Resurecția Antigonei

Abstract

It is said that some works never die, through their meanings and validity, through the actuality of there depiction of a humanity which remains, now and always, the same. If so, then Antigone is one of the most suitable choices. Both through the general human attitude that the paradigmatic conflict of the tragic depicts – where “both sides of the opposition, considered for themselves, are justified, while on the other hand each of them can realize the true positive content of the goal and its character only by denying and harming the other side”, as Hegel states in Lectures on Aesthetics -, as well as by the necessity of an answer to a problem beyond the artistic field, in our very current existence: namely, war. From this point of view, re-reading Antigone in the key of a contemporary perspective could give us the opportunity to confirm the values and actuality of the ancient Greek dramatist. But not only that. In a way it is like opening a Pandora’s Box, one originating in ancient Greece. Besides the fact that it had laid the foundations for the debate about the morality of the city and the individual`s “despair” of ethical origin, it seems that it also deals in an exhaustive manner with the topic and implications of war – a radical event of the city, which enshrines a very specific relationship in history, both at individual and at state levels, and which arises from the discursive mediation of a narrative that is also our object of study.