Antigone, Deportee

This paper reads Sophocles’ Antigone as a text about deportation, which is to say, about the “forcible removal” of non-citizens from a given polity. Developed from a seemingly small shift in the play, namely Creon’s decision not to kill Antigone in one fell swoop as announced in the edict but to place her in a subterranean chamber (866) subject to a “living death” with some food rations, this reading proposes that the cave-space is not merely a site for just or unjust punishment (and certainly not for a mitigated sentence), but a legal and political figuration underpinning sovereignty’s putatively “blameless” (hagno[s], 889) rupturing of a person’s juridico-political existence.