectrum of (interpretations of) tragedies form the background to her analyses. An interesting new perspective on ritual is the one that takes its failure as a point of departure. The concept of ‘ritual failure’ originated within the research cluster ritual dynamics at Heidelberg University (Germany) in the context of religious studies and social science. 6 In the first place, ‘ritual failure’ has been conceived of as rituals causing the failure of others, such as sorcery. The notion has been further expanded from an archaeological perspective on the material manifestations of the unplanned failure of ritual� 7 We propose to expand 4 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, Chicago 1969 � 5 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring Forms of Political Theatre, Oxon/ New York 2005 , p. 36 � 6 Ute Hüsken (Ed.), When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure and the Dynamics of Ritual, Leiden/ Boston 2007 � 7 Timothy Insoll, “Foreword: Introductory thoughts on the theme of ‘Ritual failure. Archeological perspectives’”, in: Vasiliki G. Koutrafouri and Jeff Sanders (Edd.), Ritual Failure. <?page no="185"?> Katharina Pewny, Inge Arteel 179 the concept of ‘ritual failure’ to include a reading of tragedy and theatre texts and performances as narrations of ritual failure. Maybe theatre evolved not only from its affinity to ritual- - as Hans-Thies Lehmann points out in his recent study on tragedy and performance 8 -- but also from the failure of rituals? 9 The failing of ritual is overtly present in each one of Sophocles’ Theban plays. Antigone might be the most famous, but it is surely not the only tragedy in which the question of ritual failure is acute, since this also applies to the third Theban play, Oedipus at Colonus. In this tragedy, which is Sophocles’ very last, the blind Oedipus, accompanied by Antigone, seeks asylum and a final resting place. Ritual purification and an oracle are present in this play. Here, Oedipus meets his death in a sacred grove at Colonus. King Theseus refuses to grant his daughters/ sisters Antigone and Ismene access to the place where he died. In his essay Of Hospitality ( 2000 ), Jacques Derrida refers to the loss of the mother tongue and the refusal of access to the grave of the forebears as attributes of foreignness. Jacques Derrida reads Oedipus at Colonus in the context of the Algerian migration to France and comes to the conclusion that “the foreigner becomes the foreigner by remaining hidden in his death”. 10 Oedipus dies unseen and without a proper burial rite in the sacred grove. In Oedipus at Colonus, as Freddie Rokem has pointed out, Antigone already experiences the failure of the ritual of familial mourning of her father/ brother Oedipus. 11 She thereby experiences a foreignness from which she tries to liberate herself in Antigone with her attempt to bury Polyneices-- which, in the end, remains unsuccessful. Whereas Medea, known from Euripides’ play of the same name, is traditionally thought of as representing the foreigner/ femininity, this new reading links Antigone to foreignness as well. Foreignness is clearly a consequence of the forbidden burial rite, both in Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus� However, what lays hidden beyond this foreignness, and which other consequences does the ritual failure have in the Theban plays? The ritual failure of the burial masks, as Tina Chanter shows, the success of the transformation of the dead brother back into a free Greek: “Antigone’s insistence on burying her brother Polyneices is articulated not merely on the basis of establishing him as a philos, a loved one, but also by distinguishing him from a doulos, Archeological Perspectives, Leiden 2013 , p. 12 � 8 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragödie und dramatisches Theater, Berlin 2013 � 9 This argumentation partially stems from a commentary on Tina Chanter’s contribution to the Occupy Antigone conference in March 2014 at Ghent University and partially from a presentation on the recognition of the human subject at the conference Literatur und Anerkennung at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, May 2014 � 10 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, Stanford 2000 , p. 113 � 11 Freddie Rokem, “Antigone remembers. Dramaturgical analysis and ‘Oedipus Tyrannos’”, in: Theatre Research International 31 , pp. 261 - 269 � <?page no="186"?> 180 Ritual Failure Remains? a slave”. 12 If Polyneices is a free Attic citizen/ king’s son, and Antigone grew out of the same womb as he did, then the ‘de-slavery’ also has an effect on her. Ritual failure and ritual success as performative mechanisms of de-slavery are thus interdependent. While the burial rite of Polyneices remains uncompleted, his social status comes near to that of slaves. This groundbreaking insight for the research on Antigone and other tragedies confirms the definition of ritual as a performative mechanism that underlies the construction of identities and the division of people between social classes. At the same time, the results of Chanter’s research point out that not only the success, but also the failure of a ritual can have transformative effects-- in the case of Polyneices: the transition from prince to slave. Completing or declining the burial rite makes a posteriori clear which social status the deceased and his relatives have. This is why ritual success and failure belong to the “frames of recognition” that Judith Butler describes in her collection of essays Frames of War, and which enable to recognize what is human or what belongs to life. Butler analyses the normative mechanisms active in the production of “recognisable persons”. 13 Her analysis is connected with the subjects of her earlier publication Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence ( 2004 ), namely the precariousness of life and “grievability”. In Precarious Life, she deals with the following questions: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life? ” 14 Five years later, Butler answers these questions, referring to the concept of ‘relationality’: life is worth to be mourned if it is considered human, or “[i]n other words, ‘this will be a life that will have been lived’ is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard”. 15 Empathy is thus the premise of recognising a living being as something that is human and that can be mourned. So, according to Butler, mourning is not simply a private matter, but also something that constructs political, social and ethical norms. Following Chanter and Butler, the trouble Antigone takes to give Polyneices a funeral can be understood as a struggle to let him be recognised as a grievable life-- that is: as a beloved brother and as the son of a king. The burial rite marks the limits of grievable life and therefore appears as a part of a global political system of power that orchestrates life and death. 16 Because of migratory movements, international and civil wars, countless people these days are unable to pay their last respects to 12 See Tina Chanter in this volume, “The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: To Bury or not to Bury”, p. 84 � 13 Judith Butler, op. cit., 2009 , p. 6 � 14 Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London 2004 , p. 20 � 15 Judith Butler, op. cit., 2009 , p. 15 � 16 This idea is comparable to Joseph-Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘necropolitics’, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, in: Public Culture 15 , 1 ( 2003 ), pp. 11 - 40 � <?page no="187"?> Katharina Pewny, Inge Arteel 181 the bodies of their relatives. In contemporary theatre, this reality is represented, and here classical Greek tragedies function as an important model. We presume that the boom of studies and stagings of Antigone since the turn of the millennium is due to the central role of the failure of the burial rite. 17 Moreover, the burial rite and its affective effects are also central to works of art other than theatre and performance; we will discuss two of these cases in the following parts of this article. Anna Kim’s novel Frozen Time ( 2010 ) deals with the personal mourning for a murdered spouse and for beloved ones, while, on the contrary, Sarah Vanagt’s film Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding ( 2013 ) shows the reconstruction of mass executions, which tell a highly impersonal story. Both works of art are part of a growing body of contemporary art that deals with violations of human rights by raising questions of ethics, law and representations of violence that is hardly visible for the average inhabitant of ‘Fortress Europe’. 2. Anna Kim: Frozen Time (2010) Frozen Time explores the experience of alienation in a fictitious story strongly connected with historical reality, namely the aftermath of the war in Kosovo in 1998 - 1999 � 18 With this thematic focus, the novel can be said to belong to a trend in contemporary German language fiction as diagnosed by Paul Michael Lützeler a few years ago in his book Bürgerkrieg global: the preoccupation with human rights and their violation in civil wars, and the critical reflection on the role of recognition of human rights as a means to prevent civil wars. 19 The first person narrator, a female Red Cross employee, has returned to Vienna after a year’s work at the office in Pristina that coordinates the identification of dead bodies found in mass graves. Her work in Vienna focuses on the collection of data from missing persons, in order to facilitate the identification process in Kosovo. In the course of the many interviews with surviving relatives and friends a love relationship tentatively unfolds itself between the narrator and one of her interviewees, a Vienna based Kosovo immigrant who has been looking for his missing wife for nearly seven years. When her remains are eventually found, the narrator accompanies the husband on his visit back to Kosovo, attending the burial of the body. Though the story can be summed up in these few lines, Anna Kim has written a highly complex and condensed book that tries to find an adequate literary form for the narration of and reflection on the continuing impact of (civil) war on its 17 See also the introduction to this volume. 18 Anna Kim, Frozen Time, ed. Michael Mitchell, Riverside (California) 2010 . Original title: Die gefrorene Zeit, Graz/ Vienna 2008 � 19 Paul Michael Lützeler, Bürgerkrieg global. Menschenrechtsethos und deutschsprachiger Gegenwartsroman, München 2009 � <?page no="188"?> 182 Ritual Failure Remains? survivors. It is constructed as a fragmentary flashback trying to reconstruct the private history of the narrator’s relationship with the Kosovarian immigrant while at the same time gradually unravelling the long and frustrating professional search for the missing body. The confrontation with the corpse is postponed to the end of the narrative, as if the moment longed for for such a long time is also the most unspeakable one. The narrative explicitly presents itself as mediated: though the desperate search of the husband for his wife is at the centre, his story is told by an outsider, a woman at first merely professionally involved. Both the narrator as a data collector as well as her former friend, the forensic anthropologist Sam who in Kosovo operates as a ‘bone collector’, are supposed to keep up absolute distance and non-involvement with their subjects in order to guarantee professional efficiency. Systematizing, controlling and reconstructing information, while at the same time “closing our eyes to the surrounding circumstances” characterize both their jobs. 20 And both fail: the narrator as she gets involved and falls in love with her interviewee, Sam as he feels a stranger in his own body, an alienation he tries to conquer in considering his job a meaningful way to transcend death: “he feels he’s been chosen, his work is more than just work, it is work that makes sense of things, living work, since it will live on after him and his colleagues”. 21 Recognition of the violently dehumanized human subject is at the core of this dense narrative: recognition of the traumata of the survivors who have been searching for years for the remains of their murdered loved ones, which is even more complicated for Kosovarian immigrants who first have to struggle for the recognition of their status as valuable witness-- recognition of the anonymous and unidentifiable bones found in mass graves as human subjects worth burying and mourning. The question of recognition also informs the narratological make-up of the text: the position of the narrator leads to the literary and ethically relevant question on how to give an account of another person’s grief and struggle for survival. The question gets even more poignant when the narrator falls in love with the traumatized survivor. The narrative seeks an answer to this dilemma in a hybrid language and narrative form. Different discourses and narratives are juxtaposed: the documentary style of questionnaires and reports, accounts of Kosovarian traditions and tales, recollections of the husband’s Kosovarian youth, memories of his wife’s engagement for the rights of the Albanian Kosovarians, philosophical thoughts on the time of waiting in limbo for the body to be found, on the language of despair, articulated in “sighing” as a corporeal “metaphor for the act of crying”, 22 and most 20 Anna Kim, op cit., 2010 , p. 96 � 21 Id., p. 101 � 22 Id., p. 17 � <?page no="189"?> Katharina Pewny, Inge Arteel 183 strikingly on the “inhuman” 23 nature of a human corpse that the narrator struggles to put into words. We want to look in more detail now at two aspects of the book. First of all the reflections on the corpse, on corpses, and the integration in the narrative of that motive as a catachretic metonymy for the dehumanised subject. Secondly, the narratological shape of this giving an account of the other. Though the book starts with the announcement that the body of the missing wife has been found, the actual confrontation with the corpse is postponed until the end, allowing room for the fragmentary recollections as described above. These recollections however are very much haunted by the narrator’s thoughts on the nature of human remains and more particularly so on how to relate to them and how to describe them-- reflections, that is, on both an ethical and an aesthetical level. Her fundamentally non-transcendent view on the corpse as dead material is profoundly shaken by the affective impact of her year’s work in Pristina at the side of the bone collector. To voice that traumatizing experience she seeks recourse to grotesque metaphors-- such as “let’s tell it how it is: a corpse is inhuman,-[…] a monster in human form”, “something halfway between”, “humans as things, human things after the metamorphosis” 24 -- pointing at the incongruous simultaneity of human shape and shapelessness. Indeed, the relation of the Red Cross team with the human remains overall has a grotesque quality to it, as the forensic pathologist constructs a recognisable human form out of the unrecognizable human remains and the identification team lends an identity to unidentifiable bones. However, it is precisely their only partial and precarious success with these endeavours that opens up the possibility for an ethically responsible behaviour: then as these bones are themselves the result of dehumanizing violence, the “joins” that remain visible, 25 the merely provisional and incomplete reconstruction of the skeleton, prevent this violence from becoming invisible. The scandalous, ‘resisting’ presence of the mutilated corpse then, 26 which defies recognisable description and integration into the symbolic order, and whose identification has hardly anything to do with the remembered living person, becomes an inhuman subject that thrusts the dehumanization into the face of the human subjects and as a catachretic figure not 23 Id., p. 98 � 24 Id., pp. 98 and 95 . The grotesque imagery, fusing the human with the inhuman, is more explicit in the original German vocabulary: “sagen wir es wie es ist: Die Leiche ist unmenschlich-[…] ein Unmensch mit menschlicher Gestalt”, “[ein] Zwitter”, “Menschendinger, Dingmenschen nach der Verwandlung” (Anna Kim, op. cit., 2008 , pp. 118 , 117 and 115 ). 25 Anna Kim, op. cit., 2010 , p. 106 � 26 Id., p. 97 : “the corpse, the resistor”; in German: “die Leiche, die Widerständige” (Anna Kim, op. cit., 2008 , p. 117 , italics in the original). <?page no="190"?> 184 Ritual Failure Remains? of “Menschlichkeit” (“humanity”) but of “Menschenheit” (“humanness”) demands to be recognised as upsetting the frame of the human. 27 The text, however, also offers another highly different approach to the problematic of relating to human remains. For the husband of the missing wife, the need to find her body is another story altogether, indicating a fundamentally different existential quality between his search and the engagement of the professional team. His is a desire to recognise and meet the image of his wife again through the reconstructed body. As the clash between the matter of the mutilated corpse and the idealised remembered image is extreme, the confrontation with the body, searched and longed for for seven years, is a fundamental disappointment. It is a body that refuses any possible relationality. The burial of this body does not bring closure, neither do the extensive Kosovarian burial rites offer the male protagonist some relief. His trajectory is contrary to that of the narrator, who, as indicated before, through telling and the exploration of language tries to make some sense of her traumatic professional experience. In the fate of the male protagonist however, the novel, exposing the disintegrating impact of dehumanizing violence specifically on the individual lives of the survivors, is very radical in its anti-metaphysical refusal to offer comfort. The only comfort then lies in the act of telling itself. The narrator thus sets out to speak in her own name as well as in the name of the other. This endeavour is most clearly expressed in a constant shift in narrative mode from the first person pronoun to the second: the I-narrator tells large parts of the other’s story in a direct address of that other, the ‘you’. This emphatic address of her lover prevents her from telling merely about his ordeal, from making him the object of her story: he becomes the grammatical subject; in the address she makes the other present as the subject to whom she dedicates her empathizing voice, the only gift she can offer him, while at the same time recognizing the irreducible difference that informs the I-you relationship. That this ‘love speech’ is in fact an apostrophe of the dead other, becomes clear only at the very end of the book, when we learn that the male protagonist, after having been a survivor for many years, eventually trespasses the border into “something inhuman” and commits suicide. 28 This final twist makes of this book as much an attempt to speak with the dead lover as a posthumous account of his struggle for survival. The you-address in Frozen Time brings us back to Antigone. Just as Antigone’s ambivalent use of the term ‘brother’ to refer to her brother as loved one, 29 the address of the other as ‘you’ is an ambivalent move too. In recent narratology, 27 Anna Kim, op. cit., 2008 , p. 118 ; Anna Kim, op. cit., 2010 , p. 99 � 28 Anna Kim, op. cit., 2010 , p. 114 , italics in the original. 29 See Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim, New York/ Chichester 2000 , pp. 77 - 82 � <?page no="191"?> Katharina Pewny, Inge Arteel 185 making extensive literary use of the you-form is called an ‘unnatural’ perspective, as it does not correspond to the readers’ expectations of the representation of a real life setting. The you-address is characterised by deictic instability, meaning both the other inside and outside of the text, and thereby creating a dialogical opening up of the text. This deictic instability implies an ethical readerand reading-orientated level, as the narratologist James Phelan has explored in asking the question “Who are the ‘you’s? ”. 30 The you-form has a strong relational and addressive effect; it calls on the reader while at the same time provoking unease, it invites identification while at the same time problematising this process. This deictic and semantic instability then offers a possibility to tentatively reconfigure the ritual of mourning in a context where the identification of human remains brings “a conclusion but no closure” 31 and any metaphysical gesture of comfort-- through, for instance, burial-- has become powerless; at the very least it urges the reader to read with care. 3. Sarah Vanagt: Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding (2013) Since 2007 , Belgian artist Sarah Vanagt produces video installations and movies about war crimes, for instance in Rwanda. Since 2010 , she films and mounts material with regard to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ( ICTY ) in The Hague. 32 It is active since 1993 , grappling with the case of Ratko Mladić in the summer of 2012 . As in other discourses on the performativity of truth and reconciliation councils, Vanagt’s reflections in Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding confront the difficulty to bring personal memories of heavily traumatized witnesses into accord with objective facts and data. In a concept note, Vanagt describes the overload she experiences due to the overabundance of records in text and image as well as the impossibility to understand the chronology of the events and the legal proceedings. In contrast to Anna Kim, Vanagt does not aim at reconstructing individual lives (and their end). Instead, she focuses on the course of the sittings of the court. To be more specific: the film unfolds on two meta-levels, because the real events, namely the sittings of the court and the process of filming, are rendered as subject. The artist offers the spectator a double perspective by cinematic means. On the one hand, long parts of the account by a surviving female witness of a mass execution (and her interrogation by the accused Ratko Mladić, 30 James Phelan, “Self-Help for narratee and narrative audience: How ‘I’- - and ‘you’- - read ‘how’”, in: Style 28 ( 1994 ) 3 , pp. 350 - 365 � 31 Anna Kim, op. cit., 2010 , p. 108 � 32 A forthcoming publication discusses the mimetic operation in Vanagt’s work and the options the artist offers through which the spectator can identify with what is shown, see Katharina Pewny, op.cit., 2016 (in preparation). <?page no="192"?> 186 Ritual Failure Remains? who was present in the court room) and of the hearings of forensic experts by the judge are shown. On the other hand, Vanagt’s film deals with the process of cinematic documentation itself: the artist lays a thin sheet of paper on several objects from the courtyard in The Hague (e. g. the entrance door, the bench of the judge and the witness stand). With a pencil, she cross-hatches these objects, resulting in drawings which show a striking similarity with satellite images of landscapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, namely the ‘disturbed earth’ where mass graves were found or are presumed to be found. Images of the actual ‘disturbed earth’ are also shown. While Vanagt is crosshatching the objects on paper, she wears a helmet camera filming her hands doing this action. In doing so, she translates the texture and contours of the material into moving images. The muteness of the objects bears testimony to the impossibility to grasp the events, to understand its logic or to find any words adequate to describe the harm and horror. The spectators are thus made aware of the media frame and can recognize the computer screen as such. With each film screening, the artist also exhibits the drawings in a nearby room, so the audience can see them within the framework of the visual arts. The long, narrow sheets lie on wooden tables, similar to the furniture in the courtyard in the film. There is a surprising abstract beauty in the cross-hatched traces of the trial (or of the mass graves) on the monochrome paper, that partially resemble flying birds. The spectators of Vanagt’s work are confronted with a sharp contrast between the horror that is told and the traces, that are mediated in various ways, so they no longer can be connected with the crimes against humanity that took place. Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding marks a particular point in the representation of deadly shootings in military conflicts in the history of video art. In Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s short film A Muerte. Segondo duelo ( 2009 ), for example, the performer aims a loaded gun at the cameraman. At the end of the short film, there is a sudden black-out, simultaneous with the sound of the gunshot, suggesting that the cameraman has been killed. Here, death is still clearly audibly (re)present(ed). A realistic mode of representation is used, with a suspense maintained until the end, which coincides with death. In films, video art and theatre stagings after 2010 , such as Rabih Mroué’s Pixelated Revolution, Lina Saneh’s and Rabih Mroué’s 33 rpm and a few seconds (both 2012 ) and Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms ( 2013 ), death is (re)present(ed) through the absence of the performers. In all these pieces, the question is how death can be documented, or more precisely: how it can be staged. In these, and this applies to Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding as well, recordings of accounts and especially objects become more important. In 33 rpm and a few seconds, for example, the absence-- and death-- of Lebanese freedom fighter Diyaa Yamout is/ are emphasized by objects such as a fax machine, an answering machine, a computer monitor and a record player. These devices play messages for the deceased person. Objects play an important role in Vanagt’s film <?page no="193"?> Katharina Pewny, Inge Arteel 187 too, since they carry the traces of the war crimes. Moreover, she presents to the spectator a story through the multiplication and blending of different media. In the following, we will reconstruct this story. In short, the story in Vanagt’s film goes that 110 people are killed in a field in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that their bodies are twice buried and exhumed. This story is reconstructed through three elements: firstly, through the testimony of a surviving female witness, which is stripped of all individuality, since she remains nameless and her voice is deformed to veil her identity; secondly, through satellite images of the ‘disturbed earth’; and, thirdly, through the eventual finding of the corpses, which bear traces of the soil of different regions. Despite the clear difference between Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding, which is definitely not about a personal quest for the body of a beloved person, and Frozen Time, a comparison between both works of art is interesting, because both deal on a meta-fictional level with the (cinematic or textual) process of telling a story, and represent the disturbed or failed burial rite as a consequence of crimes against humanity. As mentioned before, the narrator in Anna Kim’s book addresses through the use of the second person a “you” in the text and, at the same time, the reader of the text. This is not the case in Vanagt’s film, though the spectator is explicitly addressed in a visual way. Throughout the whole film, facts and real data are incorporated into the story and this semi-documentary style affects the credibility of the information that is offered to the spectator. A further difference is that Kim implicitly thematizes the position of the narrator, while Vanagt does this in an explicit way by filming herself while filming and crosshatching the paper sheets. In Kim’s work, the telling of the victims’ stories is delegated to the emphatic ‘love speech’ of a non-victim in a way to fight the unspeakable that is part of the trauma. In Vanagt’s work, by contrast, the story of the female witness is confronted with the aggressive questions and insinuations of the accused Ratko Mladić. By incorporating the accused and his continuous disputing of the witness’ statements, Vanagt’s film refers to the struggle for the recognition of the truth about what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina. For example: Mladić accuses the witness of lying, while claiming that the survivors have received in Bosnian organisations precise instructions on what to declare in court, making the different testimonies on mass executions similar to each other-- “the stories coincide”, as can be heard at 18 min. 39 sec.-- a statement that devaluates the witnesses’ claims on the truth. Normally, the more witness statements on the mass killings are comparable to each other, the more they become credible; but this is turned into its exact opposite by Mladić’s insinuations. The dispute between the witness and the accused is followed by the climax of the film, when the corpses are revealed (see also below). Shortly after this, the film suddenly ends. There is thus no catharsis (for example in the form of judgement) and thereby no emotional relief of the suspense that was built up. <?page no="194"?> 188 Ritual Failure Remains? In both works of art there is a suspense that leads up to the description or revealing of the corpses. In the third part of Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding, a pile of forms is shown that look as if they were burned, while an expert is interviewed. At 34 min. 36 sec., he declares: “This is the head and this is the blindfold here”. This ascertains the obvious suspicion that it is a pile of remains of the victims of the mass executions. The soundtrack to these images is the hearing of the forensic expert by the judge who tries to find out what we actually see in the image: “Is this the back of the head or the face that we see? ” “That’s a really good question-[…] I think it might be the face-[…] I cannot tell now whether we are looking at the face or at the back of the head” (at 36 min. 9 sec.). This conversation confronts the spectator with the fact that is also impossible for him/ her to determine if the pile of dark forms are in fact human corpses. This creates estrangement, distance and gloom. Similar to Frozen Time, the human remains are dehumanized. Yet, unlike Frozen Time, there is no narrative end to the story. When the expert finally declares, based on the traces of soil found on the corpses, that they were exhumed and transported, it becomes clear that the deceased have to be identified again and will not rest in peace. The double burial and exhumation reminds us of the double funeral of Polyneices, who is also exhumed twice by Antigone. While Polyneices’ identity is defined in Antigone, the identity of the bodies in Vanagt’s work is debatable. Ratko Mladić claims at the end of the film ( 39 min. 40 sec., to be precise) that the traces of fabric on the presumed heads of the bodies are not blindfolds, but headbands that the Islamic warriors received from their mothers for ceremonial reasons. Here, the story is distorted and victims of crimes against humanity are turned into voluntary warriors that ran the risk of dying in battle. In contrast to the deceased in Frozen Time, whose identity is finally ascertained-- although this does not free the surviving husband of his emotional burden-- the question about the identity of the victims in Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding remains unresolved. Both works of art that were analysed in this article continue in two respects the ‘Antigonal’ motives of contemporary art. On the one hand, there is the troubled burial rite that fails in Vanagt’s and Sophocles’ stories but takes place in Kim’s text, although it does not bring a deliverance in the sense of a transition from life to death. On the other hand, the burial rite in Antigone as well as in Frozen Time and Élevage de poussière/ Dust Breeding seems to be the locus, the retrospective act that confirms the identity of the deceased, be it in a personal way as beloved relative or spouse (Sophocles and Kim), or in a collective way, as members of certain communities that waged war on each other (Vanagt).