Theatricality as Medium

Chapter 4. Antigone's 'Nomos'

4 Antigone’s ‘Nomos’ From the Rule of Law to the Law of the Rule T r u e t o its Protestant heritage, American society has never taken the existence of the ‘‘group’’ for granted. Its emphasis upon the individual as the basic unit of experience, whether religious, social, political, or ethical, has always cast the ‘‘rule of law’’ in an ambiguous light. On the one hand, as Tocqueville already noted, issues and controversies that in Europe would be decided by political instances tend in America to be resolved by judicial institutions.1 This inclination to ‘‘legalize’’ politics implies an elevation of established, positive law over the more conflictual process of law making, which is based on shifting relations of forces. On the other hand, however—and herein perhaps lies the ambiguity of law in the American tradition—the historical emphasis on the ‘‘individual’’ and the local, as distinct from the European tradition of centralized states, stands in a certain tension to the rule of law, which always implies a dominance of the general over the particular. The law is constructed for general purposes, which are then ‘‘applied’’ to particular ‘‘cases.’’ From the perspective of the rule of law, the ‘‘individual’’ is only a ‘‘case’’: an instantiation of the general. Hence, the cult of the ‘‘outlaw,’’ the criminal, and, more recently, of the Mafia: all are seen as antilegal, antistate, anticentralist agents and institutions , representing the individual and the local against the anonymous powers of the State, Big Business, and ‘‘the Law’’ in general. Conversely, recent rejection of international law in favor of the politics of preventive warfare, preemptive strikes, and imprisonment and trial without due process, testify to the sentiment that legal procedures are inappropriate, ineffective, and perhaps in the end counterproductive when it comes to securing the ‘‘homeland.’’ PAGE 121 121 ................. 11043$ $CH4 11-04-04 08:11:36 PS A n t i g o n e ’ s N o m o s At the same time, this move from the rule of law to the rule of rule poses the question of the ruler, which is to say, of the powers and prerogatives of the state. This is all the more obvious in the contemporary American situation, where a government whose ideology traditionally would place it on the side of ‘‘the individual’’ sees itself constrained to increase the police and military powers of the state, ostensibly to protect the rights of its individual citizens. Of course, the problematic relationship between state, individual, and family is by no means limited to the United States. It is one of the hallmarks of the history of the ‘‘West.’’ Nothing less is suggested by the continued and indeed growing popularity of the first of Sophocles ’ Theban tragedies: Antigone. This play, which in so many ways seems so close to us, also keeps a certain distance—one that may well be the source of its continuing power. For a contemporary reader it is perhaps not entirely obvious that the ‘‘action’’ of the play, Antigone, as with all of Sophocles’ Theban plays, has ‘‘begun’’ long before the curtain rises. To read Antigone, whether as text or as theater, is to be confronted with the signifying chain of a mythic prehistory that is never present as such, but that exercises a decisive influence upon everything that happens, whether on stage or in the text. Throughout, the play implicitly stages this dependency of the explicit upon the implicit, from Antigone’s opening speech, which echoes—or, rather, since Antigone is generally considered to have been written before Oedipus Tyrannos—anticipates2 the context in which the ‘‘action’’ unfolds: Ismene, my sister, true child of my own mother [autodelphon],3 do you know any evil out of all the evils bequeathed by Oedipus that Zeus will not fulfill for the two of us in our lifetime? There is nothing—no pain, no ruin, no shame, nor dishonor—that I have not seen in your sufferings and mine. And now what is this new edict [kērugma] that they say the general has just decreed to all the city? Do you know anything? Have you heard? Or does it escape you that evils from our enemies are on the march against our friends? (ll. 1–10) Two sisters, not merely of the ‘‘same blood’’ as it is sometimes rendered, but more literally ‘‘of the same womb’’ or ‘‘mother’’—or PAGE 122 122 ................. 11043$ $CH4 11-04-04 08:11:36 PS [3.149.234.141] Project...