Antigone after Auschwitz

This reading of Sophocles’s Antigone traces the roots of contemporary ethnic cleansings and genocides to the love of one’s own. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, it argues that it is time to read Antigone rather than Oedipus as epitomizing the tragedy of the violated incest taboo, and to see that violation in terms of ideologies that in advocating loving only one’s own, make the world uninhabitable for all others.