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141 CHAPTER 6 Antigone and the Ethics of Intimacy At once she brought in her hands thirsty dust, and from the well-wrought brazen urn that she was carrying she poured over the corpse a threefold libation. —Sophocles, Antigone T raumatic violence has caught Oedipus in an ongoing repetition of mimetic rivalry, rooting him in an eternal present. Compellingly demonstrated not only in Oedipus the King but also in Oedipus at Colonus, his trauma is visceral. For Oedipus’s suffering is written on his body: his unsightly face, expressed pain, and profound exhaustion offer graphic testimony.1 Others reflect back to Oedipus their horror: Oedipus is a polluting presence.2 Attentive to Oedipus’s distress, in this chapter I examine the representation of trauma as well as actions that promise to break open constraints on Oedipus, permitting the transformation of Oedipus’s memories.3 In Oedipus at Colonus, these actions occur in ritual. Indeed, as Julia Kristeva observes, the purification rite described in Oedipus at Colonus is notable for providing us “with one of the most detailed descriptions of purification in 142 Chapter Six classical literature.”4 Although the ritual in which Oedipus takes part does not result in a magical healing of trauma, he can at last bear his wounds.5 To be sure, and notwithstanding the rich descriptions of supplicatory ritual in Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’s experience at the sacred grove remains shrouded in mystery. Even as the rituals enable him to bear his suffering, we receive no assurances that Oedipus is freed of the trauma that has beset him throughout his life. Theseus, who alone observes Oedipus’s passing, is uncertain about what he has observed. Moreover, Theseus appears to suggest that Oedipus remains in a sacrificial orbit, for Theseus understands that, if he keeps secret the location of Oedipus’s grave, Oedipus’s body will protect Athens.6 But even as Oedipus at Colonus does not definitively break with a sacrificial economy, it establishes preconditions for transformation in Antigone . A point of kinesic connection for Antigone’s audience, ritual constitutes one of the only moments of action in a tragic play that sometimes is cited for its lack of action.7 Thus, ritual in Oedipus at Colonus readies us for a transformation that comes to the fore in Antigone when healing powers of ritual evoke “graceful possibilities of imagination.”8 Turning my attention from Oedipus at Colonus to Antigone in the second half of this chapter, I explore these graceful possibilities. Throughout Antigone, Antigone’s imagination risks radical truncation. So also does her speech risk fracture as she struggles to name and offer testimony to generational order that has been implemented only in criminal form in the house of Labdacus. But, when Antigone performs rituals over her brother’s body, a barrier of sensation and knowledge that has shielded her from full exposure to trauma is breached, becoming an unexpected instrument of healing that opensontointimacy.Antigonesurpassesmimeticviolenceandsacrificewhen she takes up and transforms the visceral memories that have accrued to Oedipus in the sacred grove at Colonus and whose traumatic form Antigone has inherited. This healing, attested to and witnessed by a revelatory process that has spiraled around and through the three plays that comprise the Theban cycle, elicits a capacity for nonviolent existence that has eluded Antigone and the house of Labdacus previously. No longer mired in traumatic repetition, Antigone, “figura Christi of the ancient world,” ushers in healing that brings to view a nonsacrificial ethics.9 Access to an intimate domain that has been blocked in the wake of trauma is opened up, as Antigone’s actions enable Antigone and the Ethics of Intimacy 143 those who hear of them to imagine and claim forms of human community that are not bound by sacrifice. My analysis, which focuses on the decisive role of rituals in exposing a sacrificial economy, builds on the multivalent possibilities of ritual. I both confirm Girard’s analysis of ritual and challenge it in order to augment it. In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Girard writes that rituals “reproduce the mimetic crisis”; moreover, rituals also attest to the resolution of that crisis, moving in microcosmic mimicry from “conflictual disintegration of the community into social collaboration.”10 Thus, in rituals, frenetic actions and discordant sounds transition to a delicate choreography in which individuals, previously at each other’s throats, engage in expressive movement framed by mutual recognition...

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