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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Forum Modernes Theater
- Sprache: Englisch
This anthology provides some of today's most relevant views on Sophocles' classic and its many interpretations from an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural perspective. It critically investigates the work of artists and theoreticians who have occupied Antigone ever since she appeared onstage in antiquity, dealing with questions of the relationship between performance and philosophy and of how Antigone can be appropriated to criticize reigning discourses. Occupy Antigone makes an original contribution to the vibrant life the mythical figure enjoys in contemporary performance practice and theory.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Occupy Antigone
Tradition, Transition and Transformation in Performance
Charlotte Gruber / Katharina Pewny / Luk Van den Dries / Simon Leenknegt
A. Francke Verlag Tübingen
© 2016 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen www.francke.de • [email protected]
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E-Book-Produktion: pagina GmbH, Tübingen
Inhalt
Introducing Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation
Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt
The articles on Antigone collected in this anthology are based on contributions to the international conference Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation, which took place on 18 and 19 March 2014 in Ghent, Belgium. This conference was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. As part of the research-branch on contemporary tragedy within the Research Centre Studies in Performing Arts and Media (S:PAM) of Ghent University, the conference was organized by Katharina Pewny and Charlotte Gruber (both involved in the BOF-funded project Antigone in/as Transition, 2012–2016) in collaboration with Luk Van den Dries and the Research Centre for Visual Poetics of the University of Antwerp.
Being a result of the conference, this anthology puts together some of today’s most relevant perspectives on the tragedy Antigone from a variety of different fields – in the first place perspectives with an outlook on the significance of the tragedy in terms of (especially contemporary) performance practice and theoretical reflections with regard to the notion of performativity. This anthology thus provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to Antigone from a performance studies angle. In doing so, this specialized issue draws attention to what could easily be called a boom of the tragedy’s occurrence and relevance in both theatre spaces and academia, which unravelled ever since the turn of the millennium and has just taken on momentum again during the last five years. This is apparent in the multitude of very recent publications addressing Antigone in particular, such as The Returns of Antigone. Interdisciplinary Essays,1Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor. New Essays on Jaques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,2 and Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery.3 These were preceded by, for instance, Les Antigones contemporaines: de 1945 à nos jours,4 and Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora.5
Hans-Thies Lehmann, one of the most influential figures in discourses on contemporary performance strategies, published a contribution to Tragödie – Trauerspiel – Spektakel in 2007,6 which preceded his extensive publication Tragödie und Dramatisches Theater that appeared in 2013.7 These publications demonstrate the overlooked relevance of tragedy in postdramatic theatre. In a chapter on what he calls “Das Modell Antigone” (not to be confused with the Antigonemodell by Bertolt Brecht), Lehmann has yet again assigned a special position to the figure of Antigone. It is Antigone whom he calls “the embodiment of tragedy”.8
Occupy Antigone elaborates on the neglect of the vast multitude of performances of Antigone, while at the same time providing a scholarly encounter between theory and theatre practice. This publication is hence located between – and inspired by – specialized anthologies such as Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism9 and Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage.10
These publications reveal a trend of radically rethinking the canonical classic and critically engage with the heritage and legacies formed by earlier interpretations. Within the German speaking humanities, and particularly under the influence of Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s influential interpretation, Antigone had come to mark the conflict-laden transition from an ethics of the family and divine law to an ethics of the state and humanism.11 Since Hegel’s account, however, the myth of Antigone and its essential dynamics have been read in a great number of ways rather contesting his position. In 1984, George Steiner published a versatile analysis of the Antigone myth in various artistic, cultural and intellectual fields.12 Therein, the author describes Antigone as “object of obsession from the end of the eighteenth century until the present”.13 In twentieth-century French academia, Antigone entered psychoanalysis mainly due to Jacques Lacan,14 whose emphasis on the heroin’s death-drive was later radically criticized by his former student Luce Irigaray.15 She accused Lacan of denying and undermining female desire and marked an important moment in early feminism. Hegel, Lacan and Irigaray have all been crucial influences on Judith Butler’s quintessential publication Antigone’s Claim.16 Butler, in contrast to Hegel, points out the linkages between the symbolic orders of language, the family and the state. Similar themes had been taken up before in the cryptic deconstructionist writing of the literary-philosophical text collage Glas by Jaques Derrida.17 It is interesting that in theory on Antigone (and Antigone in theory), particularly against the background of Butler’s and Derrida’s publications, the fields of psychoanalysis and philosophy seem to find an important meeting point. Since then, different proclamations of the notion of an ‘Antigone Complex’ played a role in publications by Cecilia Sjöholm18 and Bernard Stiegler,19 whose work frequently crosses the borders between philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Occupy Antigone investigates the vibrant life – since the beginning of this millennium – of a mythical figure that is after all more than 2500 years old. One of the earliest records of Antigone, mentioning her as being one of the daughters of Oedipus, is a fragment of Pherecydes of Athens that dates from around the beginning of the fifth century BCE.20 The first known tragedy in which Antigone appeared was Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, which probably premiered in 467BCE.21 It is of course mainly due to the tragedy entitled Antigone, which Sophocles wrote around 441BCE, that the figure became and remained important, especially on theatre stages. Besides the original text, famous twentieth-century adaptations, such as the one by Bertolt Brecht (1948) and those written by Jean Anouilh (1944) and Jean Cocteau (1922), continue to inspire today’s theatre makers. Performances that are built around the mythical figure of Antigone are hence an exceptionally rich and ever-growing field of research for performance analysis. First and foremost, there is an immense amount of material from the boom of re-stagings of ancient tragedies since the 1980s, and contemporary stagings of Antigone are found in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and India. Antigone adaptations have, for example, told the story of the founding of the nation of Ghana (Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Chioce, Ghana, 1962) or critiqued the neo-colonialism at the turn of the century (Femi Òsófisan’s Tègònni, USA, 1994). The forbidden burial of one’s kin provides a point of departure for Latin American versions of Antigone, for example in Argentina and Peru, where civilians were abducted by military regimes in the second half of the twentieth century (Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa, Argentina, 1986 and José Watanabe’s Antígona, Peru, 2000). There is especially in Africa a continuing trend of theatrical, postcolonial deconstructions of the classic that is a part of Western heritage. This might partly have to do with the renowned drama The Island (South Africa, 1973) by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in which two prisoners of the apartheid era prison Robben Island prepare to perform Antigone for the other prisoners. Two more recent African plays have gained a similar level of popularity, namely Òsófisan’s Tègònni and Koffi Kwahulé’s Bintou (France, 1997).
But also in Europe and the United States the amount of Antigone performances in recent years is strikingly high. Some productions even travel to different continents, often actualizing the tragedy by building it up around recent political issues. In 2012, Volker Lösch, known for his controversial choruses for which he often uses amateurs from specific, marginalized groups, presented his Antigona Oriental in Uruguay. In this performance, he worked with Uruguayan women that were victims of political persecution and imprisonment during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. Flemish director Ivo van Hove, who works across Europe and the United States, chose, on the contrary, a deliberately unspecific setting, starring Oscar-winning French actress Juliette Binoche as Antigone and using a new translation by T.S. Eliot Prize winning poet Anne Carson (Antigone, UK, 2014). Besides the slightly grimmer translation she did for Van Hove,22 Carson published together with Bianca Stone a wonderfully crafted (hand-lettered and illustrated), witty book entitled Antigonick in 2012.23 In California, theatre company Shotgun Players made a very dedicated effort to bring the aesthetics of the book to the stage (Antigonick, USA, 2015). At Paris-Sorbonne University, as part of the Theater, Performance, Philosophy conference in 2014, Ben Hjorth organized a performative public reading with Judith Butler as Kreon: a public proof of the intense link between academia, new translations of classic texts and innovative performance practice. Roy Williams’s Antigone: a play for today’s streets is another exciting, inventive adaptation. Translated in gang-slang, the tragedy was first performed by Pilot Theatre in the United Kingdom in 2014. Another example worth mentioning is Dutch dramatist Lot Vekemans’s monologue of Ismene entitled Zus Van(“Sister of”), which received many lauding reviews.24 It was produced in Belgium and the Netherlands by Allan Zipson (2005–2013) as well as in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, directed by Stephan Kimmig in 2014 during the annual Autorentheatertage. Previously, Kimmig was the director of Ödipus Stadt, a performance that combines Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus the King with Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and Euripides’ The Phoenician Women (also at Deutsches Theater, 2012). This performance was, among other cities, invited to Prague, Santiago de Chile and Beijing. Among the other performances that combine Antigone with other tragedies are kReon by Jorgen Cassier (Belgium, 2009), Ödipus/Antigone by Michael Thalheimer (Germany, 2009) and These Seven Sicknesses by Sean Graney (USA, 2012). The list can be extended almost endlessly and gives us only a peek at the prominence of Antigone on contemporary stages. The limited amount of publications that actually consider performance practice reveals that research on contemporary performances of Antigone are still at the very beginning in both theatre and performance studies.
The title of the conference and this resulting anthology Occupy Antigone refers to the amount of projects, publications and people occupied with Antigone. ‘Occupation’ is of course a term that strongly echoes political force. Especially in postcolonial discourses, histories of occupation are addressed as being related to violence and oppression. Occupation, however, and this is particularly true for the global counteractions of the Occupy Movement, can also refer to bottom-up approaches to resistance and empowerment. Occupation can then be understood as an act of seizing a certain object, usurping it, collectively using it in a different way and thereby giving new meaning to it. The contributions collected in this volume emphasize the political impact of performance practice and academic writing with regard to present sociopolitical realities.
Three key sections form the structure of this collection: “Antigone’s Transformed Heritage”, “Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance” and “Antigone’s Scenes of Death”. In the first section questions are raised such as: what were the links between philosophy, art and performance and the figure of Antigone in the past? What is the state of these relations today? Within which philosophical frameworks do we encounter Antigone today? What is the tragic element in these frameworks? Are there connections between changes in how the tragic is conceptualized and changes in how Antigone is interpreted?
Freddie Rokem, author of Performing History and Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance and also one of the driving forces behind the research network Performance Philosophy, opens the first section. Referring to Aristotle, Rokem postulates that in tragedy, principles from basic formal logic are central to critically approaching the philosophical question of what it means to be human. Claiming that “one of the distinguishing features of tragedy is that it both integrates and at the same time confronts and subverts the classical forms of logical argumentation” (p. 17), his paper is a unique example of the fertile exchange between performance practice, philosophy and classic propositional logic. He then performs a careful reading of the famous “Ode to Man”, with regard to the different translations and interpretations of deinon and their respective contexts, from Sophocles’ original and Hölderlin’s translation to Heidegger’s reading and Brecht’s production The Antigone of Sophocles; A version for the stage after Hölderlin’s translation. Rokem provides a particularly complex reflection on the manifold meanings of the term, the philosophical questions it touches upon and how this has had an impact on both philosophical writing and performance practice throughout the centuries.
Kati Röttger dives even deeper into the history of philosophy, seeking the traces Antigone has left in this field. In her contribution “Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone”, she detects subtle differences between approaches to the figure of Antigone and scrutinizes them against their historical backgrounds, unravelling an “interrelation between the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law” (p. 36). This is the point of departure to reveal the commonalities “between philosophical and theatrical thinking” (p. 36), which she finds to be strikingly present in Antigone. Focusing on the significance of the notion of poiesis and agon, she contrasts dialogues between Heidegger and Hölderlin with dialogues between Derrida and Heidegger, while also taking relevant remarks by Walter Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe and others into consideration. Röttger stresses that the remarkable kinship between theatre and philosophy “is founded on dialogue” (p. 38) and can be seen as a matter closely related to dramaturgy.
In “Against the Unwritten Laws. The Figure of Antigone and the Political Occupation of the Public Space”, Klaas Tindemans deals with a more concrete mode of the abstract concept of law and the politics of undermining them. Engaging with Hannah Arendt’s ideas on the construction of a democratic political realm and studies by contemporary thinkers such as Cecilia Sjöholm, Bonnie Honig, Florence Dupont and Cornelius Castoriadis, he moves between historical analysis and contemporary philosophical ideas to reflect on public space as political space. He connects examples from film and theatre productions with their political realities – particularly the aftermath of the ‘German autumn’ in the 1970s – to tackle the problem that while “[a] public, political space needs written laws in order to frame itself, […] it of course also needs an Antigone to occupy it” (p. 53).
The article “Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT” by Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera closes the section on “Antigone’s Transformed Heritage”. They reveal the transformation the concept of kinship has undergone in both philosophy and psychoanalysis. Starting from Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, they investigate her claim that “stable kinship norms support our abiding sense of culture’s intelligibility”25 within popular culture. Through original case studies such as the science fiction film Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009), the film Stoker (Park Chan-Wook, 2013) and the TV series Game of Thrones (2011-present) they shed new light on the traditional Oedipal scenario that Freud read in Sophocles’ Antigone. With an innovative theoretical twist in their analysis, they extend Butler’s ideas by means of the Actor-Network Theory that Bruno Latour develops in Reassembling the Social as a “circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society”.26 They deploy Latour’s theory to open up a path that goes beyond the philosophy of causality. Performativity is defined as something that is constantly being made and remade.
The second section, “Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance”, addresses the appropriation of Antigone as a canonical text of Western heritage against the critical background of postcolonial theory, with two contributions turning their attention to the African context, which has frequently been the subject of analysis.27 The readings of Antigone and related performances that are addressed in the second section deal with the legacy of domination of Western thought and the repression of cultural diversity and difference, while showing the relevance of an independent cultural heritage to form and nurture an independent cultural identity. However, the manifest focus on the few exemplary popular performances (of which Femi Òsófisan’s Tègònni is one) in the second section and in many other publications in the English-speaking performance studies also reflects that the access to – and consideration of – non-Western performances remains restricted and problematic.
Tina Chanter has recently edited the anthology The Returns of Antigone28 and is author of the critical analysis of Sophocles’ original entitled Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (2011).29 The publication received acclaim for the fact that Chanter traces Antigone’s influence on Western thought to reveal and problematize how the marginalization of the position of slaves, which is crucially inherent in the tragedy and was so fundamental to the society of the Attic polis, has been gone more or less unnoticed for more than five centuries. In her contribution “The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: to Bury or not to Bury”, she unfolds this argument anew and shows “how [Antigone’s] efforts to inscribe her burial of her brother as meaningful, legitimate, and intelligible underwrite the marginalization of others” (p. 81).
With the subsequent articles by Wumi Raji and Izuu Nwankwo, two African scholars provide their view regarding the production by Femi Òsófisan. In “Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations”, Raji draws from Sophocles’ original as well as Òsófisan’s performance to “undertake a comparative exploration of the formal and visionary continuities and transformations between these two related tragedies” (pp. 94–95). He does so by “[f]ocusing specifically on the private theme of inter-racial love” (p. 95). While Raji links the Greek tragedy to the African adaptation, Nwankwo starts from Òsófisan’s Tègònni to make comparisons with the illustrated translation Antigonick by Anne Carson and Bianca Stone.30 In his paper “Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society”, Nwankwo uses Derrida’s concept of différance to look “to other characters who surround Antigone to determine how their (in)actions shape hers” (p. 108). The shift towards a more careful consideration of the other characters in Antigone is a trend that can be seen in both performance practice (e.g. Lot Vekeman’s Zus Van, 2005) and philosophical theory (e.g. the focus on the neglected role of Ismene in Bonnie Honig’s Antigone Interrupted).31
In her contribution “The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies”, Charlotte Gruber, who also engages with theoretical concepts by Derrida, addresses this shift towards the Other and its relevance for introducing a critical distance from Eurocentrism and logocentrism in two recent European theatre productions, namely Zus Van by Lot Vekemans (Belgium, 2005) and Antigone by Nicole Beutler and Ulrike Quade (The Netherlands, 2012).
The articles that constitute the last section revolve around “Antigone’s Scenes of Death”. While in Hegel’s account the ritual and religious aspects of the burial performed by Antigone stood central, today Antigone often comes to represent the radical politicality of the right to mourn and bury the deceased as a basic human right and as a tool of political power. Especially when contemplating for example Foucault’s work on biopolitics32 and Judith Butler’s reflections on ‘grievable life’,33 questions surrounding the dead and their righteous place become important.
In “Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother”, Francesca Spiegel gives a detailed analysis of the role of Polyneices from a variety of angles, stressing that “[e]ven though Polyneices is not the most important character of Antigone, his life, and the end of his life, is ultimately what provokes all of the arguments, crisis and tragedy of Antigone” (p. 149). She investigates how the group dynamics in the play are influenced by the presence of his corpse and are as much social and political as they are ideological. She points out his neglected position, for even though “[t]he dead Polyneices does not speak in Antigone, […] the presence of his body and of his spirit weigh heavy on the whole character constellation” (p. 149).
Małgorzata Budzowska addresses the concept of ‘post-memory’ by Marianne Hirsch in her article “The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber”. According to Budzowska, the Polish performance, which premiered at the New Theatre in Łódź in 2013, deals with post-war trauma and connects themes of a global and a local level, as well as public and individual modes of mourning. Her analysis of Liber’s adaptation is the point of departure for critically examining how political engineering influences questions of who and what is worth to be commemorated and how this should be done.
The paper “(Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning” by Aneta Stojnić, establishes a connection between Antigone and Chelsea Manning by interpreting the figure of the whistleblower as a contemporary Antigone, while also tackling aspects of gender performativity against this background. Citing Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler as well as Arthur Danto, Stojnić presents an exciting case of how contemporary resistance works and fails on various levels.
Butler’s theories also play a central role in the joint contribution “Ritual Failure Remains? The Inaccessibility of the Dead (Corpse) in Antigone and in Contemporary Post-Conflict Art” by Katharina Pewny and Inge Arteel. They particularly elaborate on Butler’s work on grievable life and relate it to the concept of ‘ritual failure’, which originated in a context of religious studies and social sciences. Combining approaches from performance studies and literary studies, they analyse the novel Frozen Time (2010) by Anna Kim and the film Élevage de poussière/Dust Breeding (2013) by Sarah Vanagt. In their analyses, they unravel ‘Antigonal’ motives in contemporary art practices and close this anthology by showing that “mourning is not simply a private matter, but also something that constructs political, social and ethical norms” (p. 180).
Antigone’s Transformed Heritage
The Limits of Logic: Heidegger’s and Brecht’s Interpretations of Antigone
Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University)
There is (probably) no other literary work in the Western canon that has inspired such a complex and multifaceted tradition of stage productions, adaptations, rewritings, canonized translations, as well as philosophical, psychoanalytical, political, ethical and activist readings as Sophocles’ Antigone. Perhaps only Oedipus the King and Shakespeare’s Hamlet can compete; but not really, at least judging from the constantly growing number of interpretations of Antigone since the turn of the millennium. The conflict between Antigone and her maternal uncle Creon concerning the burial of Antigone’s brother Polyneices after the end of a cruel and devastating civil war, has given rise to a complex, intertextual web of interpretations both on the page and on the stage, where drama, theatre, and performance, on the one hand and philosophy and theory, on the other, interact on a number of levels.1
In what follows I will zoom in on two particular moments of the multifaceted tradition of Antigone readings and productions, during and directly after the Second World War, focusing on the almost contemporaneous, but indeed quite different interpretations of Sophocles’ play: first by Martin Heidegger in his seminar on Hölderlin’s poem The Ister, which he conducted at the University of Freiburg, in the summer of 1942, after his resignation as rector – and not published (in German) until 1984. This particular interpretation was partly based on his previous readings of Sophocles’ play – which includes a detailed interpretation of Hölderlin’s 1804 translation of Antigone – but in this context Heidegger adds some quite remarkable reflections on war and violence. And second, by examining Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation of Hölderlin’s translation, which Brecht directed in Chur, in Switzerland in 1948, six years after the Heidegger seminar and three years after the end of the Second World War. After having spent fifteen years in exile, Antigone – a play about the aftermath of war – was Brecht’s first assignment for the German language stage after the war, leading the following year, in 1949, to the much more known production of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Both these Brecht productions, in different ways taking the spectators directly into the ’heart’ of the ’experience’ of war were important steps towards the establishment of the Berliner Ensemble. Soon after his return to Berlin, Brecht also published the book Antigonemodell 1948 in collaboration with Caspar Neher, the scenographer of this production and a close friend since their school days in Augsburg. It was edited (redigiert) by Ruth Berlau, whom Brecht had met in Denmark, during his exile there. She also photographed all of the scenes of the performance that were published in the so-called Modellbuch.
In their foreword to this book, which was to become the first in a series of such publications, laying the basis for an innovative approach to the documentation of Brecht’s own theatre productions and for the understanding of the epic theatre, Brecht and Neher somewhat laconically stated that "[t]he Antigone story was picked for the present theatrical operation as providing a certain topicality of subject matter and posing some interesting formal questions",2 stressing in particular the ways in which the theatre – and this play in particular – reveals "the causality at work in society [my emphasis, FR]",3 adding that, "[e]ven if we felt obliged to do something for a work like Antigone we could only do so by letting the play do something for us".4 It is important to pay attention to how they formulate the dynamics of their engagement with Sophocles’ play, revealing how the "causality" or logic of society is constituted. And only after "letting the play do something for us" will they be able to do something in return for the play. So what does the play do for us? What is the inner logic of Sophocles’ tragedy that enables this reciprocal ’doing’ or ’negotiation’ with this ancient text?
Antigone is a play depicting the anxieties and the threats of a post-war situation, when guilt and responsibility have to be confronted and when there are winners and losers, as well as perpetrators and victims who cannot always be clearly distinguished. For the production in Chur, Brecht composed a short Vorspiel, a prelude, which, as the signboard (fig. 1) written with capital block letters above the stage indicates, takes place in Berlin, an early morning in April 1945 at the time when a new day breaks. In this short scene with two unnamed sisters returning from the air-raid shelter discovering traces of someone who has entered their home, leaving food for them. Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel, who played the First Sister in the dark coat and will then play Antigone in Sophocles’ play and Marita Glenk as the Second Sister in the white coat, who will then be Antigone’s sister Ismene in the play itself, immediately following the Vorspiel, realize – when it is already too late – that it is their brother who has made a short visit to their home, bringing the much needed food.
Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone (1948) in Chur, Switzerland. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Theaterdoku 318/317, © R. Berlau/Hoffmann.
As their happiness from this unexpected fortune was growing, they hear a scream from the outside and an SS officer who can also be seen in the photo enters the room and interrogates them about the identity of the man that had been seen coming out through the door of their house and who had then been killed by hanging. The two sisters deny that they recognize this dead soldier – who is actually their brother – just as Mutter Courage denies knowing her own son Swiss Cheese when he is brought onto the stage on a stretcher after he had been executed for having stolen the cash-box of the Finnish Regiment. In Mutter Courage the mother bargains too long for the life of her son, trying to sell her wagon. And after the soldiers have left with her dead son, Courage/Weigel opens her mouth in what has become her renowned silent scream. In Brecht’s Antigone, the sisters are not given any opportunity to prevent the execution of their brother. In Sophocles’ original play, however, as opposed to the two situations of denial for the sake of survival that Brecht presented, Antigone never denies that she has buried her brother, creating a stark contrast between the Vorspiel and the ancient tragedy.
1.Tragedy and logic
Sophocles’ Antigone was composed in 441BC, less than a decade after the fifty-year long Persian Wars had come to an end. While the play presents the concrete circumstances and consequences of a war that had both been caused by and led to a ’state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand),1 the primary concerns of the play are also more general, raising issues about the relations between the individual and society, the interactions between the private and the public spheres, the tensions between family/kinship relations and marriage, finally confronting individual duties and rights based on carefully formulated claims and counter-claims as well as – and this is a crucial issue – what it means to be human. But it is probably the combination of the extraordinary circumstances of Antigone’s family history and her identity – being both the daughter and the sister of the same man (Oedipus) – and these more general human concerns that has given Sophocles’ play its unique status as a dramatic as well as a philosophical text, or perhaps rather a text presenting direct challenges for philosophical thinking. This combination forces us to listen very carefully to how the characters perform their claims and in particular how they argue for their respective positions as humans in a world of ethical conflicts and ambiguities.
Hegel formulated the basic structure of Sophocles’ play as an agon, a competition or a struggle between two incommensurable positions, where neither Antigone, representing the primacy of the family or kinship structures, nor Creon, representing the larger collective of the polis – the state and the law – is willing to compromise. Both of these positions, which are presented in the two first scenes of the play, can be summed up as logical arguments for what is the legal and the ethically right (or proper) action with regard to the burial of Polyneices – Antigone’s brother and Creon’s nephew – after he has been killed in the war between two factions of the family and whose name actually means "manifold strife".
According to Samuel Weber “to identify the Hegelian interpretation of Antigone with the position of Creon, for instance, privileging the authority of the state over that of the family, is to ignore the dialectical structure of the Hegelian text”.2 Instead, Weber claims, there is a “symmetrical negativity”, comparable to Judith Butler’s double negative in her rendering of Antigone’s confession, emphasizing that Antigone’s admission is expressed with a double negation that "I will not deny my deed".3 According to Weber the relations between family and state become transformed into what he describes as “signifiers of something else […] [which] has to do with the determination of identity in terms of individuality: not individuality as such, but individuality mediated and reflected in its constitutive negativity, which is to say, individuality as ‘spirit’”.4 In terms of the plot of Sophocles’ play this multifaceted negativity gradually leads to three consecutive and inevitable erasures, of individuality, of family and finally of the polis itself.
Examining these features of tragedy as a literary genre and in particular of Sophocles’ Antigone – though they are not necessarily limited to drama or performance – I want to argue here that one of the distinguishing features of tragedy is that it both integrates and at the same time confronts and subverts the classical forms of logical argumentation. Logical argumentation and its subversion constitute the ‘ground’ of tragedy on which the perceptions of the tragic as well as of particular literary tragedies are based. The ways in which logical argumentation is privileged while at the same time drawing attention to its limitations are no doubt an important reason why tragedy as a genre, and Antigone specifically has received such a prominent position in philosophical discourses, in particular with regard to which actions are ethically right or wrong (or humane) and how to seek justice by developing and problematizing legal practices rather than just doing what is ’legal’.
Since logical arguments have been embedded in Antigone as well as in most tragedies, the principles of logic can in turn be extracted from these plays. And even if the theoretical principles of logical argumentation were only fully formulated by Aristotle in the Poetics two generations after these plays had been written and performed, the notion of tragedy as it had been practiced by Sophocles was, on the one hand, based on the use of logical argumentation in order to define the positions and relations of the major conflicting characters – in this case of Antigone and Creon – but at the same time also to investigate and define what it means to be human. Being human includes both the ability to make logical arguments based on rational thinking and the use of language, while the tragedies bring about situations where the basic principles of logic are challenged and even reach a liminal point of failure and collapse. And paradoxically, this collapse frequently occurs exactly at the point when someone is trying to define what the characteristics of being human are.
But before examining this paradoxical situation in terms of tragedy and the tragic I want to present the two basic principles of formal logic which are activated and challenged by tragedy. First, the theory of deduction, for example in the so-called ‘Barbara syllogism’, beginning with a universal proposition which does not have to be proven empirically, but is based on some common understanding and can therefore also refer to fictional/mythical situations that “All x are y” or “All humans are mortal” or “The Gods are immortal”. Such a universal statement is followed by a particular statement, like the claim that “Socrates is a human” from which we draw the necessary conclusion that “Socrates is mortal”. The second principle of formal logic that is of importance in this context is the three Classical Laws of Thought: the Law of Identity, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and in particular the Law of Non-contradiction. The Law of Identity is based on the proposition that “A is A and not not-A”, the Law of the Excluded Middle on “P is either true or false” and the Law of Non-contradiction that “P and not-P” is always false.5
Even if Aristotle no doubt was familiar with a large number of literary works when he formulated these basic principles of logic, he never explicitly associated the syllogism, which can in effect be seen as a basic narrative ‘scaffolding’ for the narrative kernels in tragedies. But Aristotle’s self-evident, even seemingly ’trivial’ formulation in chapter 7 of the Poetics, that a tragedy must have three parts in order to be complete – a beginning, a middle and an end – must not be understood naively, as if Aristotle was considering the three acts in a play, but rather as an implied reference to the three parts of the deductive syllogism:
A beginning [Aristotle claims] is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.6
A narrative which begins with something “which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be”, and ends with “nothing following it” could just as well be a deductive syllogism, which Aristotle defined in the Prior Analytics as “an argument in which when certain things are laid down something else follows of necessity in virtue of their being so”.7 It is also possible to show that what can be said about tragedy as a whole is also true of its parts, which are the focus of this discussion. But I will not develop this idea in detail here.
At this point I am thus not examining the comprehensive syllogistic structure of any particular tragedy, which is apparently Aristotle’s concern in the above passage from the Poetics. My focus is rather to clarify how a specific tragedy integrates the logical structures presented by the characters and how their contradictory argumentations, in situations of conflict through an agon, affect our understanding of what it means to be human. On the one hand, these arguments are framed within a combination of social, political, religious, ethical and ideological contexts, which open up a broad range of hermeneutical horizons, which most likely, in cases like Antigone, can activate the readers, directors and spectators for new and innovative interpretations in increasingly more complex contexts and situations, testing our ability to contain and even to accept the tensions between the logical necessities of the underlying syllogisms in relation to the randomness and intrinsic instability of the broad range of such social, political and ideological contexts in which they have been or can be embedded.
At the same time, these contextualisations can also be developed and expanded by confronting different logical arguments with each other as they are presented and contextualized within the psychic universes of the characters. In Sophocles’ Antigone the confrontations between the positions of Antigone and Creon are obviously the most important ones. For Antigone the syllogism, with which the play begins, is:
To be human means to bury our dead/kin as the gods have commanded us to do
Polyneices is my (dead) brother
Therefore I must (and will) bury Polyneices
And for Creon, who presents his argument in the following section of the play, the syllogism has the following formulation:
It is illegal to bury enemies
Polyneices is an enemy of the polis
It is illegal to bury Polyneices
The gradually accelerating conflict between Antigone and Creon is based on the incommensurability of these two syllogistic arguments which are simultaneously contextualized in social, religious and ethical terms. Relying on divine authority both of them argue that it is either legal or illegal to bury Polyneices. It cannot be both. Such a situation was formulated by Aristotle as the Law of Non-contradiction that “P and not-P” is always false, or according to Aristotle’s own formulation in the Metaphysics: “It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect”.8
However, just after the conflict between Antigone’s and Creon’s syllogistic formulations has challenged the Law of Non-contradiction concerning the burial of Polyneices, in the next section of the play, with the chorus singing the first stasimon, usually referred to as the "Ode to Man", this challenge to one of the basic laws of logic is further reinforced. In the "Ode to Man" the chorus directly draws attention to the contradictory nature of what it means to live a human life and to be human. There is only one thing concerning human ‘life’ about which there is no argument, and that is that all humans are mortal which as the chorus argues cannot be prevented, even by the remarkable marvels of human inventiveness.
Here is an abbreviated quote from the “Ode to Man”, which obviously needs a much more detailed philological explication. But it contains enough information to formulate its syllogistic argument, and for the moment I will insert the key concept of deinon and deinotaton, referring to the contradictory characteristics that define what it means to be human – being both wondrous and monstrous (which will be clarified in what follows) – without translation:
There is much that is deinon, but nothing
that surpasses man in deinotaton.
He sets sail on the frothing waters
amid the south winds of winter
tacking through the mountains
and furious chasms of the waves.
[…]
Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue,
he comes to nothingness.
Through no flight can he resist
the one assault of death,
even if he has succeeded in cleverly evading
painful sickness.
[…]
Clever indeed, mastering
The ways of skill beyond all hope,
he sometimes accomplishes evil,
sometimes achieves brave deeds.9
The attempt to formulate the syllogistic structure of the “Ode to Man” is much more complex than in the two previous cases. First, because it consists of three universal statements – which is also an accepted form of syllogism (“All men are mortal. / All Greeks are men. / All Greeks are mortal.”) – and these universal statements in turn branch out into syllogisms about the mortality of humans that include particular statements as well as referencing particular human deeds and claims; and, secondly, (as I pointed out before) because of the preference for the use of negative statements, like "Nothing surpasses man in being deinon”.
The following attempt to formulate an extended syllogism in the “Ode to Man” gives us a basic idea of this complexity, regardless of its circularity:
Nothing surpasses humans (which I prefer to “man” in the quote) in being deinon; or simply: All humans are deinon
Since humans “sometimes accomplish evil, / sometimes achieve brave deeds”, they are defined by their inherent contradictory nature. Or in other words: the Law of Non-contradiction does not apply to human nature or actions, i.e. what it means to be human
Therefore the attempt to apply the Law of Non-contradiction to humans will show that they are deinon, possessing contradictory characteristics
We could probably say that logic has outwitted itself by arguing that "The Law of Non-contradiction does not apply to human nature or actions", which is a self-referential statement, like the Cretan who says that "All Cretans are liars". The Greeks were no doubt fascinated by situations of logic and its contextualisations where the relations between inclusions and exclusions are tested and logic and language seem to turn upon themselves, as in such paradoxical statements.
Classical Greek tragedy exposes and examines the tensions between different laws of logic and between these laws and the contexts of the fictional world, including those specific situations where the laws of logical thinking are actually applied but also questioned. This activates a self-referential mechanism where the paradoxical combinations of context and logic serve as a challenge to the adequacy of logical thinking for the understanding of the complexity of what it means to be human. But classical drama – and I should really only speak of Sophocles’ Antigone here – does not challenge the fundamental validity of logical thinking as such. As I intend to show however, the two twentieth-century interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone by Heidegger and Brecht I will now examine more closely, also contest the validity of the traditional, Classical forms of logical thinking, in particular in those cases when the logical argumentation refers to ethical contexts, regardless if the interpretation is primarily philosophical (as with Heidegger) or performative (as in Brecht’s case).
2.Heidegger’s deinon
The crucial issue for our present discussion is how to interpret the notion of deinon, which is a concept that has a broad range of meanings. The following five points give an overview of its contradictory connotations:
It can mean fearful, terrible, dread, dire, in Sophocles also danger or suffering awe
The term projects a sense of being powerful, related to being able, clever, cunning and skilful
It also refers to force or power – mighty, powerful, wondrous, marvellous or strange. In his German translation from 1804, Hölderlin used "ungeheuer", which was used by Brecht in his 1948 adaptation, meaning awesome, monstrous
For Heidegger on the other hand it means violent, which in a strange combination with unheimisch – not homely, is the particular connotation he developed on the basis of deinon as uncanny (unheimlich) instead of ungeheuer
And as we shall finally see, in Brecht’s interpretation, the deinon of a human is his ability, even his fatal attraction for becoming his own enemy, which is the ultimate form of negation through annihilation
One of the many occasions when Heidegger formulated his position with regard to deinon was in a lecture course in 1935 at the University of Freiburg, where he was then the rector. These lectures were first published as An Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953. Here Heidegger emphasized that
deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who uses power, who not only disposes of power [Gewalt] but is violent [gewalt-tätig] insofar as the use of power is the basic trait not only of his action but also of his being-there [Dasein]. Here we use the word violence in an essential sense extending beyond the common usage of the word, as mere arbitrary brutality. In this common usage violence is seen from the standpoint of a realm which draws its standards from conventional compromise and mutual aid, and which accordingly disparages all violence as a disturbance of the peace. […] Man is deinon, first because he remains exposed within this overpowering power, […] But at the same time man is deinon because he is the violent one […] he gathers the power and brings it to manifestness. Man is the violent one, not aside from and along with other attributes but solely in the sense that in his fundamental violence [Gewalt-tätigkeit] he uses power [Gewalt] against the overpowering [Überwältinge]. Because he is twice deinon in a sense that is originally one, he is to deinotaton, the most powerful; violent in the midst of overpowering.1
Even if it sounds like Heidegger talks about the two sides of deinon, he actually disambiguates the term to mean nothing but violence.
However in his seminar on the Hölderlin-hymn The Ister, which Heidegger also conducted at the University of Freiburg, now in the summer of 1942, he also included a more detailed reading of the “Ode to Man” more directly valorising state power/violence, while at the same time reintroducing an expression of radical ambiguity with regard to which forms of violence are an essential aspect of what it means to be human. In 1942 Heidegger also more openly exposed his hermeneutic strategy, rejecting the rendering of deinon as ungeheuer, which Hölderlin had used in his translation of the play. Instead of ungeheuer, Heidegger insists on understanding deinon as unheimlich – “uncanny” – which at this time had already been used by Freud, an author Heidegger probably never read.
Heidegger’s interpretation or ’adaptation’ of Hölderlin’s translation of deinon as "unheimlich" (uncanny) is based on an intentional, even somewhat paradoxical resistance towards the complex double nature of being human expressed in the “Ode to Man”. Or as Heidegger himself explains, he chose this translation because it "is initially alien to us, violent, or in ’philological’ terms ’wrong’".2 And immediately following this gesture of resistance, Heidegger asks how it is possible to decide about the correctness of a translation, beyond the mere dictionary meaning of a word. Or according to Heidegger’s own explanation:
In most cases a dictionary provides the correct information about the meaning of a word, yet the correctness does not yet guarantee us any insight into the truth of what the word means and can mean, given that we are asking about the essential realm named in the word.3
In what follows, Heidegger argues that central texts by Kant and Hegel are actually "in need of translation" because
It pertains to the essence of a historical people to extend like a mountain range into the lowlands and the flatlands and at the same time to have its occasional peaks towering above into an otherwise inaccessible altitude. […] Translation must set us upon the path of ascent towards the peak.4
