Abstract
Can Antigone’s passionate claim be reconciled in a Hegelian synthesis that relies on the presumptions of universality and progressivity, on binary oppositions, and on a final recovery of coherence? Ηow do we theorize the feminine as not transcending symbolic representation, but also deconstructing the phallogocentric symbolization of the “woman”? Antigone perverts the universal and its norms of property/propriety. She exemplifies a political agency fraught with ambivalence. She troubles the Aufhebung understood as a sublation whereby all contradictions are overcome. She inflects dialectics by showing toward an ethicopolitics of both autonomy and heteronomy, of both vulnerability and monstrosity. Antigone unsettles Kant’s notion of the sublime as well as Hegel’s formulation of the dialectic. The claim conveyed by her dissidence is neither merely aesthetic nor merely dialectic.
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Notes
- 1.
On how Antigone’s mourning turns from a proper language-in-the-feminine into a performative that unsettles the intelligibility of the political, see Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis, “Mourning (as) Woman: Event, Catachresis, and ‘That Other face of Discourse’,” in Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘The Greeks’, ed. Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010).
- 2.
This is not to suggest that Antigone could be taken as model figure of classical Western modernity. Intrigued by Antigone, the metaphysics of European modernity, the poetics of idealism and the romantic imaginary have fostered a current of persistent return to (this) tragedy. However, as the tragedy is introduced and re-inscribed in the multiple (historical, political, epistemological, national, transnational, local) contexts of contemporary critical theory and poetics, transformed into an object of persistent re-examination and re-appropriation, the categorical assumptions that have rendered Antigone a founding moment in the grammatology of Western modernity have been revisited and unsettled. For more on this decolonial perspective on Antigone, see “Antigones: Bodies of resistance in the contemporary world” at https://antigones.gr/.
- 3.
On the connection between the invention of aesthetics and the sublime, Lacoue-Labarthe rites: “the frame of aesthetics, of aesthetic commentary, built by preromanticism and Romanticism, is completely dominated by (and subordinate to) the idea of the sublime … When the question of art is posed in terms of what is the right rule for producing a work of art?, we are in the classical approach, and the name of this approach was poetics. When the question of rules for producing art-works dissolved, that is to say when the question of the sublime began at the end of the seventeenth century, the classical approach was over. Baumgarten, in a sense Burke, and certainly Kant tried to build a new approach, and this new approach is called Aesthetics. This new approach was closely linked to the question of the sublime because it was necessary to conceive a perception of art-works without rules. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “On the Sublime,” in Postmodernism: ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 113.
- 4.
References to the works of Kant follow volume and page of Kants Gesammelte Schriften in the German Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe) abbreviated as Ak.
- 5.
For a detailed understanding of Kant’s aesthetic theory please see the chapter by Tina Chanter in the present edited volume.
- 6.
Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 1992), 172.
- 7.
Bernstein writes: “So the test is a contest, a struggle between two bodies, each exceeding itself, being more than body; and in that excess threatening the other (body, that is more than body)” (ibid., 173).
- 8.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Complexity and the Sublime,” trans. Geoff Bennington, in Postmodernism: ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignanesi, 19-26 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1986), 24.
- 9.
Kant writes: “The feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that arises only indirectly: it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger. Hence it is an emotion, and so it seems to be seriousness, rather than play, in the imagination’s activity. Hence, too, this linking is incompatible with charms, and, since the mind is not just attracted by the object but is alternatively always repelled as well, the liking for the sublime contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a negative pleasure” (Ak 5, 245).
- 10.
Lyotard, “Complexity and the Sublime,” 22.
- 11.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
- 12.
Given that according to Kristeva both the sublime and the abject disturb order, transgress borders, and promote ambiguity, the question that arises at this juncture is whether they might also provoke gender ambiguity: an ambiguity that goes beyond the system of sexual dimorphism in the sense of either male or female or in the sense of both male and female.
- 13.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.
- 14.
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire livre VII: L’ éthique de la psychoanalyse, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986), 133.
- 15.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 124.
- 16.
Ibid., 125.
- 17.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 157.
- 18.
Jean Laplanche, “To Situate Sublimation,” trans. Richard Miller, in October 28, (Spring 1984): 7-26, 24. For a critique of Jean Laplanche’s accepting the viability of the concept of sublimation, see Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1981), 249–267.
- 19.
In Kant’s words: “The feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but it is at the same time also a pleasure, aroused by the fact that this very judgement of the inadequate, namely that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is in harmony with rational ideas, insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us” (Ak 5, 257).
- 20.
Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 47.
- 21.
Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 41; original emphasis.
- 22.
Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 83.
- 23.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78.
- 24.
Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)(“within such limits”),” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 277–360.
- 25.
De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 126.
- 26.
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff. Bennigton and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 123.
- 27.
For a thorough analysis of why Hegel’s thought cannot be identified with the philosophical project of transcendental consciousness, see Tuija Pulkkinen, in Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone?, ed. Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),19–37.
- 28.
De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 87.
- 29.
Derrida, Truth in Painting, 131.
- 30.
Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 15.
- 31.
Carol Jacobs, “Dusting Antigone,” MLN 111, no. 5 (1996): 895.
- 32.
Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1995), 88.
- 33.
Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 133.
- 34.
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus: The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 63.
- 35.
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press), 29.
- 36.
In his discussion of Hegel’s analysis of Antigone, Derrida has pointed out that Hegel generalizes from the particular situation of Antigone’s family to the more general “law” she is said to represent and to defend:
And what if the orphanage were a structure of the unconscious? Antigone’s parents are not some parents among others. She is the daughter of Oedipus and, according to most of the versions from which all the tragedians take their inspiration, of Jokasta, of her incestuous grandmother. Hegel never speaks of this generation moreover, as if it were foreign to the elementary structures of kinship.
Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 165–166.
- 37.
Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 72–73.
- 38.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 178.
- 39.
I would like to make a warning disclaimer at this point: in rewriting “différance” as “woman” and “woman as writing”, Derrida has importantly articulated a call to be “sexually otherwise” Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 1978. Sexual difference signifies woman’s nonaccess to the human (“we-men” as the horizon of humanity), the radically other who, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, “does not really exist, yet her name remains one of the important names for displacement, the special mark of deconstruction,” Gayatri, Chakravorty Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). In an important essay on the affirmative “feminization” of the practice of philosophy in the context of deconstruction (or, male self-deconstruction) and Derrida’s critique of phallocentrism, Spivak suggests that “when Derrida follows Nietzsche’s lead, it results not in an abolishment but in a distanced embracing of a doubly displaced woman” (ibid., 181). To go back, this being-up-until-death that Derrida calls sexual difference cannot dissociate itself from the “massive enclosure of the male appropriation of woman’s voice, with a variety of excuses: this one being, it is not really woman” (ibid., 190). The varieties of expropriation upon which sexual difference is predicated should be addressed according to Spivak: “the text (of male discourse) gains its coherence by coupling woman with man in a loaded equation and cutting the excess of the clitoris out” (ibid., 191).
- 40.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. Thomas Dudoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 45.
- 41.
Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 109.
- 42.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 422.
- 43.
Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 138, original emphasis.
- 44.
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 80.
- 45.
On the animal-like representations of the feminine, Gatens warns: “In our relatively recent history, the strategies for silencing those who have dared to speak in another voice, of another reason and another ethic, are instructive. Here I will mention two strategies that seem to be dominant in the history of feminist interventions. The first is to “animalize” the speaker, the second, to reduce her to her “sex.” Women who step outside their allotted place in the body politic are frequently abused with terms like: harpy, virago, vixen, bitch, shrew; terms that make it clear that if she attempts to speak from the political body, about the political body, her speech is not recognized as human speech.” Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 24–25.
- 46.
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 60.
- 47.
Athena Athanasiou, “Reflections on the Politics of Mourning: Feminist Ethics and Politics in the Age of Empire,” Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories 5, (2001): 51.
- 48.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.
- 49.
Jacobs, “Dusting Antigone,” 901, footnote.
- 50.
Relevant here are Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s formulations on the sublime and Ancient Greek tragedy: “The sublime is probably … the generalization to the whole of art of the Greek (Aristotelian) conception of tragedy. This is grounded in a schema of contradiction and in a logic one could qualify as oxymoronic. I refer to the double tragic stage, or the division of the tragic stage into stage and ‘orchestra’ (two irreconcilable spaces), and also to the tragic conflict, the contradiction which inhabits the tragic hero (the oxymoron par excellence being that of Oedipus, both guilty and innocent), and thirdly to the double tragic effect—itself contradictory—of pity and terror, to use Aristotle’s terms, i.e. of pleasure and unpleasure. Finally, I refer to the properly modern idea that in the tragic there occurs for the first time (and I’ll use Lyotard’s formulation) the ‘presentation that there is (the) ‘unpresentable’. This is what Hölderlin was trying to get at when he said that God is present in tragedy in the figure of death.” Lacoue-Labarthe, “On the Sublime,” 13.
- 51.
Tina Chanter’s chapter in the volume.
- 52.
Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 180.
- 53.
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 151.
- 54.
See Bernstein, The Fate of Art, and Derrida, The Truth in Painting.
- 55.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 210.
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Tzelepis, E. (2022). Antigone’s Dissidence: Bringing Hegelian Dialectics and the Kantian Sublime to the Limit. In: Lettow, S., Pulkkinen, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13123-3_14
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