Epochal Discordance: Holderlin's Philosophy of Tragedy

6. Dys-Limitation and the "Patriotic Turning": Sophocles' Antigone

Pray I will and sing I must, And yet I weep—Oedipus’ child Descends into the loveless dust. If Antigone has retained a power to fascinate and haunt sensibility, thought, and imagination that is probably unrivalled by other tragic characters (only the epic figure of Odysseus seems, in this respect and within ancient Greek literature, her equal), Hölderlin himself indicates the fundamental conditions that empower a poetic work to present such a figure. He opens his “Remarks on Antigone” with the reflection that, whereas philosophy treats only of a single capacity of the soul, so that “the presentation [Darstellung] of this one capacity then amounts to the whole, and the mere coherence of the articulations of this same capacity calls itself logic,” poetry [die Poësie] treats of the different capacities of human beings. In poetry, the presentation of these different capacities is what yields a genuine and differential whole; and the interrelation of parts then manifests “rhythm” or the “calculable law.”1 As Aristotle points out in the Poetics, tragedy is more philosophical than history, which remains bound to the arbitrariness and disconnection of the factual;2 but for the late Hölderlin, philosophy itself is intrinsically limited, as compared to poetry, due to its predilection for reductive unification.3 If Hölderlin, unlike his German Idealist contemporaries, responds to Antigone—notwithstanding the tragedy’s philosophical near-canonization— 75 SIX Dys-Limitation and the “Patriotic Turning”: Sophocles’ Antigone as a poet rather than just as a thinker, a scholarly interpretor who respects his thought and word will herself need to approach the tragedy from out of the full range of her human “capacities”: her sensitivity, her gender, her history and life experience, as well as her intellect. Thus, she may sometimes find herself motivated to engage Hölderlin’s thought from hermeneutic vantage points that reflect her own historical situation which, at the writing of this book, is that of the first decade of the twenty-first century. ANTIGONE’S ERRANT “ENTHUSIASM” Hölderlin characterizes Antigone as a woman whose reason wanders in errancy “beneath the unthinkable;” and he considers that giving voice to such errancy constitutes the ownmost character of Sophocles’ poetic language (from a contemporary standpoint, Sophocles would then be, quite surprisingly , a more “modern” tragic poet than Euripides).4 Since Hölderlin’s concern is with how the protagonist is torn away from his or her “midpoint” (a notion already prominent in “Ground for Empedocles”) and seized by “the spirit of the ever-living unwritten wilderness and the world of the dead”5 — and given also that Sophocles has Ismene tell Kreon (who charges her and Antigone with madness) that, at a certain point of outrage, the human spirit falters and gives way (A, 563f)6 —Hölderlin tends, in his translation, to render the characters’ self-expression more extreme by an intensification of Sophoclean diction. The intensification is particularly striking in his translation of the verses with which he introduces the second part of his tripartite “Remarks,” the section that contains his analysis of the tragedy proper. He has Antigone answer Kreon’s question as to why she defied his law forbidding Polyneikes’ burial as follows: Darum, mein Zeus berichtete mirs nicht, Noch hier im Haus das Recht der Todesgötter . . . This is why: My Zeus did not announce it to me, Nor here in the house the right of the gods of death . . . The Greek text (at A, 450f) reads: ouj gavr tiv moi Zeu;~ h[h oJ khruvxa~ tavde, oujd’ hJ xuvnaiko~ tw`n kavtw qew`n Divkh . . . To translate literally: It was not at all Zeus who announced this to me, Nor yet Dike who dwells with the gods below . . . EPOCHAL DISCORDANCE 76 Whereas Hölderlin’s intensified diction (and otherwise idiosyncratic translation) suggests that Antigone recognizes and follows a god of her own (“my Zeus”) as well as a law or justice that is linked to the gods of death and that obtains “here in the house,” she actually says no more than that neither Zeus (the sovereign Olympian and sky god) nor the chthonic deities have proclaimed Kreon’s law to her or affirmed its justice. She goes on to state that divine laws, in contrast to Kreon’s edict, are unwritten, unshakeable, and timeless (A, 454).7 Hölderlin’s reading suggests the interpretation—which can be traced from Hegel (whom he directly influenced)8 to...