Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life

6. Ῥίζα Αἱματόεσσα:On Antigone

171 VI Ῥίζα Αἱματόεσσα On Antigone All this is very different from the usual presentation of the play as a Hegelian or post- or pseudo-Hegelian clash of ideas: family vs. state, religion vs. secularism, and the like. Ideas do clash in the play, but they are as near or far from the center of the action as ideas generally are in real life. Sophokles’ conception, that the clash is basically a matter of gods and blood, is closer to reality as he knew it and we know it. Gerald Else, The Madness of Antigone A Tragicomic Misreading? Despite the startling in medias res with which Antigone pulls us into her act, she is hardly an immediately approachable figure. To approach her from our present moment proves multiply difficult: it requires not only our attunement to a way of thinking and of being that manifests itself only obliquely to us but also our engagement with the many other Antigones she has engendered. For even though this young girl of the myth died unwed and childless and even though her very name means anti-generation, she has reproduced herself in various guises throughout centuries of literary, critical, and philosophical production. My own remarks here were formed, at least on a preliminary level, as responses to a relatively recent, poststructuralist Antigone—that of Judith Butler. However, instead of attempting a systematic commentary on Butler’s 172 passions reading—which is itself deliberately not a close reading of Sophocles, even though it offers several rhetorical analyses of the play—my chapter takes only certain cues from her work, cues that prompt my own turn to Sophocles’s tragedy. In other words, just as the Sophoclean Antigone served for Butler as a springboard for questions that exceed the scope of Sophocles (and they exceed it not in the sense of existing outside Sophocles’s horizon but rather in the sense that Sophocles may have—for essential reasons—kept a certain reserve from them), so Butler’s text offered me a similar springboard to reread Antigone as a guidepost toward a modern problematic. I have already identified this problematic with the consequences of a profoundly untragic vein that runs through the heart of what we call contemporary theory, whether it is allied to cultural studies, critical theory, or the poststructuralist ethicojuridical discourses Butler follows. The latter discourses are in fact embellished and “improved” forms of social construction and identity theory that, by displacing agency into “performativity,” thinly veil, but do not actually abandon, the determinist pitfalls of such sociocultural outlooks. Butler’s reading of the play as a critique of law’s exclusion of the nonnormative family implies a larger theoretical assumption according to which theory can isolate specific problems, identify their social determinations (let us note that in her case, at least, the determinations are invariably sociocultural), and thereupon undertake the project of improving the world (mostly by attempting discursive redefinitions of already existing political and juridical categories). Despite its good intentions, the optimism of Butler’s social voluntarism is not without problems, problems that begin with her textual and thematic misreadings of the play. Of course, it could be argued that these misreadings, offensive as they may be to classicists, are fruitful updates of Sophocles, and Butler herself admits that she is interested not in a philological exercise but in the philosophical implications of the play’s treatment of kinship.1 However, one cannot expect textual misappropriations and omissions not to affect the philosophical meanings one elicits from a text. Therefore, beyond its specific philological oversights, Butler’s heterodox reading of the function of the law in Sophocles’s play points to a larger issue concerning the place of tragedy in modern thought: the theoretical failure to understand tragic logic in general—namely, the logic of the indeterminate par excellence, the logic that exists beyond justification and in which “bad things happen to good people,” so to speak. Despite its obvious unfairness and callous arbitrariness, which proves 173 Ῥίζα Αἱματόεσσα off-putting to our modern sensibility, this ancient logic allows for more profound differences among human beings than social construction does, even when the latter, like much of contemporary theory, claims difference as one of its central concepts. Tragic logic highlights human beings’ singularity in the unique way each one responds to unexpected adversity. Thus, while I understand the democratic spirit of social construction when it comes to addressing the civic nature of things, I...