Bringing Antigone Home?

“[S]he makes a mark that cannot be properly located . . .”

—Carol Jacobs

Some readers of Sophocles’ Antigone have taken its heroine to be a representative of resistance to tyrannical power, a model of moral behavior. Others have seen her as an example of the limit case—the limit of the community, the limit of the intelligible, even the limit of the human. Many of these readings rely, at least in part, upon an exploration of Antigone’s relationship to her home: both the house in which she lives and the concerns that are associated with it, in particular her care of and obligation to her family. It is Hegel who suggests a reading of this play in terms of a fundamental conflict between the home and family ( ), on the one hand, and the city and more generally the public sphere ( ) on the other, placing Antigone entirely on the side of the first of these.¹ A diverse assortment of writers has since moved within the circle of questions Hegel suggests about the nature of Antigone’s relationship to her family, the gods, and the community, and about where in all of this she is at home. The issue remains compelling in part because her “home” is, in fact, remarkably difficult to locate; it is a challenge to argue that Antigone represents only and purely the side of the when the complexity of her relationship to the very ideas of home and family, and perhaps more fundamentally of belonging and properness, resists any attempt at categorization.

One way to address this difficulty is, negatively in a sense, through the notion of the Unheimliche—conventionally translated as the “uncanny,” but rooted in the word Heim, “home.” The range of significations associated with the word unheimlich [eerie, strange, disturbing] is shared to a certain extent by the word heimlich [secret, furtive, hidden], despite the fact that the latter term looks like the opposite of the former, and in fact originally had the same meaning as heimisch [homey, domestic, familiar]—a historical connection that remains visible in the near-identity of the words themselves.² The notion of the Unheimliche can thus suggest that there is something strange or improper about that which belongs to the home—and at the same time, something familiar or “homely” about that which belongs outside of it.³ I would like to argue that the best way to understand Antigone’s relationship to her home is to see it as unheimlich, insofar as this would allow for the possibility that she may simultaneously have the strongest claim of belonging to her and the most radical uncertainty about such belonging.

I will, in general, deliberately use the terms “home” and “ ” interchangeably here, despite the fact that they do not have precisely the same range of meaning. It is Antigone’s relationship to her —her family and dwelling-place, and the obligations associated with them—that I would like to investigate first of all; but at the same time, I would like to keep always in mind the more expansive connotations of the word “home” as a way of opening up some of the wider implications of Antigone’s relationship to her and of the question of her “proper place,” broadly understood. It is in terms of this sort of question that Martin Heidegger’s reading of Antigone is particularly valuable. Heidegger devotes roughly a third of his 1942 lecture course Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” to a discussion of Sophocles’ play in terms of the Unheimliche, arguing that Antigone is the most “unhomely” (unheimisch) and the most “uncanny” (unheimlich) of creatures—and thereby the most essentially human. Yet there is a significant distance between the conceptual (un)homeliness of the Unheimliche and the in the most immediate sense of the term, and the possibility of making a connection between Heidegger’s notion of the Unheimliche and Antigone’s relationship to her is less than certain. For although Heidegger’s elaboration of the former presents a useful approach to theorizing the latter, his own reading never considers the as such; indeed, Antigone’s complex relationship to her home and family...