Subjectivity and Femininity: Reading Antigone

The one who loves sees the world only through the absence of what he loves, and this absence, for him boundless, flows back on the entire world; if a single person is lacking, all will fall back into vanity.

—Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being

What is a subject in the feminine? i will try to answer this question looking at Sophocles's Antigone and starting from a particular content in the reading that Kierkegaard gives of tragedy in his "The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama" (Kierkegaard 1987, 8). Here we learn immediately that the essay is read in the presence of the , an expression that can be translated as "brothers in death," "brothers in burial," or "fellow-dying-men." Although in the text the confirmations are not explicit, it is evident that between the recipients of this piece and its object there is an undoubted, constitutive relationship. Indeed, who is Antigone, if not the person who chooses to die because of her brother, together with Polynice? And does not the fraternity that links these two siblings find its seal precisely in death? It seems indeed that the test and the defense of what she was, in life, is entrusted by Antigone to the decision to die, for which reason her gesture shatters the opposition between these two extremes (life and death) and perceives in the death offer, more radical than disjunction, a paradoxical form of bond. Death thus remains the only defense of life and its memory.

There is nevertheless a particular quality in Antigone's action that goes beyond the limits of the tragic, ancient or modern, in whichever sphere one wishes to include it, to refer to Kierkegaard's text, because it originates from the gender, from the feminine marking of the who involved in the action. My reading has the tendency to valorize this aspect and to see in Antigone precisely the trace of a particular configuration of the role and the place of the "subject" beginning from femininity. Starting from this angle, that almost accidental indication by Kierkegaard on the "fellow-dying-men" becomes particularly eloquent. The fact is it is as if precisely the ability to die with a person who is dead or condemned to death was the existential acme that a particular subject is able to approach whose action is closely linked to the gender characterizing him or her and who, beginning precisely from this bond, seems to account with a renewed sense for the etymology of hypokeimenon, which is also at the basis of the Latin subjectum, even though it is not completely referable to it. We are talking precisely of a subject in the feminine, of which Antigone offers us the trace.

In the Greek hypokeimenon, of which subjectum is the Latin translation, there is expressed the lying of what acts as a substratum: hypokeimai means "I am under," "I lie under." Submitting oneself, the basic meaning of the verb, constitutes the fundamental determination of what, precisely beginning from such an originally passive condition, constitutes the base, allowing the entity to appear for what it is. In the modern subjectum this passive quality of the substance undergoes a meaningful variation. The fact is that sub-iacio, from which subicere and subjectum originate, means "I cast under," "I put under." The passivity therefore changes its meaning and loses its meaning of native disposition and acquires the meaning of a surrender to passivity. This is like saying that the passivity of what is "cast under" depends on a deliberate decision that not only causes the active to continue to be the paradigm of the passive but that the very meaning of the passive coincides with the recovery of a position that causes a privilege to spring from a voluntary lowering. It is not by chance that the subjectum acquires a capacity for determination toward what is offered to it in front of the gaze, the objectum, and beginning from this, being near the roots that it has in common with the hypokeimenon, starts to take on a more substantial relational meaning...