Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God

Chapter 8. Tragic Dislocations: Antigone's Modern Theatrics

8 Tragic Dislocations Antigone’s Modern Theatrics Tina Chanter Dedicated to the memory of Sarah Kofman The Modern Tragedy of Ancient Greece Where to begin? In which time, or what place? With modernity or antiquity? And would there be a difference? Is it certain that there would be anywhere for me to begin beyond the tomb, the cave, the womb that suffocates Antigone? Would it be possible to start from anywhere other than the feminine, rather than the masculine? Or would it be possible to start from anywhere other than the masculine ? I will try to remain here in the interval between: between the particular and the universal, the feminine and the masculine, the spirit and the law, the private and the public, the blood ties of the familial bond and the civic ties of the political state, between ancient Greece and modernity, between Antigone and Oedipus, between a suffocating space in which Antigone is walled up and the Oedipal desire to know. I will speak from the gap that is the lapse of words, and will not string together in a series the various words Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe employs to designate such a lapse within the An earlier version of this essay was published in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 75–97. I am grateful to Ewa Ziarek, at the English Department of the University of Notre Dame, for inviting me to present the essay in March 1997, and to the Philosophy Department of Vanderbilt University for asking me to present it at the conference ‘‘Styles of Piety,’’ also in March 1997. Both occasions provided me with the opportunity to reflect on and revise the essay. 151 ‘‘spasm’’ of ‘‘paralysis . . . dislocation . . . immobiliz[ation] . . . .prohibit [ion] . . . disten[sion] . . . suspen[sion] . . . diver[sion] . . . collapse . . . regression . . . arres[t] . . . the step back . . . disarticulation . . . caesura.’’1 Antigone marks the absent center, the caesura, of LacoueLabarthe ’s speculations. A curious silence surrounds his organizing thesis: the proposition that ‘‘the fundamental text for Hölderlin’s interpretation of tragedy is, in reality, Antigone.’’2 Except for two or three paradoxical and elliptical statements, to which I will return, very little effort is made to support the thesis—which does not cease to organize everything else that is said here—that, for Friedrich Hölderlin , Antigone is the tragedy of tragedies. Antigone, and not Oedipus Rex, furnishes the tradition with the most tragic of tragic heroes.3 According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hölderlin thereby disrupts a long philosophical tradition, stemming from Aristotle, that has granted priority to Oedipus as its most representative hero: ‘‘Oedipus, the ‘incarnation of self-consciousness,’ the embodiment of the ‘desire to know.’’’4 What makes Oedipus the model tragic figure, as is known well enough, is the conversion from ignorance to knowledge that he undergoes . In his determination to discover the truth, not only is his innocence transformed into guilt as his true identity emerges, but his reversal of fortune takes the most extreme form. The knowledge of who he is and what he has done necessitates his own exclusion from the very city that, as ruler, he had sought to save; he himself becomes the evil of which Thebes must be cured. If he began as the savior, he comes to represent the threat from which the city must be delivered, through purging and purification, a rite Oedipus is only too willing to take on himself. The paradoxical nature of Oedipus’s accursed quest for knowledge , which begins on the road to salvation and culminates in his own self-imposed exile, the expulsion of the one who sought to save the city from its ills—this contradiction at the heart of the Oedipal identity —is also what makes it so appropriate for philosophy. As LacoueLabarthe says: ‘‘The Oedipal scenario . . . contains the speculative solution. And everything has been prepared here for that absolutization or that paradoxical infinitization of the Subject within which philosophy will find its completion.’’5 Even in his discovery of himself as the cause of defilement, Oedipus preserves the city by removing himself from it, and, in doing so, he makes himself responsible for what he could not have known. He takes on the responsibility of his own unwilling ignorance, and thus, in a reversal dear to speculative 152 Styles of Piety philosophers, his weakness proves to be his strength: his innocence is culpable. Freedom emerges victorious...