Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

The Act of Witnessing

four The Act of Witnessing Violence,Gender,and Subjectivity 5 9 many recent contributions to the theory of the subject have argued that the experience of becoming a subject is linked to the experience of subjugation in important ways.1 The violations inscribed on the female body (both literally and figuratively) and the discursive formations around these violations, as we saw, made visible the imagination of the nation as a masculine nation. What did this do to the subjectivity of women? We need to ask not only how ethnic or communal violence was enacted through specific gendered acts of violation such as rape, but also how women may have taken these noxious signs of violation and reoccupied them through the work of domestication, ritualization, and renarration . I argued earlier that the discursive formations through which the nation-state was inaugurated attributed a particular type of subjectivity to women as victims of rape and abduction. Yet women’s own formation of their subject positions, though mired in these constructions, was not completely determined by them. The previous chapter argued that women spoke of their experiences by anchoring their discourses to the genres of mourning and lamentation that already assigned a place to them in the cultural work of mourning, but they spoke of violence and pain within these genres as well as outside them. Through complex transactions between body and language they were able to both voice and show the hurt done to them as well as to provide witness to the harm done to the whole social fabric—the injury was to the very idea of different groups being able to inhabit the world together. In this chapter I hope to explore the meaning of being a witness to violence—to speak for the death of relationships.2 In the literary imagination of the West, the figure of Antigone as witness provides a kind of foundational myth that explores the conditions under which conscience may find a voice in the feminine. Hegel, as is well known, saw a conflict of structures in this story. In his reading, Creon is opposed to Antigone as one principle of law is opposed to another—call it the opposition between the law of the state and the law of the family:3 “The public law of the state and the instinctive family-love and duty toward a brother are here set in conflict . Antigone, the woman, is pathetically possessed by the interest of family: Creon, the man, by the welfare of the community. Polyneices, in war with his own father-city, had fallen before the gate of Thebes, and Creon, the lord thereof, had by means of a public proclamation threatened everyone with death who should give the enemy of this city the right of burial. Antigone, however, refused to accept this demand, which merely concerned the public weal, and constrained by her pious devotion for her brother, carried out as sister, the sacred duty of interment.”4 As long as we are with Hegel looking at the dialogue as constituting the arena of the play, it is difficult to find other meanings in this tragedy except in the conflict of these two discourses. In contrast, Lacan invites us to shift our gaze to the tragic setting of Antigone.5 What is the nature of the zone that Antigone occupies in this setting? Lacan specifies it variously as the limit, as a happening between two deaths, as the point at which death is engaged with life. The scene of Antigone’s death is staged in this particular zone from which alone a certain kind of truth can be spoken. Lacan rejects Hegel’s interpretation that Creon is opposed to Antigone as one principle of law is opposed to another. Instead, he is more sympathetic to Goethe’s view that in striking Polyneices, Creon had gone beyond the limit. The issue, Lacan feels, was not that of one law versus another, but whether the law of Creon could subsume everything, including the funerary rites to the dead. For Lacan, it was never a question of one right versus another, but a wrong against something else that is not easily named. Lacan insists that Antigone’s passion is not for the sacred rights of the dead—it is not that she speaks for the rights of the family against the claims of law. Instead, he draws attention to the famous passage in Antigone’s speech that has caused much discussion among commentators. This is the speech...