Mark Cousins and Parveen Adams
‘Whenever, wherever, in the Western legacy, we have found ourselves engaged in the confrontation of justice and of law, of the aura of the dead and of the claims of the living, whenever, wherever, the hungry dreams of the young have collided with “realism” of the ageing, we have found ourselves turning to words, images, sinews of argument, synecdoches, tropes, metaphors, out of the grammar of Antigone and of Creon. Indwelling in our semantics, in the fundamental grammar of our perceptions and enunciations, the Antigone-and-Creon syntax and the myth in which they are manifest are “specific universals” transformative across the ages.’ George Steiner
Sophocles wrote his Antigone in the fifth century BC. Today there are innumerable Antigones. In all these, questions of justice and the law remain central even if there is disagreement about the position of the characters of Creon and Antigone in relation to these questions. This course is concerned with how these differing interpretations arise, particularly in the work of nineteenth century philosophy and theories of translation - for Hölderlin and for Hegel questions of tragedy are inextricably bound up with questions of language and translation, of justice and the law and of life and death. But the importance of the prevailing political background must not be underestimated. Antigones thrive in times of crisis and the twentieth century is no exception. The course devotes a session to the 1978 film Germany in Autumn made with reference to the Bader-Meinhof gang. A final session introduces a post-war French Antigone and reviews the course as a whole.
Items marked with an asterisk * are essential reading.
General Reading
*George Steiner, Antigones, chapter 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
*Mosaic, Antigone issue vol. 41 no 3, September 2008)
1. Antigone
This session will introduce the course and give a brief account of Greek tragedy followed by a class discussion of the Antigone text. We will look at one or two central speeches in Antigone and compare translations which are at times bafflingly different.
Reading
*Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcom Heath (London: Penguin, 1996)
*Sophocles, Antigone, trans. H.D.F. Kitto, ed. Edith Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2008)
Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy’ in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1988)
Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1986)
2. Tragedy and Space
The invention of drama involves the representation of well-known stories in a completely new form. Dramatic space can represent anywhere but itself; actors can represent anyone but themselves. At the same time Athens is experimenting with democratic governance and voting. Speeches and dialogues represent the new spaces in drama, government, and the law courts. We follow the links between these practices of representation and their spaces.
Reading
*Froma Zeitlin, ‘Thebes: Theatre of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’ in John. J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do With Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1990), pp.130-67
*Froma Zeitlin, ‘Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama’ in John. J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do With Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1990), pp.63-96
*Damian Stocking, ‘Antigone, désoeuvré: Tragedy, Finitude, and Community’, Mosaic, 41 (2008): 153-68
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: University of Cornell Press, 1982)
Vincent Farenga, Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece: Individuals Performing Justice and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2006)
Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (London and New York: Routledge, 2003)
David Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
3. Tragedy and Translation
We will discussf Hölderlin’s theory of translation as it applies to his Antigona.
Reading
*Hölderlin, Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone, trans. David Constantine (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001)
M. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” part 2 (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1996)
4. Justice and the Law
It is necessary if not sufficient to know something of Greek law in Sophocles’ time in order to interpret the play. Of later accounts of law in relation to Antigone we single out Hegel’s and Lacan’s–Hegel’s in the service of philosophy; Lacan’s in the development of an ethics of psychoanalysis.
Reading
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
*E.M. Harris, ‘Antigone the Lawgiver, or the Ambiguities of Nomos’ in E.M. Harris and L.R. Rubinstein (eds) The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2003), pp. 19-56
Judith Fletcher, ‘Citing the Law in Sophocles’ Antigone’, Mosaic, 41 (2008): 66-87
Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60 Bk. VII, trans. Dennis Porter; Jacques-Alain Miller, ed.,(London: Routledge, 1992)
Marc de Kesel, Eros and Ethics (SUNY Series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature0, trans. Sigi Jottkandt, (New York: State U. of New York Press, 2010)
Tanya Staehler, ‘Antigone and the Nature of the Law’, in Michael Freeman and Ross Harrison, eds., Law and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Klaas Tindemans, ‘Antigone and the Law: Legal Theories and the Ambiguities of Performance’ in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, Wilmer S. E. and Zukauskaite Audrone eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
5. Antigone and the Bader-Meinhof Gang
The figure of Antigone has continued to be adapted and re-used as a dramatic way of staging contemporary political issues of justice and the law, obedience and disobedience–here in a German context.
Reading
*Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerilla or Guerilla Urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game’, in Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, eds., Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (London: Verso 1999), pp. 267-302
Gerhard Richter, Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, illustrated edition: 2002)
Robert Storr, September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter(London: Tate Publishing, 2010)
Screening
Germany in Autumn, dir. Fassbinder, Schlondorf et al, 1978
6. All our Antigones
Kierkegaard uses Antigone to reflect upon the possibility of tragedy in the modern period. More recently, Anouilh writes his Antigoneduring the Nazi occupation of Paris–we continue to reflect upon Antigone may or may not read as ‘political’. These texts add to the review of how the course has understood the phenomenon of Antigone.
Reading
Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama’ in Either/Or, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings Vols 3 and 4, (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1987)
Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-war French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
*Jean Anouilh, Antigone, trans. Barbara Bray (1951; London: Methuen, 2000)
Sean D. Kirkland, ‘Speed and Tragedy in Cocteau and Sophocles’ in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, Wilmer S. E. and Zukauskaite Audrone eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Further Reading
Andrew Benjamin, ‘Placing Speaking: Notes on the First Stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone, Angelaki, Vol. 9 No. 2 August 2004
Bertolt Brecht, Sophocles’ Antigone , (Applause, 1990).
Eliza M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1935)
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Wellek Library Lectures), (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2002)
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven and London: Yale U. Press, 2000), pp. 156-176
Catherine Kellogg, Law’s Trace: From Hegel to Derrida, (Routledge 2009), chapter 5
Catherine Kellogg, ‘Mourning the Law: Hegel’s Metaphors of Sexual Difference’,Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2003 vol. 29, No. 4, pp.361-74
Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris (OUP 2005)
Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2007). Book 12F.
Soderback ed., Feminist Readings of Antigone, SUNY 2010
Birkbeck Library
* G. Steiner, Ch 1 Antigones, Oxford University Press 1986 – 2 copies for Reference
* J-P Vernant, ‘Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation’, in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and John Hopkins University Press, 1972) – 2 copies for Reference
Hölderlin, Death of Empedocles (SUNY 2009) – 1 copy for Reference
J. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (eds) Nothing to Do With Dionysos: Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton, 1990) – 3 copies for Reference
E.M. Harris and L.R. Rubinstein (eds) The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece (Duckwoth, 2004) – 1 copy for Reference
*T. Elsaesser, ‘Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerilla or Guerilla Urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game’’, in (eds) Joan Copjec and Micheal Sorkin, Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (Verso S Series, 1999) – 1 copy for Reference
