Antigone's Voice

Abstract

Antigone's Voice Lior Levy (bio) She cried out bitterly, with a sound like the piercing note of a bird when she sees her empty nest robbed of her young. (Sophocles, Antigone, 1994, 423–424) For while fish are dumb in their element of water, birds soar freely in theirs, the air; separated from the objective heaviness of the earth, they fill the air with themselves, and utter their self-feeling in their own particular element. (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §351Zß, pp. 354–355) Introduction: Philosophers Reading Antigone—Action and Speech The stakes are high in reading Antigone. Oscillating between the figure of a daughter loyal to maternal ancestry and a symbol of disruption, or even the eradication of the meaningfulness of kinship structures, Antigone is read by philosophers and psychoanalysts alike as an image of sexuate identity caught in a web of psychic, familial, political, and social relationships. The stakes are high, of course, even when Antigone is not read, as George Steiner (1984) demonstrates, pointing to Freud's investment in Oedipus Rex, the first in Sophocles's Theban trilogy,1 an investment that leads to concern with vertical lines of kinship instead of the horizontal axis of relationships between siblings that is central to Antigone.2 The stakes are high, and so Luce Irigaray (1994), for instance, urges readers to "abstract Antigone from the seductive, reductive discourses and listen to what she has to say" (p. 70).3 What did she have to say? At least from the 19th century onward, readers of Sophocles's tragedy concentrated on Antigone [End Page 437] the agent, writing and thinking about what she does. Renowned, admired even, for her defiant acts of burying her brother, by which she self-consciously transgressed the ruler's decree, and mourned for her premature, self-inflicted death, Antigone's deeds were understood as dramatizing the possibilities—both the risks and the promises—of human existence. For Hegel, Antigone's actions, meant to protect divine law and familial bonds of love, were crucial for setting in motion the tragic conflict—the opposition between Antigone's one-sided commitments to the "unwritten laws" of the family, and Creon's one-sided commitment to the laws of the polis—out of which the ethical substance, where the two positions are mediated by one another, emerged.4 Others—for example, Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan—who challenge this Hegelian opposition, still emphasized Antigone's deeds. For Lacan (1992), Antigone's actions are central to articulating an ethics of desire for the Other; for Butler (2000), her actions reveal "the socially contingent character of kinship" (p. 6). The focus on Antigone's actions is not unfounded, given that out of the 1,338 lines that comprise Sophocles's tragedy, less than one-fifth (about 216 lines) are spoken by the play's eponymous character. But if her words are scarce, her deeds are even rarer. Antigone's acts of burial embody, for Hegel, her loyalty to family ties; for Butler, a defiance that put kinship into question; and for Lacan, the desire to recognize what lies beyond language. These acts, by which she comes to be what she is under these readings, are absent from the stage. They are retrospectively reported by the guard, who describes a "deed" (pragma) of an unknown doer (asemos), an agent leaving no marks on what was done. When Antigone's act is first introduced, recounted by the guard, it is left unclaimed, an unowned doing, whose results are plainly visible—the body "not buried in a tomb, but covered with a light dust"—but that do not disclose their author—"the doer left no mark" (253–255). This fact, of course, did not escape the readers of the play; commentators on the text readily acknowledge the fact that Antigone's acts are implicated by her speech. But moving from action to speech does not necessarily involve attentiveness to Antigone's voice. Butler (2000), for example, assimilates speech to action, linking the two under the heading of illocutionary [End Page 438] acts, a form of linguistic doing that subverts the "language of the state" from within (p. 6).5 Lacan (1992), in a twist on...