The Monstrous, Catastrophe, and Ethical Life

Abstract

It is striking that both Hegel and Heidegger turn to Sophocles's Antigone in order to give an account of the deepest roots of ethical and political life. For both, this very strange ancient Greek text exposes something decisive about the shape of the present age; despite its historical distance, its words announce something that is simultaneously impossible, ineluctable, and irrevocable for us, something that needs a response from a space of understanding not yet apparent. Both Hegel and Heidegger take this tragedy as pointing to a new sensibility, one that opens up a new and more original ethical and political order. For both, this drama that is so concerned with and saturated by death gives birth to a radically new possibility and summons the deepest natality of thought and the movement of history. The question I want to address today concerns the way in which Hegel and Heidegger-often in quite different ways-find this poetic presentation of a deep and impossible antagonism as illuminating what needs to be understood about the idiom of political and ethical life in our times.Now before beginning with that question, I do need to note something that both Hegel and Heidegger almost completely ignore; namely, that Antigone, a text drawn from a trilogy and best read in that context, lays out a quite bizarre situation-Creon is Antigone's uncle, Antigone's brothers have killed one another, the entire family kinship lines are quite blurred (mothers are also wives, brothers are also fathers, sisters are daughters), the blind are the those who see most clearly, the living are buried alive, there is murder, suicide, and fratricide, and of course this is perhaps the only play in which a corpse is a main character. In other words, roles are doubled, taboos are violated, and the living and the dead seem to trade places. One must concede that the choice of this particular text to unfold an ethical and political sensibility would, on the surface, seem a bit odd. But in a sense it is precisely this messiness that is so important for each. Nonetheless, there is a great deal played out in Antigone that neither Hegel nor Heidegger is concerned about. Neither 'reads' the play, neither sets it into any of its own contexts, and, in Hegel's case, the most significant allusions to the dramatic life of Antigone do not even mention the play, its characters, or its author by name, while in Heidegger's case there is only minimal reference to the drama at all. In short, neither Hegel nor Heidegger is really intent upon interpreting Antigone; both readily set aside too much for that to even be a possibility. And yet, for both this text assumes an unparalleled place, a pivotal moment, in their own thought. What this makes clear is that both Hegel and Heidegger turn to Antigone with a very specific intent. For each, the great achievement of Antigone is found in the way it condenses the riddles of ethical life while simultaneously showing that these conflicts emerge from a region that given ethical terms cannot grasp and that cannot be grasped by the conceptual language of philosophy. That is why both place great emphasis on the poetic character of this text.My goal is to say something about this intent in each case. For now, I will simply say this: that, in the end, neither understands Antigone as a struggle of right and wrong, good and evil, it is beyond those terms which inappropriately frame most ethical judgment; rather, they both understand the real contribution of Antigone to be found in the exposure of the deep antagonism, violence, and incommensurability that opens the space of ethical and political responsibility. Both use the word monstrous (ungeheuer) to speak of this opening, but each understands its significance in distinct ways.***Heidegger's engagement with Greek tragedy takes place almost exclusively during the thousand-and-one-year period of 1933-1946: the first reference, to Aeschylus, is in 1933, while the last is in Anaximander's Verdict in 1946. …