Whose Antigone? , livre ebook

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
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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
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.
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 family, 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 to Hegel 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 kinship, 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 tradition 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 the discrete categories that contemporary discourse tends to impose on them. Building on, but also challenging, the readings of Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray and Butler, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and others, while at the same time problematizing some of the philosophical and psychoanalytic assumptions and blind spots of the tradition in which these readings are ensconced, my effort will be both to situate the Oedipal cycle in relation to the historical and social context out of which it arises, and to show where and how that context informs the text in ways that have been neglected and underplayed. This will be a question of sifting through the available evidence concerning the legal, ethical, and political context, at the same time as interrogating why certain aspects of this context have been played down by the dominant, European, theoretical reception of Sophocles' plays, while others have come to dictate the terms of its reception. A European, colonialist framework continues to drive Western, philosophically and psychoanalytically inspired readings of the Oedipal cycle, invested in retaining the invisibility of the founding paradox upon which I suggest a good number of post-Hegelian interpretations are premised.
During the period in which Sophocles wrote the Oedipal cycle, attempts to draw up legal definitions about who was entitled to marry whom were intimately bound up not only with demarcating the concept of strangers from that of Athenian citizens, but also with the determination of who should be a citizen and who should not, and with who should be a slave and who should be free. The exchange of women within a group of men, the boundaries of which were newly circumscribed, had everything to do with the circulation and containment of wealth, and with attempts to ensure the political and military prominence of Athens. Questions of mastery over self, others, the body, and the body politic were intricately bound up with one another, and the desire for freemen to maintain mastery over the self was formulated in tension with the desire not to be construed at any cost or in any way as slavish. 1 A constellation of factors were related to one another in complex ways, including controlling the movements of women across geographical boundaries, monitoring the circumstances under which Athenian women gave birth, establishing the legitimacy of male citizens and the identity of slaves, and overseeing the inheritance of wealth.
A complex nexus of historical forces, including a recent shift in marriage practices—away from exogamy and toward endogamy—its legal corroboration, and its implications for foreigners and slavery, constitutes the background against which Sophocles conceives of the Oedipal cycle. This background can be read as informing Sophocles' exploration of the implications of Oedipus's incestuous marriage to Jocasta, his self-imposed exile, Antigone's rejection of Haemon as a potential husband, and her insistence