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Article Excerpt
All this is very different from the usual presentation of the play as a Hegelian or post- or pseudo-Hegelian clash of ideas: family vs. state, religion vs. secularism, and the like. Ideas do clash in the play, but they are as near or far from the center of the action as ideas generally are in real life. Sophokles' conception, that the clash is basically a matter of gods and blood, is closer to reality as he knew it and we know it.
--Gerald Else (2)
I. By Way of an Introduction
Despite the startling in medias res with which Antigone pulls us into her act and into this act of literature that goes by her name--the tragedy Antigone--she is hardly an immediately approachable figure. To approach her from our present moment proves multiply difficult: it requires not only our attunement to a way of thinking and of being that manifests itself only obliquely to us (let us call it the Sophoclean, or even Attic way), but also our engagement with the many other Antigones she has engendered. For even though this young girl of the myth died unwed and childless, and even though her very name means antigeneration, she has reproduced herself in various guises throughout centuries of literary, critical, and philosophical production.
My own remarks here were formed, at least on a preliminary level, as responses to a recent Antigone, that of Judith Butler. This means that, instead of attempting a systematic commentary on Butler's reading, or of accounting comprehensively for Butler's reasons behind such a reading--which is itself rather deliberately not a close reading of Sophocles, even though it includes several painstaking and insightful analyses of the play' s rhetoric (3)--my essay takes only certain cues from her work, cues that prompt my own turn to Sophocles' text. In other words, just as the Sophoclean Antigone served for Butler as a springboard for questions that exceed the scope of Sophocles (and they exceed it not in the sense of existing outside Sophocles' horizon, but rather in the sense that Sophocles may--for essential reasons--have kept a certain reserve from them), so Butler's text offered me a similar springboard to reread Antigone as a guidepost toward a modern problematic. I would provisionally identify this problematic with the consequences of a profoundly untragic vein that runs at the heart of what we call "contemporary theory," whether it is allied to cultural studies, literary-critical, or even ethico-juridical philosophical approaches such as Butler's.
Beyond even some particular thematic oversights, Butler's reading of the play as a critique of law's exclusion of the non-normative family implies a larger theoretical assumption according to which theory can isolate specific problems, identify their social determinations (let us note that in her case at least the determinations are invariably sociocultural), and thereupon undertake the project of improving the world. Despite its good intentions, the optimism of Butler's social voluntarism is not without problems. In fact, the least of these problems may appear to be her literary, or thematic misreadings of the play, since Butler--after all--is interested not in a philological exercise, but in the philosophical implications of the play's treatment of kinship. However, such specific misreadings and omissions, particularly when involving the function of law in this tragedy, point to a larger issue: they illustrate this contemporary theoretical failure to understand tragic logic in general--namely, the logic of the irrational par excellence, the logic that exists beyond justification, and in which "bad things happen to good people," so to speak. Still, despite its obvious unfairness and callous arbitrariness, which proves off-putting to our modern sensibility, this ancient logic allows for more profound differences among human beings than social construction does; this, even when social construction, like much of contemporary theory, claims difference as one of its central concepts. Tragic logic highlights human beings' singularity in the unique way each one responds to unexpected adversity. Thus, while I understand the democratic spirit of social construction when it comes to addressing the civic nature of things, I submit that tragedy offers the site where the hard question of what exceeds civic--and hence, human--determination is at stake. In the precinct of the tragic, we cannot claim that all relations--blood commitments, commitments of love, cries of betrayal, and so forth--can or should be leveled out.
In distinguishing the inevitable and transcendent law of ate qua mortal fate from that of immanent, juridical Right, I thus attempt to show the ontological priority of tragedy's law. Subsequently, I turn to the notions of blood and incest because they both introduce the question of nature [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which the theory of social construction elides, but which remains germane to tragedy for important reasons: beyond any simple determinism, nature is the field of accidents and contingencies, and as such, it presents us with the limits of human capacity to explain, control, or improve the world around it. Before Heidegger's devastating assessment of humanism that has resulted in the so-called antihumanist trend of modern continental philosophy, (4) it is in tragedy that this antihumanist impulse finds its earliest instantiation: in tragedy, the human subject is not at the center of the world above all other beings, but rather exists as the site of strife between opposing forces that exceed it. It is with this understanding in mind that I develop my reading of Butler and Sophocles.
Of course, what the tragic means outside its restrictive definition as a poetic genre, or its trivialized usage for any unfortunate event, and why the forgetting of this tragic dimension of the human may merit further consideration, are the larger questions behind my reading, but for obvious reasons cannot be exhausted by such reading. Instead, my remarks on Antigone aim at sketching the outer parameters within which such questions can be broached. It is in this sense then that I consider the play a guidepost to my inquiry, for rather than simply illustrating prior theoretical questions through its content (questions concerning the tragic or untragic consciousness, questions concerning law, kinship, obligation, the state, and so on), the play--and particularly its heroine--stipulate in advance for us the very language from which these questions can emerge.
II. Eureka! Eureka!
Butler begins by admitting to the play's long critical reception, the discontents of which led her to take Antigone up once again in what will presumably be a new and different way. This is not an unlikely beginning to the study of an enduring text; quite the contrary. In his preface to The Madness of Antigone, Gerald Else also acknowledges the "vast literature" on Antigone (8), but sidesteps extensive documentation in favor of a narrow focus on textual details, so as "to bring forward a number of aspects and bits of evidence which have been overlooked, to the detriment ... of our understanding of the play and its heroine" (7). In another example, George Steiner opens his comparative motif-study Antigones with a triply framed quotation, thus underlining the oblique path through which we may approach the play. Steiner cites Montaigne's implicit reference to Plato's description of the rhapsode in the Ion: "We are 'only the interpreters of interpretations,'" he writes (Steiner 1), suggesting the distance and necessary mediation that separate us from Sophocles' original.
However, regardless of admitting to its exhaustive citation, critics, philosophers, and perhaps ordinary readers (5) alike are drawn toward this work in an original manner (6)--not only in hoping to find something new and distinct from the previous analyses, but most importantly, in being drawn above all to Antigone herself, to encountering her directly and for the first time as it were--despite the burdensome and even obfuscating interpretive tradition. Else underlines Antigone's force of attraction by comparing her to "a tidal wave of energy which cannot be stemmed," adding that she claims "the lion's share of our attention" (80). Jacques Lacan too saw this exclusive attention she commands and spoke of it in terms of fascination (252), a fascination that draws us toward the bare minimum of what makes her be, the bottom ground--which is also to say, it draws us toward the very beginning, the abyss itself: who is she really, and what does she stand for?
Each time, a reading begins more or less guided by these two questions (and significantly in this sequence, as we will see), and each time, the heroine seems to demand originality and daring from her readers. Thus, even though her distance and reserve are essential aspects of her grandeur, they are simultaneously markers of an invitation, of a waiting for an approaching of some kind. That somewhere between the tragic and the ironic this originary invitation is often missed--as it is welcomed--owes to the very slippage in the sequence of the two questions we just have posed to her: "Who is she?" seamlessly recedes during the interpretive process behind the question "What does she stand for?" Slipping from being to meaning, from presencing to representation, the reader forgets Antigone, who nonetheless remains next to him/her, and falls instead into the interpretive vortex of reducing her to some sort of political representative. Antigone is (but also is not) what she represents. The interpretive mode of reading forgets the negative copula in all its resonances, even in the most emphatic sense that from the beginning of the play Antigone's being is given over to death: she is she who is (about) to be not. Through her shines Being not as an entity, but as that abyssal force, that originary nothingness from which entities proceed and take their essence. (7) It is in this sense of a primordial not-being that we should be hearing her proper name--the one who does not generate. Antigone: the name of the nameless, of the one who dies for blood relations by also standing against mere physical existence and biological procreation.
Butler's recent effort at rereading this tragedy is largely in keeping with this desire for an original encounter, which often translates into a critical assessment of previous analyses. Indeed, Antigone's Claim begins by distancing itself from the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and hitherto feminist tradition of reading Antigone, on the grounds that they all reduce Antigone to the question of representation. However, in evoking legal rhetoric from its very title, Antigone's Claim is already situated within a long tradition of interpretation that has established this play as the quintessential example of law and literature, at least since Hegel. Even though Butler's critique of the law and the political implications she draws from this critique problematize this tradition, her analysis encases and even reproduces the principal argument she critiques, namely, Antigone's representativeness.
I will be returning to this remark in more detail in the following section of the essay, but it deserves a brief explanation for the time being, since it does counter Butler's explicit intents. Wishing to distance herself from the history of representative readings, which rely on the mimetic fallacy that a fictional character like Antigone can be a "real" representative of something, Butler writes: "Indeed, it is not just that, as a fiction, the mimetic or representative character of Antigone is already put in question but that, as a figure for politics, she points somewhere else,...
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