Antigone

Antigone's Nature

“…Creon feels this threat palpably, seeing in it his own potential emasculation, which would, in psychoanalytic terms, dispossess him of the phallus and would consequently exclude him from the polis . He articulates this potential in announcing that “it's clear enough that I'm no man, but she's the man, / if she can get away with holding power like this” (Sophocles 1998, 484–85) 4 . Though Antigone does not attempt to and has no interest in becoming a man, Creon voices the threat she poses in sexual terms: the threat of destabilizing his own male sexuality and, with it, the masculine order of the polis , which cannot incorporate irreducible sexual difference within its bounds.…”

“…It is not that Antigone “sides” with the divine law of Hades against the civil law that Creon proclaims but that she resists Creon's disjunction of divine and human legal substances. This becomes clear when, on trial before Creon, she testifies that Creon's edict forbidding Polyneices' burial (“none may shroud him in a tomb or wail for him; / he must be left unwept, unburied, treasure sweet/for watching birds to feed on at their pleasure” [Sophocles 1998, 28–30]) both deviates from the law of Hades and lacks the backing of Zeus, with whom Creon aligns himself: “It was not Zeus who made this proclamation; / nor was it Justice dwelling with the gods below/who set in place such laws as these for humankind; / nor did I think your proclamations had such strength/that, mortal as you are, you could outrun those laws/that are the gods', unwritten and unshakeable” (Sophocles 1998, 450–55) 5 . Along these lines, Antigone points to the way in which the Sophoclean drama that bears her name serves as an inaugural moment for occidental religion.…”

“…This is due in large part to the unwritten status of the divine law to which she maintains allegiance. (This perhaps contributes to the chorus's description of her as autonomos , since they, too, are unable to read the law to which Antigone remains faithful (see Sophocles 1998, 821). Her other law is unreadable because, as unwritten, it does not present itself, make itself present, as a visual or visible text that a scopophilic Creon can read.…”

“…But even her dialectical encryption cannot absolutely subdue and sublate her disruptive potential, which shows itself in a line she utters just before she enters the tomb in which she will live (and die): “Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred” (¶470, citing Sophocles 1998, 926) 14 . This is the only line from Sophocles' tragic drama that Hegel cites, only once, in his Phenomenology of Spirit .…”

“…To avow that “because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred” would be extraordinarily uncharacteristic for Antigone, whether considered from within Sophocles' text or on the terms set by Hegel's own ethical hermeneutic. Hegel discounts the line's irreducibly contingent quality, heightened by its dramatic context of divine judgment: “If this is viewed as something fine, / I'll find out, after suffering, that I was wrong” (Sophocles 1998, 925–26) or “If the gods really agree with this, / Then suffering should teach me to repent my sin” (Sophocles 2001, 925–26). Antigone's is not a causal but a hypothetical statement, an as if , in which she does not put much credence.…”