Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery by Tina Chanter (review)

In 1995, Tina Chanter, currently a professor of humanities at Kingston University in London, published Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. The third chapter of this text is entitled: “Looking at Hegel’s Antigone through Irigaray’s Speculum.” Part of Chanter’s expressed interest in this particular chapter and arguably the book as a whole involves taking up Irigaray’s exhortation as stated by Chanter in the chapter’s opening sentence: “‘It is very important,’ Irigaray tells us, ‘to question again the foundations of our symbolic order in mythology and in tragedy, because they deal with a landscape which installs itself in the imagination and then, all of a sudden, becomes law.’” More specifically, Chanter indicates that what she intends to explore in this third chapter of Ethics of Eros is “Irigaray’s instance of a woman who is neither master or slave: Antigone.” In Chanter’s view at that time, Irigaray “retrieves Antigone from the role in which she is cast by Hegel in his reading of Sophocles’ play” (Chanter 1995, 80). What readers of Chanter’s 2011 Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery discover is that not only did Chanter continue to read and reread Sophocles’s Antigone, but she eventually decided that she was not completely satisfied with Irigaray’s conclusion in that it gestured too much under an influence left by a reading of Hegel’s that overdetermines the tragic drama by virtue of his outlawing slavery as a subject proper to tragedy.

It is unlikely that readers will be able to get halfway through Chanter’s preface without realizing that Chanter is setting off on an Odysseus-like journey because it will not be easily executed as if it were an overnight excursion. The scope of the daunting project Chanter sets for herself will require a sustained effort. This work is not simply about rendering one more interpretation of what is at stake in the drama. Nor is it the more or less controlled sweeping study of the historical reception of Antigone that we have from George Steiner. Topically speaking, Chanter’s agenda is very well focused because it is simply concerned with giving a very specific kind of attention to the legacy of Sophocles’s tragic character named in Chanter’s title, which launches the book’s guiding question: Whose Antigone? Chanter is asking: “Who owns Antigone?” The question is not impertinent when one surveys an abbreviated list of international figures who have contributed to the legacy of this tragic figure, a list that is stunning if for no other reason than its range, covering stage plays, operas, albums, and at least one comic book: Jean Anouilh, Sylvain Bemba, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Griselda Gambaro, Janusz Glowacki, A. R. Gurney Jr., Seamus Heaney, John Kani, Brendan Kennelly, Aiden Matthews, Marianne McDonald, Winston Ntshona, Carl Orff, Tom Paulin, and Mac Wellman. Who owns Antigone? Chanter answers: “Despite her multifarious rebirths, she resists definitive appropriation.” That’s the book’s project: Sophocles’s Antigone cannot be owned, “Philosophy, psychoanalysis, and imperialism have initiated competing claims for Antigone, yet her spirit remains irrepressible. With each rebirth of Antigone, every time Antigone goes to her death her legacy lives on, and she is configured anew. No one owns her; Antigone rises again and again” (Chanter 2011, 145). Chanter’s formulation is quite likely intended to remind us of the lines from Sophocles’s drama in which Antigone herself invokes Persephone, the daughter born to Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. Persephone is the goddess of the underworld and this relation has long figured prominently in associating Antigone with a worship of the older chthonic gods, pitting her against Creon’s worship of Zeus and the Olympian gods. Persephone, in much the same sense suggested by Chanter, when associated with vegetation and death, is frequently employed to symbolize endings and beginnings, death, rebirth, and death and rebirth again. Chanter’s book...