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 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), chapter 1
*Michael Lurje, ‘Misreading Sophocles: or Why Does the History of Interpretation Matter?’ Antike und Abendland, 52 (2006): 1-15
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
*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 University Press, 1986)
2. Tragedy and Translation
We will consider Aristotle’s remarks on tragedy in the Poetics especially in regard to the nature of the plot and of the production of fear and pity in the audience. The intrication of theories of tragedy and of translation is illustrated using the example of Hölderlin.
Reading
*Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcom Heath (London: Penguin, 1996)
*Hölderlin, Ho?lderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone, trans. David Constantine (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001)
Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
Elizabeth S. Belfiore, ‘The Elements of Tragedy’, in Georgios Anagnostopoulos, ed., A Companion to Aristotle (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation’, in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972)
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 69-82. Also in Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader, end edn. (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 75-85.
3. Tragedy and Space
The invention of drama, with tragedy in the forefront, involved the representation of spaces and reflected existing realities and discussions in the polis. But such representation also actively determined how the audience thought of persons and places, of scenes, of forms of address and of the law.
Reading
*Damian Stocking, ‘Antigone, désoeuvré: Tragedy, Finitude, and Community’, Mosaic, 41 (2008)
Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2007). Book 12
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: University of Cornell Press, 1982)
Froma Zeitlin, ‘Thebes: Theatre of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’ in John. J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do With Dionysos: Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Vincent Farenga, Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece: Individuals Performing Justice and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University 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)
4. Justice and the Law
Antigone stages the conflict between political law and the claims of another law whose nature will be investigated. To refuse to obey someone is not comparable to the demand that someone obey you. Creon and Antigone will also be contrasted by looking at the tragedy in terms of the claims to authority and legitimacy. These issues are considered in Sophocles, especially in the lines of Tiresias and in the light of the place of law in ancient Greece.
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
Tanya Staehler, ‘Antigone and the Nature of the Law’, in Michael Freeman and Ross Harrison, eds., Law and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Catherine Kellogg, Law’s Trace: from Hegel to Derrida (London: Routledge, 2009), chapter 5
Judith Fletcher, ‘Citing the Law in Sophocles’ Antigone’, Mosaic, 41 (2008): 66-87
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, and obedience and disobedience –here in a German context.
Reading
*Germany in Autumn, dir. Fassbinder, Schlondorf et al, 1978
*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
Screening
Germany in Autumn, dir. Fassbinder, Schlondorf et al, 1978
6. All our Antigones
Kierkegaard’s Antigone is a reflection on the possibility of tragedy in the modern period. The differences within the post-war reception of antiquity in France open onto a discussion of how Antigone may or may not be read as ‘political’. These will add to the review of how the course has understood the phenomenon of Antigone.
Reading
Søren Kiekegaard, ‘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 University 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)
Gabriel Josipovici, ‘Kierkegaard and the Novel’ in Jonathan Reé and Jane Chamberlain, eds., Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell 1997), pp. 114-28
Further Reading
Bertolt Brecht, The Antigone of Sophocles, Collected Plays 8 (London: Methuen, 2003).
E.M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry Over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935)
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, (New York: Columbia University Press, )
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp 156-176
Catherine Kellogg, ‘Mourning the Law; Hegel’s Metaphors of Sexual Difference’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 29 (2003): 361-74
Mosaic, 41.3 (2008). Special issue on Antigone
Jaques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 7, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992)
David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance, Space and Theatrical Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
