Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone Carlo Salzani Premise: Incipit Tragoedia Ω κοινόν αυτάδελφον Ισμήνης κάρα. The famous incipit of Sophocles’ Antigone presents various problems to the translator. Κοινόν is what is “common,” “shared,” and this “sharing” is repeated and reinforced in αυτάδελφον, “my own sister,” where αυτός evokes a link of blood and flesh, a profound, archaic commonality of kinship. The invocation is directed to Ισμήνης κάρα, which literally means the “head of Ismene.” As George Steiner points out, “to claim this head to be ‘common to us both’ and as ‘shared in the totality of sisterhood,’ is to negate, radically, the most potent, the most obvious differentiation between human presences. … Antigone’s prolusion strives to compact, to ‘ingest,’ Ismene into herself. She demands a ‘single-headed’ unison.”1 This “totality of sisterhood” is reaffirmed four times, in the terms κοινόν, αυτός, άδελφον, κάρα. The translator must work out a periphrastic solution – like Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ “My own sister Ismene, linked to myself”2 – to avoid a monstrum, like Hölderlin’s Gemein- samschwesterliches.3 As Steiner emphasizes, “a fertile duplicity”4 inhabits the term κοινόν. On the one hand, κοινόν means the “ordinary,” “general,” what is “common” to many; on the other hand – and specifically in this context – it indicates a commonality of blood, a carnal bond, what is common within kinship. Within the incestuous stock of Labdacus though, κοινόν takes on much darker and COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University. www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/salzani.pdf ░ Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone 9 horrifying connotations. Antigone and Ismene are at the same time sisters and daughters of Oedipus, daughters and granddaughters of Jocasta, and this aberrant commonality cuts them off from the accepted norms of kinship based on the incest prohibition. This makes their sisterhood different, they are closer than other sisters, they are almost “fused.”5 The invocation to Ismene is thus a request and a provocation to “fuse” in one sisterly identity, the scandal of the sanctification of an aberrant kin- ship against the polis. The new-born democratic experiment in the Athens of the fifth century B.C., based on plurality and a “modern” concept of indi- viduality, is challenged by Antigone’s archaic, perennial “collective,” by her impulses towards human interfusion. The dialectic between mechanical in- dividualism and psychic collectivism haunts the whole play. However, at the same time, in the course of the theatrical action, Antigone becomes the agent of “the most solitary, individual, anarchically egotistical” of the cam- paigns,6 severing every bond except the one with the dead brother. Anti- gone summons Ismene into the play reminding her of a belonging, a shar- ing, and she herself moves through the whole play ambiguously confound- ing the limits and the definition of this sharing. Figures of Commonality Following the fil rouge of this short interpretation of Antigone’s first line, this article will read the play through the question of commonality. An- tigone’s ambiguity, in which “lies the bottomless irony and falsehood of An- tigone’s fate,”7 only exemplifies a complex and articulated topic. Tragedy was, in the Athens of the fifth century B.C., a political tool whose purpose was to educate the polis (πόλις) through the presentation on stage of the dangers and problems of the life of the community; the question of com- monality was thus the central topic of the tragic education or paideia (παιδεία). Sophocles’ Antigone problematizes and deconstructs the notion of commonality under almost every possible angle: in kinship and polis, lan- guage and communication, love and death, nature and law. In the play every “figure of commonality” is opened up and “vivisectioned” to show its fragility and its limits, and the dangers for the polis when the “walls” of its democratic construction are demolished. There are no figures of commonality in Antigone: all the figures repre- sent the aberrations of the concept of commonality, which is displayed, un- derlined and invoked through the presentation of its absence. In the classi- cal interpretation, Antigone as a figure of kinship represents the conflict be- tween the order of the polis and the one of the family; but, as incestuous offspring of Oedipus and with her ambiguous acts and claims, she repre- 10 Carlo Salzani ░ sents, in addition, the problematic and aberrations of kinship. At the same time, as a woman speaking in the public space or agora (αγορά), she also raises the question of the polis as a community based on the exclusion of women. Creon represents the aberration of the democratic notion of “civic friendship” and embodies a voice that silences all the other voices; but at the same time he evokes the contradictions of a politics founded more on the concept of enmity than of friendship, more on exclusion than inclusion. Both Antigone and Creon are figures of the misunderstanding of the de- mocratic meaning of law (νόμος), both negating its fundamental character- istics of deliberation and conciliation. Deliberation and conciliation which are founded on another common trait, the sharing of a logos (λόγος), a common language and understanding; but all the characters of the play are segregated within a deafness which makes them figures of incommunica- tion. Logos as the base of a “rational” politics fails because all the charac- ters are figures of irrationality; but, at the same time, the notion of logos raises the question of an order – called, in fact, logo-centric – based on the exclusion of the women as deprived of logos. Antigone even fails in being a figure of love: the only community to which she belongs is the one of the dead. Sophocles’ Antigone presents on stage the complete failure of any possible kind of commonality and the political dangers represented by this failure: every character is apolis (άπολις), a figure of the negation of the po- litical understood as a space of sharing of thoughts, words and actions. Twenty-five centuries of history have added many interpretative layers to the surface of Antigone’s pedagogic intentions. The political actuality of Antigone is still present in the presentation of the multiform concept of commonality in the democratic agora; but the modern reader must add the analysis of topics to which an Athenian audience of the fifth century B.C. was uninterested, such as, for example, sexual difference and discrimina- tion, the role of women, a new definition of logos etc. The modernity of Sophocles’ tragedy is that it offers many unintended opportunities for a modern discussion of the concept of commonality. The following analysis will try to compose the ancient pedagogy with new political inspirations. Philia I Wenn Antigone kommt, die schwesterlichste der Seelen Goethe The ancient Greek term philia (φιλία), when referred to the household, ░ Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone 11 covers the semantic area that embraces the fact of belonging to a stock, a family, a kinship. It is what Antigone calls “my own.”8 It presents neverthe- less an important differentiation in its use: when referred to the household, philia evokes the world of female “care”; when referred to the agora, the public space, philia is a political, i.e., masculine virtue. The Athenian de- mocracy was founded on the division of these two spaces: the household constituted the prepolitical condition that enabled the existence of the polis, as Judith Butler writes, “without ever entering into it.”9 The liberation from the necessities of the physical, bare life was the prepolitical condition for the political freedom in the polis; it was the work of women and slaves that enabled men to be free in the public arena.10 The care of the dead was part of women’s duty: Antigone’s claim falls thus entirely within the traditional and prepolitical role reserved to women. Her claim’s scandal consists in the modalities of her act, which invades the public realm.11 Since Hegel, Anti- gone has been considered “not as a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implications, but rather as one who articulates a prepo- litical opposition to politics.”12 Nevertheless, in Antigone the picture is more complex: philia refers here not much to the realm of δόμος (house) or οικία (household), but to the one of birth or genos (γένος), a relation of blood, the incestuous blood of Oedipus. As Adriana Cavarero argues, the commonality of philia is here “radicalized in the endogamic model of a generation which has as unique source the maternal incest.”13 In Oedipus’ family, the individual identity seems to be only secondary to a “pre-egotical” community of blood, in which the singularity, due to its aberrant incestuous origins, is in symbioti- cal immanent union with the genos. Antigone’s philia goes over the divi- sions of time and politics, and binds her with Oedipus and Eteocles, but with Polynices as well. The conflict between polis and genos is the conflict between the temporality of the human events and the atemporality of “the womb as time of the ‘ever’ which death conserves.”14 In this context, in spite – or maybe because – of the morbidity of the attachment to her brother, Antigone has been often identified as “the most sisterly of souls” (Goethe). Is that really so? Antigone seems to forget that Ismene is now, after the death of the two brothers, her last and only kin. Ismene is twice harshly repudiated and, in the end, Antigone rejects any commonality with her. Even from a grammatical point of view, Antigone de- parts from the philia of kinship towards an egotistical solitude: from the dual person of the first lines, after Ismene’s refusal to join in her pious act, Anti- gone switches to the singular, “which yells the suffering of her uprooted solitude.”15 Besides, as Butler points out, in the context of her incestuous family, Antigone’s love for her brother is coloured with suspicious tones of 12 Carlo Salzani ░ obsession and madness.16 However, the most scandalous utterance against kinship’s philia is Antigone’s infamous declaration in the final kom- mos, where she affirms that she would not do for a husband or a son what she did for her brother.17 What kind of philia does Antigone then represent? Does she really stand for “the sanctity of kinship”? If the ancient Athenian saw in Antigone a figure of the conflict between the orders of kinship and the polis, for a mod- ern reader she cannot be a figure of the commonality of kinship anymore, but rather problematizes the same notion of philia, exposing its limits, its conflicts, its aberrations.18 Philia II War [πόλεμος] is the father and ruler of all things Heraclitus When it is used in the agora, the term philia means “civic friendship,” which is the principal political virtue: philia no longer intended as a com- monality of blood, but as the pure social bond, which is the determinant cri- terion for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the polis. This criterion excludes women from the public space, segregates them in the house and confines them to the philia of kinship.19 For Creon, Antigone’s sin is “insubordina- tion” (αναρχία, 672); however, the real scandal of her claim is that she dares to enter the political space, reserved to men, and speak the language of politics and sovereignty. Her claim concerns “womanly” things, but she pursues them in an “unwomanly” way.20 Her entry into the male space is a threat to men, who feel “unmanned.”21 Antigone forces into the political arena a pre-political – for the phal- logocentric idea of politics – issue. As Arendt emphasizes, “the human ca- pacity for political organization is not only different from, but stands in direct opposition to, that natural association whose centre is the home (οικία) and the family.”22 This opposition is confirmed by Creon: “and him who rates a dear one higher than his native land, him I put nowhere” (182-3). Civic philia needs the destruction of the family bond, of the blood relation, of the feminine philia. The philia Antigone tries to force into the public space is a prepolitical commonality of blood; civic philia persists in an excluding oppo- sition to it. The two spaces present opposite features: the household is the space of force and violence, where the head of the family governs through discipline, and freedom does not exist.23 The role of women is to obey, and ░ Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone 13 there is no worse insult for Creon than to be compared to a woman.24 Erro- neously Creon thinks he can apply the discipline, which reigns in the family, to the public space, which is the space of freedom.25 The public space is a space shared by “equals,” and discipline cannot be a political means. Thus, Creon misunderstands the democratic articulation of civic philia and uses it exclusively as criterion of inclusion/exclusion for the polis. The dialectic friend/enemy is for Creon, as for Carl Schimtt, the political cate- gory par excellance26: friend is Eteocles, “who died fighting for this city” (194-5); Polynices, who came back from exile meaning to burn to the ground his native city and the gods of his race, and meaning to drink the people’s blood and to enslave its people, (198-203) is the enemy, the stranger, the Other, “something different and alien,”27 ca- pable of “drinking the people’s blood.” Not even death can overcome his otherness and exclusion.28 The emphasis here is much more on Polynices than on Eteocles. For Creon, then – as for a great part of patriarchal politi- cal theory – what defines the inclusion in the community is what is ex- cluded: in the dialectic friend/enemy the stress is always on the second term, and war becomes the activity which ultimately defines the identity of the community.29 In Greece, “warrior and citizen coincide in a sole and ho- mogeneous concept – and the meaning of ‘friend’ ends up taking in the system an entirely secondary place.”30 However, the inclusion/exclusion criteria of friend/enemy do not work for Antigone. She is not “the other,” the one who comes from outside to conquer the city. She is an insider, the internal enemy. That is why, unlike Polynices, she does not fit into the category of πολέμιος, the public en- emy.31 The Greek language presents a difference between εχθρός and πολέμιος, preserved in the Latin inimicus and hostis, the internal enemy and external enemy. Antigone is the “apolitical,” “prepolitical” internal dissi- dent. And when the opposition is internal, among “citizens” and not against “the Other,” the conflict is more dramatic, “more tragic”: the opposition φίλος/εχθρός in Antigone emphasizes, as Cavarero writes, “the sense of a horizon of incestuous blood. A horizon which confers to the concept of εχθρός all that was radically corporeal in the concept of φίλος, and makes so the enemy consanguineous, as it wanted the friend of consanguineous origin.”32 In Antigone’s Thebes, no social bond keeps the citizens together: civic philia is misrepresented and problematized in every character’s rejection of the basic political sense of commonality. At the same time, Antigone con- founds and deconstructs the notion of this philia, based on exclusion much 14 Carlo Salzani ░ more than inclusion, on enmity and opposition much more than commonal- ity. Nomos The people [δήμος] must fight for its law as for its walls. Heraclitus Antigone is a tragedy about the law: Antigone’s unwritten laws (άγραπτα νόμιμα, 454-45) are opposed to Creon’s edict (κήρυγμα, 8). Or: primordial, natural laws are opposed to the human and temporal norm. For Hegel the conflict of the “universal” public law and the divine (unwritten) law is “a conflict of self-conscious Spirit with what is unconscious.” 33 Butler notes that the unwritten law “appears only by way of an active trace”34: it is a law with no traceable origin, no form, no communicability and no translat- ability into written language. It is not fully knowable, but, “as the uncon- scious of public law, it is that which public law cannot do without, which it must, in fact, oppose and retain with a certain necessary hostility.”35 Be- sides, this is a law with “but one instance of application”36: it would not ap- ply to a husband or a son, but it does to the brother because he is “irrepro- ducible.” This means that “the conditions under which the law becomes ap- plicable are not reproducible.”37 This law, therefore, is not conceptualizable as law; it undermines the universality of public law and “destroys the basis of justice in community.”38 It should be noted that Antigone uses the term nomima (νόμιμα), cus- toms, ordinances, and not nomos, which was always a human creation (ποίησις) and therefore opposite to nature or physis (φύσις). The real meaning of the term nomos is “convention,” “human rule,” something abso- lutely human and independent from the nature of things.39 Law was con- sidered as equivalent to the wall around the polis, the limit and the condi- tion of possibility of the political space: there can be no community without the wall-like law, and law is the prepolitical founding instrument of the politi- cal community.40 Constitutively emendable and correctable, the law was re- formulated and negotiated through deliberation, like the boundary line. Deliberation is precisely what is lacking in Antigone. Hegel already had noted how Antigone and Creon exclude and oppose one another, becom- ing in the end mirror-images.41 No composition is ever possible between their opposed fanaticisms. Exposing this lack, the tragedy exposes the sin and the danger that undermines any human community: “devotion to one’s own personal sense of justice” and “mutually exclusive commitments to ░ Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone 15 righteousness.”42 Only through deliberation and conciliation can a commu- nity survive: “this,” writes Zak, “is a collective responsibility and wisdom Creon and Antigone will not heed or consider. … In the isolated, self- restricted, and finally self satisfied kingdom of the spirit each insist on commanding, both rule their respective deserts beautifully alone.”43 Many commentators have underlined how the real sin of both Antigone and Creon is to “declare themselves autonomos, a law unto themselves”44: on the one hand, Antigone, in her autistic exile, excludes herself from the community; on the other, Creon transforms his claim for a general justice in a rule of force and violence. Outside the democratic system of conciliation, the sovereignty of the law becomes indistinct from violence.45 As Stathis Gourgouris points out, in ancient Athens law had a constitu- tive differential and agonic character, “encompassing a range of significa- tions from the explicitly religious (say, the justice of Zeus) to the most his- torically institutional, from the widest possible meaning of sacred dike to the most brutal defiance of the law in the name of responsibility to justice.”46 In Antigone the term is used with opposite connotations by the different char- acters and almost all the possible meanings are presented. However, each and every position remains segregated in its ivory tower, the laws of the po- lis do not interweave with divine justice, no real community is ever created and sustained by these mutually excluding laws. Logos I In the “Ode to Man” the chorus establishes the foundation of political commonality: men learned (and thus share) speech and thought, which are the conditions and the components which rule cities.47 The sharing of the same language is what makes possible the constitution of a community: “speech and wind-swift thought” enable men to distinguish good and bad, right and wrong, a community is based on shared moral perceptions and on the capacity of judgement (κρίσις).48 What differentiates the political animal (ζώον πολιτικόν) from the other animals is the fact of sharing a capacity to communicate and decide together; Aristotle’s famous definition acquires its full meaning only when completed with his other definition of the “human”: ζώον λόγον έχον, a living being capable of speech.49 Antigone adds an im- portant feature. She cries to Ismene: “Tell them all! I shall hate you far more if you remain silent, and do not proclaim this to all” (86-7). Action needs to be publicized in order to have political valence, and public speech is the real political action.50 Aristotle’s βίος πολιτικός (the political) con- sisted of πράξις (action) and λέξις (speech): the Athenian polis was the space where words and speeches acted as the political medium. Politics is 16 Carlo Salzani ░ not force, not violence, but speech, understanding, confrontation and agreement.51 Creon’s will to command rather than persuade, his incapacity to listen to the other, represents the opposition to, and the negation of, this concep- tion of the political. Creon transfers into the political space the prepolitical ways of violence and force characteristic to the household. He insists on the necessity of discipline and obedience (πειθαρχία, 676), and on the dangers of insubordination (αναρχία, 672), contradicting the very notion of discursive politics itself.52 Creon’s discourse is appropriate to an army, not to the polis: he refuses to listen to the others’ opinions53 and, writes Euben, relegates the others’ voices to “whispers (the people of Thebes) or caves and houses (Antigone and Ismene).”54 However, it is not just Creon who represents the negation of the politi- cal. Rather, as it has been noted, in Antigone language is paradoxically what divides and separates: every character retires into a code not under- standable to the others; they use the same words, but confer to these words different connotations, so that what they enact is “a dialogue des sourds. No meaningful communication takes place. Creon’s questions and Antigone’s answers are so inward to the two speakers, so absolute to their respective semantic codes and visions of reality, that there is no ex- change.”55 This is what George Steiner calls the paradox of “divisive fac- simile”: “the discovery that living beings using the ‘same language’ can mean entirely different, indeed irreconcilable, things.”56 This paradox is a problem of the language in general and “is present in all speech and speech-acts,”57 but in Sophocles’ Antigone it is taken to such extremes that forbid any kind of communication, in any kind of dialogue. Euben thus con- cludes: “the exchange between Creon and Haemon suggests that same- ness and interchangeability can mask different features … more specifi- cally, that repetition of terms can obscure incompatible principles and inter- ests. What seems to be or should be a firm basis for deliberation, shared language and culture, turns out to be divisive.”58 Logos II “Good sense [φρονείν] is by far the chief part of happiness” (1348-9). With these words the chorus concludes the tragedy, emphasizing that “good sense,” φρονείν, is precisely what is lacking in the play. There is much talking about reasoning, knowledge, deliberation, but every character is guided by the irrational: the voice of reason conceals always a passion. Especially Creon insists on the rightfulness of his reasoning, whereas the others are supposed to be mad, irrational, without sense or judgement: ░ Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone 17 άνους. In the end, every character is dominated by the conviction to be “right” and that the others are “wrong”; none of the characters is ready to acknowledge his or her mistake. Reason is questioned and problema- tized.59 Thus, reason fails in the play. However, reason does not fail merely in its “correct use”; it fails also in its pretension of universality. When Creon insults Haemon calling him a “contemptible character, inferior to a woman!” (746), he is implicitly calling him άνους, irrational, lacking of correct reason- ing. Φρονείν, the “right thinking,” as well as “thinking” in general, have in fact traditionally been male attributes: women, emotional and passional, are not fit for the “reasonable” public space and are to be sequestered and si- lenced in the darkness of the household. Creon’s exasperated misogyny in this respect only mirrors the situation of women in ancient Athens. Women are considered not “reasonable” because they are deeply rooted in the carnality and materiality of the body, and cannot rise to the heights of reason. As Cavarero writes, body and corporeity are considered as the “mere material support of the human faculties of speech and thought,”60 thus distinct and separated from them. The political order built on this distinction and exclusion has been called logocentric and phal- locratic, and thus phallogocentric: it is based on the exclusion from the higher political realm, on the one hand, of the corporeal, and, on the other, of women as inevitably rooted in this corporality.61 Logos is what separates and redeems men from the animal condition; but at the same time, it sepa- rates the “human” from its corporality and relegates women into it. By raising her voice, Antigone confuses and violates the “logical” or- der, which relegates her to silence. She speaks in public, and to do so she has no other means than to utilize that same logical order which wants her silent. Antigone speaks in that language which is not “hers,” the language of a hyper-masculinized logos that wants her silent, the language of politics and sovereignty that sequesters her in the house. This is the “only” lan- guage, the sharing of which is what constitutes her as “human,” but that at the same time excludes her as not fully so.62 Antigone as a woman is ex- cluded from the realm of logos, politics and higher “humanity”; she lacks a “reason” and a language of her own, and must make her political claim us- ing the logocentric tools that exclude her. On the other hand, her claim is considered non-political because she inhabits a region outside the realm of logos. The failure of reason is thus complete: reason fails because every one in the play lacks reason (is άνους), and even “reasonable” actions are prompted by passions; but reason fails also as the founding element of identity for the animal rationale, because it becomes a pretext for exclusion and reclusion.