Whose Antigone?: The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery

279 Pages·2011·3.04 MB·English

by  Tina Chanter

PHILOSOPHY
In this groundbreaking book, Tina Chanter challenges the philo-
sophical and psychoanalytic reception of Sophocles’ Antigone, which C
has largely ignored the issue of slavery. Drawing on textual and h
contextual evidence, including historical sources, she argues that a Whose Antigone?
slavery is a structuring theme of the Oedipal cycle, but one that has n
been written out of the record. T
e
r The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery
Chanter focuses in particular on two appropriations of Antigone:

The Island, set in apartheid South Africa, and Tègònni, set in

nineteenth-century Nigeria. Both plays are inspired by the figure of
Antigone, and yet they rework her significance in important ways
that require us to return to Sophocles’ “original” play and attend to W
some of the motifs that have been marginalized. Chanter explores
h
the complex set of relations that define citizens as opposed to non-
o
citizens, free men versus slaves, men versus women, and Greeks
s
versus barbarians. Whose Antigone? moves beyond the narrow con-
e
fines critics have inherited from German idealism to reinvigorate
A
debates over the meaning and significance of Antigone, situating it T i n a C h a n T e r
n
within a wider argument that establishes the salience of slavery as a
t
structuring theme. i
g
o
“Readers will learn a great deal from this beautiful, impassioned,
n
and erudite book.” —Mary Beth Mader, author of Sleights of Reason:
e
Norm, Bisexuality, Development ?
Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She
is the author of The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of
Difference; Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy; Time, Death, and the
Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger; and Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting
of the Philosophers. She is also the coeditor (with Pleshette DeArmitt)
of Sarah Kofman’s Corpus and (with Ewa Płonowska Ziarek) of Revolt,
Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, both also
published by SUNY Press, and the editor of Feminist Interpretations of
Emmanuel Levinas.
State UniverSity of new york PreSS
www.sunypress.edu
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Whose Antigone?
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Whose Antigone?
The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery
TINA CHANTER
Cover art: (L to R) Kamal Angelo Bolden and La Shawn Banks in Remy Bumppo Theatre
Company’s production of The Island. Photo by Johnny Knight.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without writ-
ten permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in
any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris
Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chanter, Tina, 1960–
Whose Antigone? : the tragic marginalization of slavery / Tina Chanter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3755-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3754-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sophocles. Antigone. 2. Slavery in literature. 3. Antigone (Greek mythology) in
literature. 4. Feminism in literature. I. Title.
PA4413.A7C47 2011
882'.01—dc22 2010041946
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xxxix
List of Abbreviated Titles xli
1 Introduction: The Shadowy Others of Antigone’s Legacy 1
2 Antigone’s Liminality: Hegel’s Racial Purification of Tragedy
and the Naturalization of Slavery 29
Hegel’s Prohibition of Slavery as a Tragic Topic 31
Sculpting Antigone’s Ethics from the Gods of “Nature” 38
The Simplicity, Solidity, and Plasticity of Tragic Heroes in a
Pre-Legal Era 45
Art Must Be Purer than Life 48
3 The Performative Politics and Rebirth of Antigone in
Ancient Greece and Modern South Africa: The Island 57
TheIncessantRenaissance of Antigone 57
Performative and Political Reflections on Greek Tragedy 61
Intervening in Fetishistic Readings of Antigone 66
Antigone’s “False Titties”: The Island 74
ConcludingRemarks 83
4 Exempting Antigone from Ancient Greece: Multiplying and
Racializing Genealogies in Tègònni: An African Antigone 87
Butler and Mader: Making Polynices Only a Brother 91
Citizens, Substitutes, and Slaves 102
A Story to Pass On? Antigone’s Mythological African Sister, Tègònni 106
vi Contents
5 Agamben, Antigone, Irigaray: The Fetishistic Ruses of Sovereignty
in Contemporary Politics 119
6 Concluding Reflections: What If Oedipus or Polynices Had
Been Slaves? 133
Synopses of The Island and Tègònni 147
Notes 151
Bibliography 199
Index 207
Preface
The figure of Oedipus has been read by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and
their followers as an inaugural myth, originating a psychic complex that has
come to be foundational for Western thought. Oedipus is the one who knows,
but whose knowledge fails him, the solver of riddles, one for whom his own
identity presents an irresolvable enigma, the stranger and the one who is too
close—the one who is blinded to the very proximity of his own blood kin.
Oedipus commits incest and murders his father. One of the major tasks of this
book is to reread Sophocles’ Oedipal cycle, challenging some of the fundamental
tenets that have come to specify its founding role in literature, philosophy, and
psychoanalytic thinking.
If feminist theorists have reoriented readings of the Oedipal cycle in
significant ways, not least by focusing their interpretations on Antigone rather
than Oedipus, in other ways some of the most influential readings retain an
important continuity with G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s admiration for the heroes of
Greek tragedy—and Antigone enjoys pride of place amongst them—is mediated
both by his attempt to contain the threat that emergent feminism presents in
his age and by his insistent aversion to interrogating both the limitations of the
emerging democracy of Athens and the colonial commitments of his own age.
To the extent that Hegel’s critics reiterate this aversion in their rehabilitation
of Antigone, they too fail to acknowledge the paradox that the literary heroes
of the Western tradition emerged from an Athenian culture that required the
exclusion of certain members from its polity, even while depending on their labor
as a necessary prerequisite for the freedoms afforded those granted full political
rights. The dependence of male members of the aristocracy—including tragic
poets such as Sophocles—upon certain individuals (foremost among them slaves
and women) who were deprived of basic political freedoms, even as they catered
to the necessities of life for those who enjoyed such freedoms, is a founding
paradox that was constitutive of life in fifth century BCE Athens. One of the
ways in which this paradox expressed itself was in the performative constraints
it imposed upon the theatrical productions of Greek tragedy, in which female
characters such as Antigone would have been played by male actors.
vii
viii Preface
If the significance of these performative constraints has not always been
taken seriously, there is a sense in which other gendered dimensions of Antigone
have taken on such a dominant role in interpretations of the play that they
have been allowed to eclipse equally pressing dynamics that demand attention.
The focal point of my argument concerns the need to expand the debate over
the significance of Antigone’s challenge to Creon beyond the concerns of fam-
ily, kinship, and gender, themes that have come to dominate the post-Hegelian
critical literature. Or rather, the point is to construe family and kinship in a way
that is not restricted to, or does not privilege, gender as an isolated category.
This entails challenging Hegel’s crucial intervention, which has served as the
inspiration for a number of decisive critical interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone,
including those of Jacques Derrida, Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler.
In the wake of Hegel’s own understanding of the play in terms of a conflict
between the ethical demands of the family on the one hand and the state on
the other, Butler frames her important discussion of Antigone as a response both
toHegel and Lacan. She succeeds in establishing the heteronormative biases not
only of Hegel and Lacan, but also of more recent feminist critiques of German
idealist and psychoanalytic readings of Antigone. Yet even as Butler and Lacan
question and recast in different ways the basic dichotomy within which Hegel
approaches Antigone, that of family and state, precisely to the extent that they
resituate this opposition, there is a sense in which they reinscribe its centrality.
This book contends that there is another discourse in which the Oedipal
cycle is implicated, one that has been overlooked, in part due to the colonial
commitments of the tradition of German idealism that has been so dominant
in setting the terms for the interpretation of Greek tragedy. This discourse is
one in which definitions of citizenship, political rights, foreigners, slavery, and
enemies figure writ large. It is a discourse reflective of an Athenian culture,
supported by a fledgling but limited democracy, which is trying to assert its
dominance in the face of its enemies.
By broadening the purview of questions beyond that of family and kin-
ship, or rather by challenging the restrictive terms according to which these
concepts have been understood, I ask how these themes have been developed in
a particular direction that might have obscured or downplayed other concerns
at stake both in Sophocles’ Antigone, and in the theoretical, interpretive tradi-
tion to which the Oedipal cycle has given rise. These concerns will prove to be
entangled with the questions of kinship and gender that have taken precedence
in recent debates, but taking them seriously will also require a reconfiguration
not only of these contemporary questions but also of standard interpretations
of Antigone as a tragedy. At issue then is to refrain from imposing modern,
Western, identity categories such as “race,” “gender,” or “class” onto a context
that preceded the reification of such categories, where issues of kinship, marriage,
exchange, slavery, citizenship, foreignness, and so on, were not carved up into