Abstract
This article takes the opportunity, occasioned by the publication of Bonnie Honig’s profound meditations on the figure of Antigone, to dwell on the implications of the many interpretations of this ancient Greek character in modern and postmodern theory. From Hegel to Honig, we have seen a wide variety of readings of this crucial and excruciated girl, this virgin, this hero, the emblematic female, embodying family for Hegel (Phenomenology, Aesthetics), pure desire for Lacan (1997), queerness for Judith Butler (2002). This article will focus on what is lost when we read Greek tragedy for “character,” for the individual who speaks–as a character. Are we retrojecting a Cartesian selfhood, a possessive individualism, a “humanism”? The article goes back to an older philological text, R.F. Goheen’s The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone (1950), implicates this reading with Nicole Loraux’s observations on voices in mourning (1999), Anne Carson’s new translation of the play (2012), and thinks about the ways in which tragedy is a web of words, a rhizome.
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Notes
I’ve resisted the temptation to change this text, in the name of a countervailing desire to preserve the tone of the event itself at the APA’s annual meeting in 2014.
P. duBois, “Slaves in the Tragic City,” in Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks, Cambridge, MA, 2010, 72–90; see also “Topplng the Hero: Polyphony in the Tragic City,” New Literary History 35 (2004), 63–81.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War Books I and II, trans. C.F. Smith, Cambridge, MA [Loeb Classical Library], 1969, vol. 1.
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, The Lectures of 1827, ed. P. C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, (with the assistance of H. S. Harris, Berkeley, 1988).
C. P. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1962).
See Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010 [2008]).
Florence Dupont, Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 12 (translations mine).
Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 311.
Translated as Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. Elizabeth T. Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
P. duBois, “Antigone and the Feminist Critic,” Genre 19 (1986) special issue “Literature as Women’s History”, ed. Nancy Armstrong, 371–383, passage referred to p. 376.
Ibid., pp. 380–381.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London and New York: Penguin, 2004), 99.
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [1995]).
Robert F. Goheen, The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone: A Study of Poetic Language and Structure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 50.
Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54.
Sophokles, Antigonick, trans. Anne Carson, New York, 2012), n.p.
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duBois, P. The Death of the Character. Int class trad 21, 301–308 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-014-0353-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-014-0353-z