critical inquiry volume 37 issue 2 2011 [doi 10.1086%2f657289] meltzer, françoise -- theories of...

7/24/2019 Critical Inquiry Volume 37 Issue 2 2011 [Doi 10.1086%2F657289] Meltzer, Franoise -- Theories of Desire- Antigon

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Theories of Desire: Antigone Again

Francoise Meltzer

The figure of Antigone has never ceased to preoccupy usthis despite

remarks such as Matthew Arnolds in the 1853preface to his Fragment of

an Antigone. The play of Sophocles, argues Arnold, turns upon the

conflict between the heroines duty to her brothers corpse and that to the

laws of her country. But such a conflict is no longer one in which it is

possible that we should feel a deep interest.1

George Eliot retorted thatArnold had misread the play, which for her had to do with the struggle

between elemental and established laws. Through this struggle, the

outer life of man is gradually and painfully . . . brought into harmony with

his inner needs.2 In point of fact, both Arnold and Eliot see the same

problem in the play, though they use a different vocabulary: the duty to a

brother as against the laws of a country (Arnold) is basically the same as the

struggle between something elemental and established law (Eliot). On the

other hand, Eliot was certainly right to refute the notion that we no longer

can have a deep interest in the play. As George Steiner makes clear in his

exhaustive bookAntigones(1984), Antigone has been the object of obses-

sion from the end of the eighteenth century till the present.3

Recent texts might be seen as bookends shoring up the two ends of a

spectrum of Antigone versions, obsessions, and theories. Judith Butler, in

For Raquel Scherr.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Thanks to Jay Williams for his insightful (as usual) editing.1. Matthew Arnold, Preface to First Edition ofPoems,On the Classical Tradition,ed.R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960), p. 12.

2. George Eliot, The Antigone and Its Moral, review ofThe Antigone of Sophocles,trans.

and ed. J. H. Parker,The Leader,29Mar.1856, p. 306.

3. See George Steiner,Antigones(New York, 1984).

Critical Inquiry37(Winter2011)

2011by The University of Chicago.0093-1896/11/3702-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Antigones Claim,for example, reconsiders a great deal of the thinking on

Antigone (mainly by G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan), particularly in

relation to what we persist in calling postmodernism.4 Even in todays

political, controversial, and conflict-laden world, Antigone emerges as a

central force that seems to embody the tensions of the age. In2004, Seamus

Heaney produced a searing (if problematic) translation: The Burial at

Thebes. The situation of Antigone is being reenacted, writes Heaney, in our

own political world: just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an

either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the

White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war on

Iraq.5 But Garry Wills, in his review of Heaneys translation, disagrees:

the result is a black-and-white picture, with Antigone all purity and

Creon sheer taint. There are good reasons for opposing the invasion ofIraq, but none that Sophocles can provide.6 These comments are all con-

cerned with the Antigone of Sophocles. Twentieth-century adapta-

tionsby Jean Cocteau, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, and Heaney, for

exampleare of course examined in studies of the authors in question;

but when it comes to considering Antigones strange and powerful lure, it

is the Sophocles figure that largely dominates. It is as if there were a certain

flattening of Antigones crisis in the more modern, largely political, rendi-

tions of her story.The most successful of such flattening is Anouilhs1944Antigone.7 One

of the authorspieces noires, the play is a resistance piece to the German

occupation (it was produced in Paris under Nazi censorship). Like the

otherpieces noires,the play is a pessimistic (and sardonic) attack on the

4. See Judith Butler,Antigones Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000).

5. Seamus Heaney,The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles Antigone(New York,

2004), p. 76.

6. Garry Wills, Red Thebes, Blue Thebes, review ofThe Burial at Thebes: A Version ofSophocles Antigoneby Heaney,New York Times,5 Dec.2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/

books/review/05WILLSL.html

7. See Jean Anouilh,Antigone,ed. David I. Grossvogel (Boston, 1959); hereafter abbreviated

JAA.

F R A N C O I S E M E L T Z E R teaches at the University of Chicago where she is the

Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities. She

has been a coeditor ofCritical Inquirysince1982and is author of several books,

the most recent beingFor Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of

Subjectivity(2001). She has just completedSeeing Double: Baudelaires Modernity

and finished coediting, with Jas Elsner, Faith without Borders: The Curious

Category of Saints(2009),a special issue ofCritical Inquiry,which will appear in

book form in2011.

170 Francoise Meltzer / Theories of Desire


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family, lofty ideals, friendship, love, and the confident passions of youth.

Unlike the Sophocles, the Anouilh playlike most modern versions

does not engage philosophical considerations, nor does it consider the

question of desire or the notion of conceptual boundaries (those for ex-

ample of gender and subjectivity in relation to death) and limit concepts.

One might say that the Anouilh play confines itself to the polis and to the

psychological. There is no question in Anouilhs play of mixing registers,

of religion, or of desiring the underworld; it is rather a question of rejecting

everyday life. But it is precisely by looking at what is missing from

Anouilhs Antigone that we can get a bit closer to the powerful and dis-

turbing aspect that the Sophocles text so brilliantly suggests. How

Anouilhs Antigone fails, what he leaves out become clues to Antigones

mysterious and haunting power as a philosopher of death in Sophocles.What I want to insist on as crucial in the Sophocles is Antigones for-

eignness. That, in turn, has to do with the peculiar, even unmappable,

nature of her desire and her insistence on religiosity. Even the etymology of

her name suggests the foreign, an aspect that in Sophocles comes early and

is tied to Antigones love for her father. At the end ofOedipus at Colonus,

Antigone comments on her fathers decision to die in a foreign land: I

know you wished to die in a strange country, she tells him, Yet your

death was so lonely! / Why could I not be with you? She says to the cho-rus, I think there is no way / for me to get home again.8 Home will

increasingly mean joining her father (and, later, brother) in the foreign

country of death. If she initially returns to Thebes in an attempt to prevent

bloodshed between her brothers, their deaths and the advent of Creon as

king will make her feel less and less at home in the polis as well as in life

itself.

The Anouilh text does not concern itself with foreignness. His Creon

notes angrily that Antigone just wants to die. He tries to talk her out of it by

telling her the awful truth about her brothers: they tried to assassinate their

father Oedipus more than once, that they hated each other, and that after

they had killed each other it was impossible to know which body belonged

to whom, so mangled had they become in the deadly fray. But this Antig-

one (after brief indecision on the heels of Creons revelations) decides that

she wants to die anyway in order to avoid becoming an adult for whom life

will erode into habit, dullness, and the lack of passion. Suddenly overcome

by a Peter Pan complex, as it were, Anouilhs Antigone does not want to

8. Sophocles,Oedipus at Colonus,trans. Robert Fitzgerald,Three Tragedies,trans. David

Grene, Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth Wyckoff, ed. Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago, 1954), ll.171315, pp.152, 154.

Critical Inquiry / Winter2011 171


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grow up to say yes to the ordinary in life like her uncle. Nor does she wish

to see his son, Hamon, the young man to whom she is engaged, similarly

reduced to saying yes to compromise, disappointment, and boredom.

Shes the one who wanted to die, Creon says confidently to the chorus in

Anouilhs version. None of us, he continues, was strong enough to con-

vince her to live. I understand now, Antigone was made to be dead. . . .

Polyneices was merely a pretext. When she had to give up on that, she

found something else right away. What mattered to her was to refuse and

to die (JAA,pp. 7980). Anouilhs Antigone does not want to say yes to

any compromise. Since she knows that time will force her to say yes in a

myriad of ways, death becomes her only option (an attitude that is partly

what inspires Lacan to call this Antigone the little fascist).9 And, speak-

ing of Lacan, as if in cahoots with his model of lack as that which consti-tutes the subject, this Antigone of Anouilhs displaces her desire onto

different pretexts (Lacan would say signifiers) until the transcendental

signified rises up to reveal itself: death. That, at least, is how Anouilhs

Creon reads her. His reading, moreover, is politically expedient and allows

him a guiltless self-righteousness; she had forced his hand, and he had no

choice but to execute her as if in spite of himself.

Indeed, we might say that Anouilhs Creon misreads Antigone much as

Freuds Thanatos, or death drive, is frequently misread: as a desire fordeath. Freuds understanding of Thanatos, however, is as an unconscious

drive of biological (even cellular) origin that is therefore completely sepa-

rate from the will and has nothing to do with desire. Anouilhs Creon, in

other words, performs a failed hermeneutical gesture with Antigone inso-

far as he wants to understand her from the point of view of his own notion

of desire. Not only does Creon get her wrong; he wants us to join him in his

reading of her, and he wants us to read her, to repeat, through his own

concept of desire. That is, Creon (and Anouilhs play as a whole) can only

understand Antigone as she-who-longs-for-death. There is something

that resists this interpretation, however, something that is nostalgic for the

Antigone of Sophocles, who resists interpretation itself in a manner much

more compelling than the ultimately naturalized Antigone of Anouilh.

For what Anouilhs play wants to demonstrate, even as it ultimately mis-

reads with Creon, is that Antigone desires notto desireat least not to

desire in the way the play understands desire to function, which is entirely

from the point of view of Creon.

9. Jacques Lacan,The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959 1960,vol.7ofThe Seminar of Jacques

Lacan,trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1992), p.250; hereafter

abbreviatedEP.



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It is in this sense that Anouilhs Antigone is deeply unfamiliarasAntig-

one. The theologian Gabriel Marcel is on to thismeconnaissancewhen he

writes that Anouilh did not shy from remodeling the character of Antig-

one herself such that it is no longer recognizable. Anouilh mocks the

nobility of tragedy, and the danger in his drama, Marcel continues, is that

pity itself turns constantly to derision. InAntigone, and in Anouilhs drama

as a whole, writes Marcel, there is always a grimacing, but grimacing

cannot be the supreme expression of a theatrical thought.10 He who mis-

recognizes the nobility and grandeur of human drama, Marcel writes in a

prescient tone, condemns himself to being condemned one day in his turn.

To an extent, the theologian is following Sren Kierkegaard here, for

whom the Antigone of Sophocles personifies a fully self-conscious mode of

subjectivity that is for him the mark of modernity. It is a mode, moreover,that is steeped in religion. Kierkegaards Antigone is like Adam in that she

is haunted by sin (the House of Oedipus); she is like Abraham in that she is

silenced by a secret that separates her from other human beings; and she is

like Christ in that her identity lies between absolute suffering and absolute

action. This gives her what Kierkegaards narrator (Aas if in identifi-

cation with Antigone, but that is another matter) calls an extraordinary

passion.11 Her secret, in other words, is generated by another secret: reli-

gious conviction, the name and desire of which in her case is death. We willreturn to this problem of religion that Kierkegaard sees permeating the

Sophocles text but is absent from the Anouilh.

Indeed, in AnouilhsAntigoneCreon speaks for the implied narrator of

the play and secularizes the gestures of the tragedy. When he says, for

example, in the passage I cited, that all Antigone ever really wanted was

death, we are supposed to discover that fact along with him and thus

understand her better with Creon as our guide. The chorus largely sup-

ports his views so that at the end of the play we are expected to join forces

with the chorus in their rather annoyed take on her. Without Antigone,

they complain, everybody would have been left in peace: But now, its

over. They are all at peace after all. All those who were meant to die are

dead. . . . Antigone is calmed now; we will never know what fever pos-

sessed her (JAA, p. 92). We are, as it were, at home with Anouilhs Creon,

and even his Antigone is little more than a troublesome teenager with a

tiresome idee fixe. Such a perspective neutralizes the antinomy that moti-

vates Sophocless play: that is, the absolute contradiction and irreconcil-

10. Gabriel Marcel, De Jezabel a Medee: Le Tragique chez Jean Anouilh, La Revue de

Paris(June1949):105,110.

11. Sren Kierkegaard,Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York,1992), p.159.



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ability of Creon and Antigone. If in Anouilh the tragedy is fully recognized,

the plays refusal to remember religion has the correlative effect of drown-

ing out gender at the same time. The problem becomes law and order

(Creon) as against an adolescent crisis, with Creon performing therapy

sessions on his unruly niece even as he explains to her that she will leave

him no choice but to have her killed. No longer foreign to the polis and to

thought itself, as in Sophocles, Anouilhs Antigone is a spoiled brat whose

misbehavior and stubbornness necessitate her execution in the eyes of the

law; her gender is pretty much beside the point. So too, with the gods

absent, the realms of the dead and the living are blurred into the biological,

rather than conceptual, end of subjectivity; all those who were meant to die

are dead, and whatever fever possessed Antigone has caused her death.

Creon is comfortable again on his throne and alls righted with the world.

In other words, not much has happened in the Anouilh play. What

makes the Sophocles play so disturbing, and so powerful, is precisely that

from their own lights Creon and Antigone are both right; and yet they

cancel each other out (hence we are dissatisfied with black-and-white ren-

ditions such as Heaneys, as Wills complained). In the Sophocles the two

are, as everybody from Hegel to Butler has noted, speaking from different

registers. At least on the face of it, Creon speaks for the state; Antigone

speaks for kinship. Such is the first layer of disharmony between them.

Neither can bend, nor indeed even read (as in decipher), the others moral

compass. This is the first antinomy that Sophocles foregrounds and that

Anouilh domesticates. In this sense, Anouilhs Antigone is close to that of

Jean Racine in his La Thebade. Adieu, says Antigone to Creon in that

play. And she adds, we are nothing but obstacles to each other. I wish to

weep, Creon, and you to rule.12 Racine though it be, the situation is too

clear-cut here as well. What makes the Sophocles text so persistent is that it

maintains an antimony between Creon and Antigone (as with Anouilh

and Racine); and because it maintains the realm of the gods of the under-

world and of the earth, Sophocless play can give us an Antigone who

finally does not belong anywhere.

Not-being-at-home, foreignness, are the hallmarks of Sophocless An-

tigone; but these are possible only if there are boundaries to provide taboo

and unholiness. You, says Teiresias to her menacingly, have no business

with the dead, nor do the gods abovethis is violence you have forcedupon the heavens. Unlike in Anouilh, here (religious) violence and the

12. Jean Racine,La Thebade, ou, Les Freres(1664),Oeuvres compltes,ed. P. Mesnard

(Paris,1885), p.487.



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ensuing avengers (in Teiresiass term) produce the tragedy.13 The vio-

lence itself, moreover, is underlined by Antigones gendera further scan-

dal, in other words. The putting of things where they do not belong, as

Mary Douglas long ago noted, creates the outrage of unholiness. With the

borders between realms provided by the gods, gender too produces a shock

value when it is no longer in its place. Antigones contention that she

belongs neither to the dead nor to the living is an echo of the feminine

subject with agencya third term that reveals the place of danger because

it fits into neither its native category nor the one that is its opposite. Or, put

another way, if Kierkegaard is right, that the truth of subjectivity is always

susceptible to the most radical misunderstanding, such misunderstanding

gets whited out when there is no taboo (as provided by religion and the

category of gender) and no transgression. The tragic must be placed be-yond aesthetics so that, to turn again to Kierkegaard, it allows for a suffer-

ing that participates in its own burden (the secret)passivelyas a

mode of guilt. For Kierkegaard, this is the rebirth of tragedy in modernity.

To the extent that the Anouilh, for example, remains aesthetic (in a Freud

cum Rene Girard-like model, executing Antigone to restore the pleasure

principle of the static in the state), it neither transgresses nor is in excess of

itself. Anouilhs Antigone is less burdened by guilt than by the fear of

bourgeois boredom.In Sophocles, then, there is an incommensurability that is utterly lack-

ing in Anouilh. Sophocless Antigone echoes her leitmotif on homeless-

ness begun inOedipus at Colonus. But if in that play her homelessness is

literal (she does not want to, and fears that in any case she cannot, return to

Thebes)inAntigoneforeignness takes on ontological proportions since

it partakes of what Kierkegaard calls the fellowship of the already dead. It

is not, however, a comfortable fellowship for her: Alive to the place of

corpses, wails Antigone in her final lament, an alien still, never at home

with the living nor the dead.14 Sophocles does not have Creon speak with

the chorus, nor does the play take on his point of view as in Anouilh. The

shifting perspectives of the chorus allow for hearing the prophet Teiresiass

warning. After sending Antigone to her death, Creon assumes that Teir-

esias wants to make a profit from his advice to bury Polyneicess rotting

corpse. Creon arrogantly warns him that human beings fall . . . when they

plead a shameful case so well in hope of profit (A,ll. 104547, p. 194).

Teiresias, however, is pleading the same case as Antigone: there is a sick-

13. Sophocles,Antigone,inThe Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, and

Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth, 1984), ll. 119193, p. 115.

14. Sophocles,Antigone,trans. Wyckoff,Three Tragedies,ll. 850 51, p. 188; hereafter

abbreviatedA.



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ness in the state because the dead want their own; the corpse must be

buried. If Antigone by her own admission belongs neither to the dead nor

to the living, or to both, Creons own problem is that he distinguishes but

badly between the two realms: For youve confused, Teiresias tells him,

theupperandlowerworlds.Yousentalifetosettleinatomb;youkeepup

here that which belongs below, the corpse unburied (A, ll. 106871, p.

195). The threat to Creon is as grave as the earlier one to Antigone; things

are being moved from their proper placea blasphemy hypostatized in

Sophocles by religion (and, therefore, the notion of the holy). Rather than

joining forces with the conventional voice of the chorus as in Anouilh, the

Sophocles play has its Antigone understoodor at least recognizedby

another marginal figure, another subject who falls outside the norm in his

excess: Teiresias. And insofar as the prophet turns out to be right, the playimplicitly supports Antigone, even if it does not understand her.

In theAntigone of Sophocles, what emerges are two responses to desire:

that of Creon, which we can recognize as the Symbolic in Lacans sense,

and that of Antigone, which we precisely donotrecognize, since it has no

obvious place inside the registers of either kinship or the state, nor in the

place of the living or dead. If Creon confuses registers, Antigone falls out-

side all registers, realms, nomenclature. She is in herselfin excess, a figural

catachresis, the emblem of which is her entombment while she is stillliving. She does not, in other words, belonghence, her foreignness. Less

a desire for death, Antigones is the desire not to desire the law as it is

offered to her; she stands, she says, for the unwritten . . . laws (A, l. 455, p.

174). Creon, on the other hand, desires that the state, and his authority

within it, be obeyed without question. Do you realize you are talking to

a king? he asks Teiresias (A,l. 1057, p. 194). This intersection of knot-

ted desires and of transgressed registers are absent from Anouilhs text,

but this is one of the aspects Hegel considers closely in the Antigoneof

Sophocles.

In The Philosophy of Fine Art, Hegel notes that the Greeks had two types

of tragic situations: the first was between ethical life in its social univer-

sality and the family as the natural ground of moral relations.15 The sec-

ond has to do with the individual who commits acts that have dire

consequences but does not commit them consciously, acting under the

directing providence of the gods (HT, p. 69). The best example of the first,

says Hegel, is Antigone and of the second,Oedipus at Colonus.We might

15. G. W. F. Hegel,Hegel on Tragedy: Selections from The Phenomenology of Mind,

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, The Philosophy of Fine Art, and Lectures on the

History of Philosophy,trans. F. P. B. Osmaston et al., ed. Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci

(Smyrna, Del., 2001), p. 68; hereafter abbreviatedHT.



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note here that Antigone is present in both of Hegels examples, for it is she

who will accompany her father to Colonus. For Hegel, if there is no har-

mony between the two spheres in this first type of tragedy (that is, between

oikos and the polis), there can be no moral life. The problem inAntigone is

that she reverences the ties of blood-relationship, the gods of the nether

world (HT,p. 68). Creon, on the other hand, reveres Zeus, the para-

mount Power of public life and the commonwealth (HT,p.68). And yet

for Hegel there is a symmetry between the two: both Antigone and Creon

are under the power of that against which they battle, as well as under the

power of that which they uphold. Both, in other words, have obligations of

respect to the royalty of which they are part (the royal prerogative is an

obligation [HT,p. 73]); and both have familial obligations since they are

in kinship with one another. The fact that each chooses the other obliga-tion to combat is what for Hegel makes the success of the play. Both are

seized and broken by that very bond which is rooted in the compass of

their own social existence (HT, p. 73). Given such a symmetry, writes

Hegel, the Antigone of Sophocles is from this point of view in my judg-

ment the most excellent and satisfying work of art (HT,p. 74).

I have said that for Hegel, Creon worships the god of the heavens, Zeus,

and Antigone the dei inferni of Hades. For Hegel, this means that Antigone

reveres as well feeling, Love and kinship, whereas Creons deities are thedaylight gods of free and self-conscious, social, and political life (HT,p.

178). What is lacking in the Anouilh play, religion, Hegel takes as a given in

the Sophocles. And within that given, the central words for Hegel that

describe tragedy in general and the Antigone of Sophocles in particular, are

combat, the search for a moral existence, sacred duty, obligation,

feeling, Love and kinship, pathos, and so on. In thePhenomenology of

Spirit, Hegel argues that Antigones being lies ultimately in the ethical law,

which becomes hersubstance(HT,p.280). Antigones crime (burying her

brother) is a conscious one, which for Hegel means that what is ethical is

actual in her: Acting expresses precisely the unity of reality and the sub-

stance (HT,pp. 27980). The guilt, Hegel notes with some satisfaction,

will be all the purer.

What we do not find in Hegels reading of Antigone is a theory of desire

(Begierde).16 On the contrary, we find the lack of desire as an explanation

for Antigones insistence on burying her brother; the brother, in the eyes of

the sister, is for Hegel a being whose very nature is unperturbed by de-

16. That occurs in thePhenomenology of Spirit,wherein the doubling of consciousness

becomes self-consciousness: self-consciousness is Desire in general (Hegel,Phenomenology of

Spirit,trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford,1977], 167, p. 105; hereafter abbreviatedPS). The splitting of

the subject that ensues is closely related, it seems to me, to Lacans mirror stage.



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sire. The two are ethically similar in nature because their recognition is

pure and unmixed with any sexual relation (HT, p. 269). Because of this,

and because they are of the same blood, the loss of a brother is irreparable,

precisely what Antigone says of Polyneices in Sophocless play (seeA, l. 910,

p. 190). There, she says to Creon: One husband gone, I might have

found another, / or a child from a new man in first childs place, / but

with my parents hid away in death, / no brother, ever, could spring up

from me (A,ll. 90912, p.190). It is because of this lack of (sexual) desire

that for Hegel the moment of individual self-hood, recognizing and being

recognized, can here assert its right, because it is bound up with the balance

and equilibrium resulting from their being of the same blood (HT, p.

269). We can grant Hegel this point, although it is at best a murky one.

After all, Oedipus was Antigones brother as well (three-quartersbrother?), and the family did not make incest preclude sexual desire, as we

know.

Can we locate Antigones desire in Hegel, if it is not for her brother, not

for her fiance, not for death, not for life? Hegels point, begun in thePhe-

nomenology, is that desire is self-consciousness. That is, when self-

consciousness return[s] from otherness, from itself as being of the

world of sense and perception, it desires a unity with itself (PS,167, p.

105). This desire sets up the master/slave conflict, which follows a few pageslater. In that conflict, it will be remembered, self-consciousness is faced by

another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself (PS, 179, p. 111).Itsees

its own self in the other, and so must supersede this otherness of itself in

order to become certain of itself as the essential being, and to overcome

otherness in itself (PS,180, p. 111). So it makes sense that Hegel does not

see desire in Antigone; her relationship to her brother is a type of mirror

image to her (being of the same blood), but not of the type that redou-

bles self-consciousness in desire. There is no dialectic of recognitionneeded between Antigone and Polyneices. Rather, her brother binds An-

tigone to balance and equilibrium because their mutual recognition is

based on sameness, on blood ties that preclude the hostility engendered by

a veritable other. Antigone is thus before the master/slave conflict in Hegel.

There can be no desire in Hegels sense for Antigone. She is in excess

because she is the transcendental good; and because she is an excess of

good she is too good to live. Nothing could be further from the derisive

approach to life that characterizes Anouilhs Antigone, who says no to life

because it will become too colorless, habitual, passionless. On the contrary,Hegels Antigone is an excess of the good who cannot accept, much less

adhere to, the ethical norms of the state. Anouilhs Antigone wants to keep

the passion of youth and prefers death to losing it. She is not in excess; she



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suggests (rather obviously) modernity, in the tradition begun, for exam-

ple, by Baudelaire. Excess of good, that which she lacks, may be one way of

understanding why with Sophocless Antigone excess can be understood

to mean foreign.

Hegel is not alone in reading Sophocless Antigone as excess. Excess is

central to Simone Weil in her reading of Sophocless Antigone. (It is worth

noting here that Weil was called Antigone by her friends). Excess for Weil,

however, is tied to love. If Antigone wants to honor the gods of the under-

world it is because of excess of love and not because of kinship or goodness

in Hegels sense. Weil will tie this excess of love, extreme and absurd, to

that which led Christ to the Cross. (In this she follows Kierkegaard in

part.) She continues: It was Justice, companion of the gods, in the other

world, who dictated this surfeit of love, and not any right at all. Rights haveno direct connexion with love.17 For Weil, Antigones decision to obey the

gods of the underworld is born of what to theLebensweltis a scandalous

sense of justice, a justice that has nothing to do with kinship, but rather

with excess, surfeit, in a word: caritas. As such, this justice as Weil describes

it is precisely in akingdom not of this world;Antigone does not belong in

Creons realm of laws. It was not Zeus, she says to Creon, who made

that order. Nor did that Justice who lives with the gods below mark out

such laws to hold among mankind (A,ll. 45052, p. 174). Creon argueswith her, of course, but she retorts, death yearns for equal law for all the

dead (A,l. 519, p.176). In other words, one might say in Lacanian terms

that neither Antigone nor Christ is willing to be constituted by the Sym-

bolic. At the same time, in reading Weil and Hegel on the Antigone of

Sophocles, one sees that figure as a litmus test for a given philosophical

focus (or obsession): an excess of the good for Hegel; an excess of justice

and love for Weil. Both of these notions of excess, let us note, are rooted in

the gods.

Anouilhs Antigone, lost as she is in a dreamy love of death, has lost all

of her religiosity. Marcel grumpily refers to this lack of gods. No religious

atmosphere, he says, permeates the play. But if religion does indeed per-

meate the Antigone of Sophocles, we might understand religion as that

which is in excess precisely because, to return to my earlier point, it allows

for borders (the realm of the living versus that of the dead; male versus

female), that which can neither be codified nor apprehended by the state,

though the state is certainly codified by the gods in Sophocles. This excess

within the religious in Sophocless world is with the gods who rule be-

17. Simone Weil, Human Personality, trans. Richard Rees,The Simone Weil Reader,

trans. Rees et al., ed. George A. Panichas (New York, 1977), p.325.



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lowHadesthose gods whom Creon accuses Antigone of serving, part

of that dreaded region where there is no light of day, as Creon notes. Thus

Sophocless Antigone is linked to death as that which is beyond under-

standing. As Lacan puts it, Antigone is the heroine. Shes the one who

shows the way of the gods (EP,p.262). Anouilhs Antigone, on the other

hand, is drawn to death for personal reasons having to do with the social:

expectations, habit, custom. She does not show the way to the gods; she

shows the way to the refusal of the social. While such a stance may say

something about the resistance in France during the Second World War, it

says nothing about the notion of conceptual taboo, of gender and religion

as charting the imagined outlines of sovereign subjectivity, of unholiness

as that which is in the wrong place.

What does it mean to ignore religion in the context of Antigones trag-edy? Kant said that religion without ethics is superstition; Hegel noted, on

the other hand, that ethics without religion is an empty intellectual exer-

cise. In an early text, Hegel calls religion the nurse of free men and the

state their mother.18 The rivalry is clear, gendered in the feminine, for

both state and religion are understood by Hegel as that which brings into

being and nurtures man, respectively. In theAntigone of Sophocles, the

gods of both the upper and the lower regions need to be satisfied. They

engage different ethical norms. Antigone obeys those from below; Creonthose from above. Antigones excess, then, is in part this identification with

the dead, this love, to return to Weil, that is in excess because it identifies

with those who have suffered. She identifies with that which is not her

place. Sophocless play supports Weils notion that Antigone lives an ex-

cess of love. Indeed, Creon says to Antigone, Then go down there, if you

must love, and love / the dead. No woman rules me while I live (A, ll.

52425, p.177). Excessas we know from Lacan, Freud, Friedrich Nietz-

sche, and Georges Bataille, to name a fewis one aspect of the feminine.

Anouilhs Antigone does not transcend the social realm; she simply

rejects its hegemony and the waning of passion necessitated by living.

Sophocless Antigone somehow manages toignorethe constraints of the

law or what Lacan calls the Symbolic. She refuses to obey Creons dictum

and declares that Acheron, the river of Hades, is to be her mate. It is not by

coincidence, of course, that I bring up psychoanalysis in this context. As

Steiner and others have noted, until about 1905 theAntigone of Sophocless

trilogy was the most known and most appreciated; Oedipus at Colonus

followed, andOedipus Rexcame in third. But with the advent of FreudsOedipus complex, and the popularity of the new talking cure, Oedipus Rex

18. Quoted in Steiner,Antigones,p. 23.



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came into first place, where it has since firmly remained. Desire itself, we

are frequently reminded, is a modern invention of psychoanalysis. But

Plato (as usual) sets the ground. For him there are two desires: the first

moves the soul itself alone; this is the realm of the immortal and disem-

bodied souls. The second occurs when the soul loses her wings because she

desires something outside herself and thus descends to the ground where

she will be weighted down by a body. Thus the body in Plato is born of

desire.

Desire has become astonishingly central more recently. Freuds Oedipal

triangle is at the heart of modern notions of desire. Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guatarri, inAnti-Oedipus, argue that desire is indeed excessive, but that as

such it should be understood as productive, not destructive.19 Michel Fou-

cault tries to sideline the whole problem in the first volume ofThe Historyof Sexuality, but by the second volume he is asking his readers, what pro-

duces desire? how does it work?20 Julia Kristeva, using Lacans notion of the

Symbolic, situates the problem of desire within the semiotic and the very

materiality of language itself.21 Luce Irigaray faults both Plato and Aristotle

for vesting desire in the masculine. On her account, they attempt to define

the feminine as passive in order to retain the fantasy of masculine auto-

genesis.22 But in all of this it is of course Lacan whose theory is the most

visible. Using the death drive from Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Princi-ple as a metaphor, Lacan argues that desire is a case of always displacing,

of never being content to gain a desired object, until the subject returns full

circle to the place where there is no longer any tension, no longer any

desire.

That place, of course, is death. That is why I said, earlier, that when

Anouilhs Antigone shifts her reason for dying from needing to bury her

brother to not wishing to become middle-aged (which is what it finally

boils down to), it is as if she is enacting Lacans notion that desire always

(unconsciously) attaches itself to different signifiers. The signified, how-

everdeathremains. Anouilhs Antigone wants to die so as to remain as

she is. Her displaced desires are unconscious, such that she can be seen as

the enactment (somewhat like the circulating purloined letter) of a sub-

jectivity constituted by lack. The Antigone of Sophocles, on the other

19. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti-Oedipus,vol.1ofCapitalism and

Schizophrenia,trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, 1983).

20. See Michel Foucault,The Use of Pleasure,trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 2ofThe History of

Sexuality(New York, 1985).21. See Julia Kristeva,Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans.

Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, ed. Roudiez (New York, 1980).

22. See Luce Irigaray,An Ethics of Sexual Difference,trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C.

Gill (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993).



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hand, in her very insistence on accepting only the gods below transgresses

even as she reveres the boundaries that allow for religion.

In his seminarThe Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that Sopho-

cless Antigone must be seen as something akin to Kants limit concept or

ate. Indeed, Lacan describes her like the sun, so splendid it cannot be

looked at directly. And he adds, Yet that image is at the center of tragedy

(EP,p. 247). After telling us that Antigone is a mystery, Lacan (like Freud

defining the indefinable uncanny) begins to tell us how this mystery works.

(She is a mystery which up till now has never been articulated [EP,p.

247]. But Lacan, his seminar makes clear, is going to articulate it.) After

arguing that Antigone blurs registers, because she blurs the distinction

between life and death, he then tells us that she is in the Imaginary register.

After telling us that she is at the limit of human experience, he then informsus that it is essential to situate that limit if a certain phenomenon is to

emerge through reflection (EP, p. 260). But ate is precisely that which

cannot be situated. And it turns out that, for Lacan, when Antigone goes

beyond the limits of human experience her desire aims at the following

the beyond ofate (EP,p. 263).

Sophocless Antigone is not, for Lacan, a limit concept at all finally.

Rather, she is herself in a limit zone, between life and death (see EP, p. 272).

Instead of looking beyond ate, now Antigone is herself an image of tragedy.Moreover (as in Weil), she is also related to Christ by Lacan, but in what

turns out to be Oedipal (in both senses). Lacan will tie her to the famous

Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Lacan claims that Sophocless An-

tigone says, I am dead and I desire death, and thus what we have here,

he says, is an illustration of the death instinct (EP,p. 281). A page later,

Lacan adds, Antigone pushes to the limit the realization of something that

might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates

that desire (EP,p.282

). Turning Antigone into a kind of Salome withoutthe veil, Lacan notes as well, the desire of the mother is the origin of

everything. The desire of the mother is the founding desire of the whole

structure (EP,p. 283). Jocasta, the mother, has long since killed herself, so

that Lacans Sophoclean Antigone might be seen as mimetic of her mothers

desiremimetic of a desire for death, given a life in the polis that cannot

match her ethos, and is as such unbearable, and convictions, which do not fit

into the Lacanian registers. Lacan must read a desire for death in her because

he cannot place her; he puts therefore his failure at taxonomy onto Antigone.

But we must not be fooled. Lacan empties Sophocless play of its dangerousmixing of realms and turns it into a kind of flattened Anouilh. Desire becomes

the protagonist of the tragedy for Lacan, and the implications and boundaries

transgressed by the unholy are elided into displacement.



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Indeed, the Antigone of Sophocles cannot be circumscribed thus. She

does not want to die so much as she wants to escape Creons laws and

return to her family (all, with the exception of Ismene, in Hades). The

extent to which Antigone is outside the law, outside the Symbolic, is evi-

dent in her famous last lament. She laments for herself because in her view

there is no one left to do it for her or, at least, no one she would permit to

lament her. Her own people, she says, are mostly in Hades; and she goes to

Hades without a friend (A, l. 919, p. 190). Or again, she descends to Hades

in her words, with no friends mourning (A, l. 848, p. 188) and un-

wept . . . unfriended (A, l. 878, p. 189). So she does the lamenting and

orating herself. But the gendering gets blurred and fairly complicated here.

AsCharlesSegalpointsout,inancientGreece,wailingandlamenting (threnos)

is the role of women.23 Funeral speeches(epitaphios),on the other hand,and burial itself are the province of men. Antigone performs both; she

wails for herself in the feminine mode (Oh tomb! Oh marriage-

chamber!) in the ululations that are traditionally feminine; but she also

delivers her own funeral oration (Men of my fathers land, you see me go /

my last journey. My last sight of the sun, / then never again) in a manner

both lucid and unrelenting (A, ll. 891, 810, pp. 187, 189). Her lament is

private because it is in the royal enclave of Creon; but it is simultaneously

public because it is before the chorus. This confusion of gender rolespublic and private, masculine and feminine acts, the controlled and the

hystericalthis transgression, is one way in which it becomes evident how

this Antigone does not fit even as she acknowledges transgression. She

remains foreign in the Sophocles text, as if the play were enacting this

figure as an instance of that which cannot be defined or placed within the

norm.

So she performs her own lament in the Sophocles, and among other

things she erases the existence of her sister in so doing: Look, leaders of

Thebes, she cries as she is being led to her execution, I am last of your

royal line (A, l. 941, p. 191). Blood ties are thus shaky at best. Antigone will

find her marriage chamber in her tomb; her virginity is to be eternal. If

sacrificed virgins are led to their deaths as brides of Hades,24 Antigone

sacrifices herself to Hades as the virgin who is, in the words of Kierkegaard,

the bride of God.25 None of this is in Anouilhby which I do not, of

course, mean that he should follow Sophocles. The impoverishment of the

23. See Charles Segal,Sophocles Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society(Cambridge, Mass.,1995).

24. See Nicole Loraux,Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman,trans. Anthony Forster

(Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 37.

25. Kierkegaard,Either/Or,p. 155.



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Anouilh lies in its inability to rise above the social. In that sense, Anouilh

himself conflates with his own Creon, his own Antigone. The inability to

rise above the social speaks, as it were, to modernity.

The means of death is gendered as well. Death by hanging is unusual for

a woman in ancient Greek tragedy, as Nicole Loraux notes.26 The majority

of women in Greek tragedy kill themselves or are sacrificed. Men are mur-

dered. Here again, Sophocless Antigone distinguishes herself. Not only

does she choose to die by her own hand, she does so by hanging. Hanging

is considered particularly dishonorable in ancient Greece because it yields

a formless death (aschemon). Of course, Jocasta, Antigones mother (and

grandmother) also hangs herself, in her case with a rope. But Antigone

hangs herself with her veil of virginity, symbol (in the words of Loraux) of

her sex. Thus the mixture of gendered roles: she is led to her execution likea man, but she hangs herself (already unusual) with a veil of femininity.

Even if we separate, as Butler asks us to, the social from kinship, we are

left with the question of Antigones desire. In Antigones Claim, Butler

looks at Antigones insistence on execution as a means of triangulating the

Symbolic law/kinship/death. For Butler, structuralisms refusal to separate

the social and the familial (kinship) lies at the heart of the problem with

analyzing Antigone. Her story, Butler argues, seems to show that desire

leads to death when it defies symbolic norms. Butlers critique of ClaudeLevi-Strauss and structuralism in general is well taken, and forcefully ar-

gued, but it leaves Antigone floundering in the wake of that discussion

because it secularizes her crisis and elides the question of the gods. Irigaray,

in her reading of the play, argues that the blood remaindered after Anti-

gones death maintains the authority of the state, thus rendering the fem-

inine into this remainder (woman as supplement, as a sex which is not

one). Death or desire: these are the two lenses through which the Antigone

of Sophocles seems always doomed to be peered at. Sophocless Antigone

embodies the extent to which the woman with agency has no place within

the prevailing (masculine) structures, economies, architectures.

The West, moreover, has an abhorrence of mixing the living and the

dead, as well as the present and the past, as race and/or queer theorists have

been recently insisting.27 Perhaps the Western notion of subjectivity itself is

the difficulty; its gendering is an obfuscation that detracts from the real

difficulty. There is something of death in subjectivity, something that its

26. See Loraux,Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman.27. I am thinking here for example of the work of Carol McClain, Michael Grosso, Paula

Gunn Allen, Mae Henderson, and Patricia Holland, to name but a few, who argue that in

African and Native American cultures, for example, the reverence of ancestors maintains the

continuity between life and death and between past and present.



18/19

gendering helps to veil. Anouilhs Antigone is further flattened by the

avoidance of any consideration of death and subjectivity; the crisis is per-

sonal, as I have noted, thus evading the threat of death to the state and the

social as well as to the subjects controlled by the state.

Sophocles leaves the figure of Antigone a mystery, a supplement refus-

ing the bounds of any economy. The religious aspect to Sophocless An-

tigone is that which allows for taboo and thus boundaries, without which,

I have been arguing, there is no strong gender and thus no notion of Antigone

as a scandal, as a radicality, as an existantwho is woman. Antigones religiosity

is a problem for the nation-state; but the play makes no sense without it. On

the other hand, if religion allows for boundaries, as I have been arguing, and

allows therefore for taboo as well for concepts such as gender, we need remind

ourselves that subjectivity is in itself a notion of boundary. Subjectivity is aconcept that maintains the unbridgeability between categories, indeed that

uses religion and gender specifically to maintain dyadic unbridgeability.

Froma Zeitlin makes the intriguing suggestion that Antigone blurs the

distinction between life and death, thus overvaluing death itself.28 Once

again, we are seeing the Antigone of Sophocles as mixing registers that are

meant to be mutually exclusive. The real point may be that subjectivity,

with woman so consistently depicted as other, is in itself a self-protective

but imagined boundary between self and death. The boundary is not onlynecessary, in other words, to demonstrate transgression and thus radical-

ity; the boundary is also a shield allowing for the concept of subjectivity in

itself. The Antigone of Sophocles is powerful because her very religiosity

produces the architecture undergirding her shocking agency as feminine. At

the same time, however, the extent to which this figure of Antigone embodies

betweenness (the cliched space into which woman has been placedone

thinks of Derridas work on the hymen, for example) puts into question not

only subjectivity, but the dyads (for example, gender), which it must insist

upon and their concomitant hypostasizations of noncontiguity or spaces be-

tween them.

This is perhaps the rather terrifying suggestion, albeit certainly a textu-

ally unconscious one, of the Antigone of Sophocles. She shows the extent

to which subjectivity is masculinized, on the one hand, and the extent to

which the boundary is necessary for veiling the thought of death, on the

other. She shows where subjectivity is at risk and simultaneously that it is

a necessity for thought itself. Religion may be the manifestation of this

28. See Froma Zeitlin, Thebes: Theatre of Self and Society in Athenian Drama, inNothing

to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context,ed. John J. Winkler and Zeitlin

(Princeton, N.J.,1990), pp.130 67.



19/19

conundrum. Kierkegaard was probably right then when he called Antig-

one she-who-is-to-come (his echoes of the second coming are inescapable,

though his immediate interest in this case was modernity).29 The more

modern readings of Antigone betray the flimsiness of the concept of sub-

jectivity and, contradictorily, its necessity. But they also betray the extent

to which the traditional notions of gender no longer work inside the

boundaries of the imagined sovereign subject. We need to find something

else to trace the boundaries. The desire for subjectivity may in fact be,

finally, what we rethink and remetaphorize as religion, the gods. More-

over, contra Hegel, desire may be the flight from self-consciousness, of

which the Western notion of subjectivity is the most obvious symptom.

Anouilh may bore us with his domestication of the sacred, his insistence

on secularization, his flabby move toward epistemological decorum. Butthe Antigone of Sophocles hints at the extent to which the binaries of the

sacred are far more porous than their apparent intransigence and certainty

would have us believe. In her desire for a kinship with death, and in her

very transgression of registers, this Antigone of antiquity suggests the ex-

tent to which the boundary itself may be our own necessary tragedy.

29. See Kierkegaard,Either/Or.


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