Brother, Sister, Monster: Resonance and the Exposed Body in Antigone and The Metamorphosis

Both Antigone and The Metamorphosis take on the body—carrying it, challenging it, singing to it, and squeaking with it. Though separated by over two millennia, both texts appear to sacrifice the body to analogous recuperative ends: Gregor’s death leads to domestic blossoming while Antigone’s insistence on burying Polyneices gives Creon the opportunity to integrate the blood relations of the family with the representative structure of the state. In recent years however, Antigone scholarship has opened new modes of disrupting the apparent fatalism of the drama, while The Metamorphosis remains stubbornly resistant to triumphant interpretation. I argue that reading Gregor’s apparently passive “squeaking” through Teiresias’s response to Antigone’s expressive “cry” opens an alternative mode of viewing the struggle with the body through the materiality of sound in each case. In Antigone and The Metamorphosis sound resonates as a non-intentional, but nevertheless damning, judgment of systems of power. As such, these texts teach us to perceive injuries that the subject may not even be able to articulate.

From a historical point of view, contrasting Sophocles and Kafka illuminates the disheartening impotence of the modern subject. In the wake of Enlightenment hopes and subsequent disillusion, we can only wish we still had a transcendental guarantor that would allow us to stand up against injustice, instead of collapsing under the weight of an internalized conception of power. Gregor’s “squeaking” voice at the start of his transformation and Antigone’s “cry” at the sight of her brother’s exposed body illuminate contrasting modern and tragic positions. Gregor, as we will see, tries to explain away his descent into the realm of the inhuman and unintelligible, while Antigone acts on her outrage. Pushing against the standard Hegelian narrative that integrates the body into the mind, the private into the public, and the woman into man, while at the same time marshaling other dialectical resources of the Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Aesthetics, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler emphasize the strength of Antigone’s cry. Yet both see its energy as ultimately transformed. Žižek insists that the cry is unduly aestheticized in the final instance, while Butler develops a positively valued route from Antigone’s cry to her claim.

In contrast to Butler and Žižek, I insist on the political resources of the cry as such at the limit of meaning. Gregor’s struggle to mentally appropriate the non-human, non-signifying aspect of sound into consciousness illustrates a potential for breakdown in the logic of interiority described in Hegel’s section on sound and resonance (Klang and Nachklang) in his Encyclopedia. Yet Gregor keeps himself together, at least long enough to talk to his family through the mediator of his door. I argue that in Antigone the cry does not return to meaning but echoes outward in Tiresias’s announcement of the bird’s unintelligible cries. Working with the Encyclopedia in this way (rather than the Phenomenology or Aesthetics) requires us to take a step back from the celebration of bold engagement of Antigone’s act. Returning to The Metamorphosis, now with a more complex conception of Nachklang, we will see that Gregor’s “squeaking” marked a material resistance to power all along. Each text wrestles with the body, with the voice pulling across it almost like a bow that broadcasts attempts to vanquish the corporeal. Both Antigone and Gregor are ungeheuer from the point of the system and teach us how, as citizens of the kingdom of signs, of view the one who screams or squeaks sends fissures through aesthetic, epistemological, and political representation.

Gregor Samsa and the Size of Language

A reading of The Metamorphosis that holds on to the body needs to stay with the shock of the opening line despite the narrative pull of Gregor Samsa’s death. Gregor, bound to the job of traveling salesman to support his family and pay off their business debts, awakes in the body of an insect-like animal. Since their son can no longer work, the father and mother first suffer an economic downgrade from...