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)