Review of Antigone in Postmodern Criticism (original) (raw)

Antigone: Other, a Subject by Camilla Howalt

2012

First a curiosity, then an obsession and later a deep lingering passion, my starting point for this exploration into Antigone, is to think of her as not only a fictive character in a play, partly reflecting the state of her times, but as a real-time historical projection by not only Sophocles but various people throughout history from the very early moment of her conception in Greek antiquity. A projection created and produced first by Sophocles, then reanalysed by Hoelderlin, Sclegel, and Hegel, then by Kierkegaard and subsequently by a large number of authors in the 20th century including Kristeva. At various levels throughout history, she seems to captivate our imagination, and thus reflect the times in which our thoughts are produced, both at a communal level but also, at an individual level. Antigone, a fictive character, who as an initial projection by another human being, can be viewed in all its complexity and ambivalence as a product reflecting the state of its creator’s conscious and unconscious thinking. Yet, as a person she can also be viewed as an idea of a woman reflecting her times as imagined by her author. Last, she can also be viewed through her projective state, aspects within her author’s life, if viewed as an expression of unconscious states of affect. To understand the importance of this, and what seems to be a deep severe cut between internality and externality, I thought of her in her projective form perhaps capable of bringing consciousness and perhaps bridging to the opposites between ancient/ modern, outer/ inner, society/ family, social/ individual, male/ female, death/ life, hate/ love without subsuming the object under the subject. Through the structure of fragment, I have put together six parts, each part tackling an area of the non-linear, cyclical process expressing the experience of projection from enmeshment through to its differentiation within the person projecting. The first part is thinking about the value inherent in the contemplation of the dead, perhaps leading affectively to a kind of volunteer death. In this case a performative contemplation of a reified or stagnated thought. Antigone has, as a projection through thought, become reified thinking of thought in that she is destined to death from the moment she enters the stage. At the time of Sophocles, with the centre of reality being grounded in externally provisioned laws, it might be a natural course of events that Antigone’s actions should lead to her death. However, in Kierkegaard’s time’s and in our time, having been provided with the structure of resurrection and later psychoanalysis as structures of rebirth, I wondered why Antigone should still have to die in her existence as a projection. I also wondered, what the consequences on the author’s material life would be, should his projected creation be enabled to choose life despite the difficulties she, in her projected form [and he in his projecting form], are facing with regards to the secret of her family, her inherent silence regarding sharing this, and last, her pride in falling honourably and her fear of falling symbolically [symbolic death], that the actual suicide seem to prevent her from contemplating. Who is Antigone if enabled a choice that would lead her life through death and back into life rather than the finality of death she seems condemned to? Is she, as her name implies a person who is not finally gone, but who is opposed to be gone, meaning she is still here despite having supposedly died – lingering like a ghost to be given the chance at choosing life? And is she, as Kristeva implies in the etymology of ‘anti,’ someone who ‘in the place of,’ is a sign or a symbol for something else - a path yet to be known? It is this path I have tried to explore.

Antigone’s (mis)appropriations in Twentieth-Century Europe: Memory, Politics and Resistance

CALÍOPE Presença Clássica, 2017

In this paper, I will offer a historicised reading of Antigone’s conceptualisation as a political play by analysing its reception in twentieth-century Europe. I will focus in particular on Friedrich Hölderlin’s adaptation (1804), which is one of the very earliest postRevolutionary witnesses to the political understanding of the play: it is particularly interesting because it provides a context for Bertolt Brecht’s and other twentieth-century adaptations of the myth and it represents a crucial step towards the current interpretative model in which Antigone is an icon of radical dissent and resistance. Appropriated both by the Nazi regime and by factions of the Resistance, Hölderlin’s Antigone was exploited as a political, subversive document or as representative of a nationalistic classical tradition. This account of the political reception of Sophocles’ Antigone in the twentieth century will contribute to shed light on the ideological climate which produced such a high number of adaptations of the ancient play, as well as on the reasons for its pertinence to twentieth-century temporal-political conditions