The performative politics and rebirth of Antigone in ancient Greece and modern South Africa

Feminist Readings of Antigone

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 83-98

  Chanter, Tina ^a  

^a DEPAUL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84871396525     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (35)

1. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959);
2. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book VII, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Routledge, 1992);
3. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
4. J. Peter Euben, introduction to Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
5. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985);
6. Warren J. Lane and Ann M. Lane, "The Politics of Antigone", in Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 162-182;
7. Mary Beth Mader, "Antigone's Line", Bulletin de la société Américaine de philosophie de langue Française, vol. 14, no. 2(2005), pp. 18-40;
8. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003);
9. Slavoj Žižek, "From Antigone to Joan of Arc", Helios, vol. 31, no. 1-2(2004), pp. 51-62.
10. Freud attributes a lack to women, based on their failure to live up to the expectation that women, like men, have penises, a mythical castration that provokes castration anxiety. Fetishism is a defense against the threat that women thereby represent. Symbolically, the role of the fetish is always and only to represent a penis that never existed. Or rather, it only ever exists as conforming to the expectation fostered in the masculine imaginary that organizes Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely that women should have a penis. The fetish is produced in an attempt to ward off the threat that this difference presents and to rein in its significance not by canceling it out, but by allowing it to coexist: I know that women are castrated, but by producing a fetish I can deny it. See Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism", in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 152-159.
11. J. Peter Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, p. 37;
12. David M. Halperin, "Why Is Diotima a Woman? Platonic Eros and the Figuration of Gender", in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 257-308.
13. Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, "The Island", in Statements: Two Workshop Productions. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, and The Island; and a New Play, Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1986), pp. 45-77.
14. Kirk Ormond, "Oedipus the Queen: Cross-Gendering without Drag", Theatre Journal, no. 55(2003), pp. 1-28.
15. Mader sets out to explain Antigone's enigmatic claim that "she would not have deliberately violated Creon's command, would not have intentionally broken his law or edict, had this edict barred her from burying a child or a husband of hers" (Mader, "Antigone's Line", p. 18). By emphasizing that Antigone's claim relates not to all brothers, but to Polyneices, the son of an incestuous union, Mader shows that commentators go astray when they fail to understand Antigone's claim to relate to this very specific case. Here is the principle according to which Antigone acts, as Mader sees it: "she is establishing (or attempting to establish) her brother as only her brother by symbolically refusing a family precedent, namely that of generating one's own sibling" (28). The law according to which Antigone acts, in Mader's view, is "recognize your parents as they who can generate those who you can, though must not, generate. The crucial causal corollary is: it is precisely by this recognition that such beings as parents, children, and siblings are made as such in this particular kinship order" (35).
16. Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 87.
17. Lacan acknowledges that the symbolic position of the father might, in principle, be filled by anyone. Yet Butler insists on asking whether it makes a difference who fills this position. If two gay parents perform the function of parenting, for example, that function does not remain the same. These positions do not function as neutral categories, empty of any content, but rather tend to carry with them implicit, normative features (see Butler, Antigone's Claim, pp. 69-71). Whatever sense of universality the symbolic claims for itself, if its universality is used to shore up its own authority as unassailable and intractable, it appears to remain immune from any changes in actual social relations. "If the Oedipus complex is not universal in one way, but remains in another, does it finally matter which way it is universal if the effect is the same?" (45).
18. That recognition is something that must occur between two humans, rather than something that can proceed from inanimate objects, is one of the lessons of the master-slave dialectic. Markell's discussion of the master-slave relationship in this regard is illuminating. See Markell, Bound by Recognition. The importance of this dialectic for Lacan is well established.
19. A play such as Fémi Òsófisan's Tègò nni: An African Antigone (Ibadan, Nigeria: Kenbim Press, 1999) treats racial taboos against miscegenation explicitly.
20. Fugard et al., "The Island", p. 65. Hereafter references to this text are given parenthetically within the text.
21. Hodoshe, a Xhosa word meaning carrion-fly, was the nickname of the prison guard-a name that has peculiar resonance for Sophocles' Antigone, in which the corpse of Polyneices was exposed to the birds. The guard, then, hovered over his prisoners, who endured a living death, and whose incarceration refigured Antigone's premature entombment by Creon in an underground cave. The guard in question was renowned for his attempt to break the spirits of the prisoners on Robben Island.
22. Errol Durbach, "Sophocles in South Africa: Athol Fugard's The Island", in Drama and the Classical Heritage: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Davidson, Rand Johnson, and John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, 1993), p. 248.
23. Olga Taxidou suggests that Oedipus internalizes the Sphinx and is thereby feminized in Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 47, 54, 69.
24. Athol Fugard, "Antigone in Africa", in Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 134.
25. Òsófisan, Tègònni.
26. Timothy J. Reiss, Tragedy and Truth: Studies in the Development of a Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 2-3.
27. Jean Anouilh, Antigone: A Tragedy by Jean Anouilh, trans. Lewis Galantière (London: Methuen, 1951);
28. Bertolt Brecht, Sophocles' Antigone, trans. Judith Malina (New York: Applause Theatre, 1990);
29. Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004);
30. Aidan Mathews, Antigone: Gone Anti (unpublished manuscript, undated, courtesy of the author);
31. Marianne McDonald, Antigone by Sophocles (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005);
32. Tom Paulin, The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone (London: Faber and Faber, 1985);
33. Brendan Kennelly, Sophocles' Antigone (Tarset, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 1996);
34. Janusz Glowacki, Antigone in New York, trans. Janusz Glowacki and Joan Torres (New York: Samuel French, 1997)
35. Fémi Òsófisan, Tègònni: An African Antigone (Ibadan, Nigeria: Kenbim Press, 1999). (Ed. note: For further examples of the resurrection of Antigone around the world, see Moira Fradinger's prologue in this volume.)