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121 CHAPTER 5 Trauma and the Theban Cycle Many are things are formidable [deina], and none more formidable than man. —Sophocles, Antigone H ow can intimacy become a subject for critical reflection?1 Intimacy is typically understood to focus on emotions of love and supportive family bonds. But if family life is the beginning point for reflection on intimacy, it is not the only terrain we can explore in an effort to understand it. Helpfully, Julia Kristeva both broadens and narrows the field for critical reflection on intimacy. She broadens it when she links intimacy to art, religion, and psychoanalysis and cites the unique capacity of these forms of cultural expression to protect the singularity of human life.2 Kristeva narrows the context for critical reflection on intimacy when she specifies that art, religion, and psychoanalysis home in on intimacy when they focus on the sensory experience of the body. Sensory experience often plays a role in the expression of intimacy; however, for Kristeva that which is most significant about connections between sensory experience and intimacy is that sensory experience is the way that intimacy in human life 122 Chapter Five is protected from threats that would destroy it. Just as mimetic rivalry is not only a linguistic and social phenomenon but also tactile and affective, so also is intimacy a healing alternative to rivalry and sacrificial scapegoating, expressed in bodily form. The intimate domain is characterized by affect, sensation, mood, and feeling. Intimacy is a practice of corporeality. As a consequence, mimetic violence is not resolved when one subscribes to the idea of nonviolence, for nonviolence requires the conversion of one’s entire being. Central to this conversion is a sensory experience that restores and protects the vitality and the singularity of human intimacy against trauma that makes intimacy impossible.3 But how do the life practices oriented toward sensory experience advance human intimacy? Addressing this question, I employ a corporeal hermeneutics in order to look closely at how Antigone came to embrace the singularity of Polyneices ’s life, love him, and thereby witness to an intimacy that opens out on nonsacrificial modes of human community. I track sensory experiences to which Antigone attests, giving special attention to trauma associated with sibling conflict. This paradigmatic social relationship is foundational for human society, and the healing of sibling relationships that have been riven by mimetic violence is a precondition for establishing an ethical existence oriented toward the others—an intimate domain. As a consequence, I explore Antigone as a traumatic text within which also may be found a healing subtext, a text in which traumatic memory, closed in on itself, is finally opened to a narrative memory that creates community out of recognition and forgiveness. Previously, in my exploration of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I considered how trauma references a primordial separation from the maternal body that initiates the family romance. I attended to a vertical axis along which the nascent subject passes in separation from the maternal body in order to assume a place in the world. Now, with Antigone, I explore the family romance again; however, this time, I focus on a lateral axis along which a subject’s first relations with others emerge. In Antigone, trauma is played out in this new register, in which confused sibling relationships, skewed by generational disorder within the house of Labdacus, are especially significant. In keeping with the approach I took to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I draw here too on Caruth’s insights about trauma, which are about a form of suffering Mitchell calls “strong trauma.” I recall that, for Caruth, traumatic Trauma and the Theban Cycle 123 experiences are characterized by repetition in which the survivor is caught up unknowingly and against her will.4 Caruth states that one who is traumatized suffers from a pain that cannot be grasped or committed to rational understanding. Such suffering hollows one out, forming a kind of wound. Caruth suggests that the agonizing repetition of trauma is broken when a voice is released through the wound. The voice that cries from the wound witnesses to a truth that the victim of trauma cannot fully know. Following Caruth, I suggest that Antigone possesses a voice that cries out from a wound. She speaks to a truth that initially she does not know and cannot fully comprehend. But what is this wound? Caruth’s observations about Freud’s...

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