Political Representation in Slavoj Žižek’s Antigone and Marvel Studio’s Black Panther by Slavoj Žižek (review)

With violations of due process in Donald Trump’s United States and the reactionary, subterranean rage of “the deplorables,” the rise of the #MeToo movement, and reports of student wannabe radicals disrupting lectures, it is little wonder that Slavoj Žižek’s theoretical and literary encounter, The Three Lives of Antigone has found a stage. Published in 2016, the work was performed in 2017 by the Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, which I discovered after an online search and I was also able to locate an experimental video interpretation of the play on Vimeo. What I find truly surprising is that Žižek’s rendition has not received more critical attention. Žižek’s play appears, published by Bloomsbury, in Antigone with a foreword by Hanif Kureishi and an introduction by Žižek. Žižek’s framing of the problem of Antigone centers on political representation, and in so doing he addresses his claim that the task of the philosopher is not to provide answers (in contrast to the merely functionary role of the expert) but rather to pose questions that have not been asked.

In posing questions and presenting problems, Žižek borrows heavily from the postmodern narrative conceit of Tom Tykwer’s movie Run, Lola, Run! (1999). The forking path of narrative possibility allows for the latent content of Sophocles’s text to be exposed. Žižek’s work presents three possible narrative outcomes. The first is the conventional close: Antigone kills herself and catastrophe befalls Creon’s household. The second entails a narrative break whereby Creon changes his mind, spares Antigone, but with the result that Thebes experiences violent revolt and mob anarchy ensues. The third situates the chorus as a revolutionary actor that simultaneously is deeply conservative. The chorus enacts a people’s revolution, recognizing that both Antigone and Creon are dangerous fanatics, deluded and zealous.

For Žižek, a text must be transformed in an act of radical reconstruction as its initial context dissipates. He cites an anecdote concerning appropriation to buttress his claim:

The Fast Runner, a unique film retelling an old Inuit (Eskimo) legend, was made by the Canadian Inuits themselves in 2001; the director Zacharias Kunuk decided to change the ending, replacing the original slaughter in which all participants die with a more conciliatory conclusion. When a culturally sensitive journalist accused Kunuk of betraying authentic tradition for the cheap appeal to contemporary public, Kunuk replied by accusing the journalist of cultural ignorance: this very readiness to adapt the story to today’s specific needs attests to the fact that the authors were still part of the ancient Inuit tradition—such “opportunistic” rewriting is a feature of premodern cultures, while the very notion of the “fidelity to the original” signals that we are already in the space of modernity, that we lost our immediate contact with tradition.¹

Žižek’s analysis thereby argues that any attempt to preserve a cultural product unchanged is inauthentic because cultures themselves are adaptable:

This is how we should approach numerous recent attempts to stage some classical opera by not only transposing its action into a different (most often contemporary) era, but also by changing some basic facts of the narrative itself. There is no a priori abstract criterion which would allow us to judge the success or failure: each such intervention is a risky act and must be judged by its own immanent standards. Such experiments often ridiculously misfire—however, not always, and there is no way to tell it in advance, so one has to take the risk.²

This last remark situates the very question that his rendition of Antigone poses; namely, whether to take the risk of political transformation.

Žižek’s work, his play, thereby freely relinquishes any claim of theoretical innocence. Like the work of Bertolt...