Reading Antigone

1. Externalities: the text as artefact
a. Sophocles: 100+ plays, 6 extant
i. Our earliest MSS 1500 years after Sophocles wrote (10th-c.)
b. The dates of the Antigone
i. 442 or 441 BCE
c. The transmission of the text: a myth
i. Story of Oedipus and his children was told in Homer, and in a number of epic and lyric poems: well-known, oral tradition
ii. Before Sophocles, Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes tells the story of Eteocles (Thebes) and Polyneices (with Argos) in battle
iii. After Sophocles, Euripides’ non-extant Antigone (431 BCE) probably had Dionysus as deux ex machina to rescue the heroine

2. Internalities: the text as such
a. Textuality
i. Poetry versus prose
1. E.g., choral ode to Man (pp. 76-77)
a. Deinon
b. Description of CULTURE: triumph over nature
i. Second choral ode (pp. 91-92) is a kind of reversal, it is homage to the gods, Zeus’ law prevails
ii. Third choral ode (p. 101) to love, eros: a god
2. Sentry’s speech (p. 70)
ii. Argumentation
1. Haemon’s early speech (p. 95)
2. Antigone’s reasoning (p. 82)
iii. Performance piece: it is a play
iv. The role of the Chorus: everyman, moral majority
1. They side with Creon almost throughout
2. They never admit Antigone ought to be crowned with gold (as Haemon says) : even toward the end, they mock Antigone, saying her “own blind will, [her] passion has destroyed [her]” (p. 104)
b. Thematics
i. Politics
1. Creon’s argument
a. City and order is truer than blood (pp. 67-68)
b. King’s will is the rule of law
c. Thebes cannot tell him how to rule (p. 97) : king does not represent : tyranny
d. Thebes must obey, whether the king is right or wrong : justice and truth are secondary to power
ii. Law
1. The “force” or violence of law; arbitrariness
a. A “state of exception” or “state of emergency” (Karl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben) : martial law, a suspension of the law to preserve the law (e.g., Canada’s “notwithstanding clause”) : a “constitutive outside” of the law, founded on violence and power
i. Sovereignty
ii. Sovereign is he who decides the exception, decides when the law does and does not apply
iii. Sovereign is outside the law, IS the law, is the one to whom the law does not apply
b. Creon is a leader for today, e.g., Bush, “I am the decider”
c. Antigone shows that only the dead are outside the law : and she constantly places herself there, “I am already dead,” “wedded to death,” etc. : prerogative of the gods
2. Antigone is “a law to herself”
iii. Kinship
1. Antigone
a. Incest (an outrage sacred to the gods, p. 63);
b. Substitutability (p. 105) : “For this law alone” (p. 106)
i. Antigone fancies herself to be divine, though? “But think of Niobe…” (p. 102)
2. Creon
a. Man’s role to have sons (p. 93)
b. Conflates kinship and the state (p. 94)
iv. Religion
1. Antigone
a. Reverence for gods? And “unshakeable traditions” (p. 82)?
b. Or for kinship?
2. Creon
a. Secularism (p. 73)
b. Disdain for gods’ laws
c. After denouement, “it’s best to keep the established laws to the very day we die” (p. 117)
v. Gender
1. Greek fear of women
2. Sophrosyne: temperance, continence, men not leaky but women are leaky in all kinds of ways
vi. Etc.

3. Internal-External (dialectic)
a. The Greek context
i. Culture of superstition
ii. “Truth” is not epistemic (modern verifiability), but cosmic, based on swearing of oaths, etc.
iii. Gods have commerce with humans, have emotions, etc.
iv. Words—power of the logos—are not merely descriptive; they are magic,
1. They “bring to birth” (p. 120)
2. Chorus says Antigone was “cut down” “by a senseless word”
b. The reception of the play through the ages
i. Political contexts
c. How is this play “cultural”?
i. Draws on myth, oral tradition
ii. It is a cultural commentary (Sophocles’) on (2(b))—thematics above
iii. It “produces” or perpetuates culture: binding us together, telling our story
iv. It has a flexibility, a relevance over time across cultures (structuralism), ironically enough by telling a poststructuralist lesson
v. From Week 1’s themes:
1. Informs psychoanalysis: the unconscious, fates = Ucs.
2. Thus, knowing this story is the condition for certain pieces of cultural knowledge
3. Epistemic conditions? Not so much
4. Ontological conditions? Yes: man is deinon (choral ode): I do not have my culture, it has me, despite myself, despite all that I do
a. Deinon = uncanny, terrible, frightful, unheimlich (Freud and Heidegger, “not-being-at-home”)
b. (p. 108), chorus again, “The power of FATE is deinon, / dark, terrible deinon”
5. Culture vs. Nature
6. Culture (human) vs. Nature (the gods), i.e., positive law vs. natural law
7. Politics (human) vs. Nature
8. Universality vs. particularity
a. Cultural relativism
b. Historical relativism
c. Moral relativism
d. Multiculturalism
e. Structuralism vs. poststructuralism
9. Is it about minority culture vs. mass civilization?
10. Culture as meaning-making, as the power to make meaning, to instate law, order, justice, truth