Antigone Lecture Two
Week One
Spring 2009
I. Burial and funeral practices:
What women do in ancient
Greek society: give birth and mourn the dead.
Tale of another unburied
body: The Iliad
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20734/20734-h/images/fig143th.png)
Antigone:
“But if I had
allowed /My own mother’s son to rot, an unburied corpse—
That would have
been an agony.” (ll.520-22)
She cites
“unwritten laws” as her authority for defying Creon:
“Nor did I think
your edict had such force/that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods,/the
great unwritten unshakeable traditions./They are alive, not just today or
yesterday/they live forever, from the first of time,/and no one knows when they
first saw the light”. (ll. 503-508)
Is this an
ancient superstition or do we still adhere to specific burial prescriptions as
ways of honoring the dead and ensuring their rest?
II. Sophocles’ Antigone has inspired many other Antigones,
many readings and many versions: a cluster of Antigones
around WWII and the Nazis
Remember
HEGEL? Link
(http://www.wpclipart.com/famous/philosophy/Georg_Hegel.png)
Dialectical
thinking: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis
Aufhebung
= canceling, preservation and lifting up
out of
oppositions come syntheses and enlightenment/progress
Lectures on
Aesthetics (1832),
Philosophy of Right (1821), Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
George Steiner
describes Hegel’s understanding from the Phenomenonology:
The rites of burial, with their
literal re-enclosure of the dead in the place of the earth and in the
shadow-sequence of generations which are the foundation of the familial, are
the particular task of a woman. Where this task falls upon a sister, where a
man has neither mother nor wife to bring him home to the guardian earth, burial
takes on the highest degree of holiness.
George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone
Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1984) 34.
Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion (1832)
First Hegel
endorses Antigone and determines that, as a woman,
her sphere is that of the family, inner feelings, the sacred. But then he adds:
“Creon
is not a tyrant, but rather a moral power; Creon is
not wrong. He insists that the law of the state, the authority of government be
respected and that offenses against the state be punished. Each of these sides
realizes only one of the moral forces and has only that as its content; that is
one-sidedness and the point of eternal justice is that both sides be wrong
because they are one-sided, but simultaneously both sides are right. Both are
recognized as valid in the movement of moral principle; here both have
their validity but their balanced validity, It is only the one-sidedness,
against which justice rises up.”
“Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion,” Hegel on Tragedy, ed. Anne and Henry Paolucci
(New York: Doubleday & Company, 1962) 325.
My thesis:
Hegel suggests a reading of
"Antigone" that strictly separates the
personal/familial and the political in order to oppose them to one another.
Antigone (as woman) is a representative of the
family; Creon is a representative of the state, and
as spokespersons for different value systems they collide. Who is right?
According to Hegel, they are both right because each espouses a valid ethical
system. Yet each is tragic because each represents only part of the
totality of moral life.
Thesis: The strict
division of the personal as Family and the political as State that supports
Hegel's thinking on the play, while useful, is not necessarily borne out by
closer examination of the text. Creon is not purely
associated with the State and Antigone is not purely
associated with the family.
Evidence for the
argument:
I. Antigone not purely associated with Family:
Heroine’s name/Title of Play:
“anti-gone” = “anti-generation,” as in someone who is against the generating of
human beings within families. She dies w/o having “generated.”
Antigone’s coldness toward
Ismene
How can someone who loves a
brother so much in death abuse a sister in life?
Antigone’s political
statements: Antigone also speaks of
rules and rights and justice as if she were there to enforce law.
Her explanation
of her defiance:
mysterious lines on p.105 (995-1004)
II. Creon
not purely associated with State
He lost a loved one in this war: Megaerus--just as Achilles lost Patroclos
and avenged himself on Hector’s corpse
Creon sees household
and state as a more or less seamless continuity:
“Show me the man who rules his
household well/I’ll show you someone fit to rule the state” (94)
Changes his mind
and humbles himself when Tiresias predicts he will
lose another son. The argument that prevails with
Creon is a threat to kinship :
Summary:
Sophocles’ Antigone : composed in
a particular historical moment----5th Century B.C.E. under Athenian
democracy (democratic Athenians regard a legendary Theban monarchy).
Hegel : Produced the most influential reading of Sophocles’ play in
the early 19th Century; family vs. state; tragedy of one-sidedness.
Brecht’s Antigone: an adaptation
of Sophocles for a different historical moment; 3 parts: Poem, Prologue, Play
Erwin Kowalke: has some of the
attributes of Antigone (like Zidane)