The Returns of Antigone: Interdisciplinary Essays ed. by Tina Chanter, Sean D. Kirkland (review)

In the face of the much-heralded “death” of tragedy in the modern era, The Returns of Antigone responds to what editors Tina Chanter and Sean D. Kirkland identify as “an undeniably ongoing revival of the character of Antigone” (1). Although it is unclear what timeline is intended by “ongoing,” it is indeed undeniable that Antigone has remained a central figure of philosophy, literature, and the arts, both within and beyond the euphemistically termed “Western tradition,” for at least two centuries; that there has arguably been an upsurge in attention paid to her by writers and artists in recent years speaks to the qualities of her being and predicament, which retain an enduring relevance to interrogations of the present. Despite the proliferation of material treating her, however, the question of whether Antigone can really be said to represent anything persists—and if so, what it is that she can be said to represent. In light of this, the phrase utilized by Chanter and Kirkland, “the character of Antigone,” is worth consideration, as it points to the polyvocal nature of “Antigone” herself: as a fictional (anti)heroine, she exceeds her ancient Greek mythological origins and reappears in numerous contexts across time and space; as a potentially representative figure, she is appealed to and deployed by thinkers to a wide variety of ends; even within the Sophoclean context for which she is best known, her character is difficult to pin down, especially when considering not only the eponymous play but also her role in Oedipus at Colonus.

All of the collected essays “attempt to locate, analyze, and explain” what can provisionally be thought of as the excessive nature of Antigone (2); to borrow the phrasing of Chanter and Kirkland, she is figured as “a cipher, an essentially problematizing specter” and “an aberrant, itinerant, queer, queered, and queering figure,” which “allows certain thinkers to push their own logics, their own systems, and those of their contemporaries to their limits” (4, 6, 4). In other words, “An errant, wayward sign, Antigone’s existence is itinerant. Operating as a destabilizing force, she reorganizes the representational space from which she is exiled, absented, or disappeared, and yet in which she occupies at the same time an oblique presence” (7). Here we see a direct appeal to the question of Antigone’s representative status, a question that plays out in political, philosophical, and aesthetic spheres, as various “logics” and “systems” are productively confounded by her presence—or present absence.

This new volume offers fifteen essays, all but four of which have never been previously published in any format. The quality of the contributions is uneven, and many would likely have benefited from being presented in a longer format, but the diversity of the theoretical approaches and reading strategies employed by the authors is quite impressive. Although Sina Kramer’s remark that “[i]t seems that we can never entirely read Antigone without either Hegel or Lacan peering over our shoulder” rings true, the relatively small amount of direct preoccupation with both of these thinkers in these collected essays is actually quite refreshing (178). Hegel and Lacan do appear, but as members of a crowd of theorists and philosophers that also includes, among others, Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Butler, Nancy, Kierkegaard, and Hölderlin. Several contributors appeal to the work of classical scholars such as Nicole Loraux and Jean-Pierre Vernant as well. Beyond engagements with this array of thinkers, the volume also features new close readings of the Sophoclean texts and, importantly, serious attention to the question of adaptations and manifestations of the Antigone myth in theatre as well as visual and contemporary performance arts.

The division of the essays into five sections—in order, “Context and Text,” “The Impertinence of Antigone,” “Psychoanalysis and its Limits,” “Butler’s Claim,” and “Antigone’s New Contexts”—provides a welcome organizational structure, although it should be noted that many of the essays speak to each other...