LET THEM ROT I DIIDOIMO M IN V IENNVTEINNTGI NWGR WITIRNITGI NTGH ETOHREYORY JacqJuaecsq uLeesz rLae zarnad a Pnadu Pl aNuolr tNho, rsther, iseesr eiedsi teodrsitors LET THEM ROT ANTIGONE’S PARALLAX ALENKA ZUPANČIČ Fordham University Press New York 2023 Copyright © 2023 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per sis tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or w ill remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www . fordhampress . com. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available online at https://c atalog. l oc. g ov. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 25 24 23 5 4 3 2 1 First edition CONTENTS Preface vii Prologue 1 1. Vio lence, Terror, and Unwritten Laws 9 2. Death, Undeadness, and Funeral Rites 21 3. “I’d Let Them Rot” 50 Works Cited 83 Index 85 PREFACE It began with something rather accidental, though not without a ba- sis in my e arlier work on ethics, in which Antigone played some role. A dear friend and colleague, Dominiek Hoens, invited me to give a workshop on Antigone in Brussels in January 2020— that is to say, at the dawn of the first pandemic year. It was a one- afternoon event for which I prepared some notes and ideas to discuss with the par- ticipants. I would not call my talk t here a work in pro gress, b ecause at that time I didn’t know or anticipate that there would be any “pro gress,” anything further coming out of it. It was more like a construction site, with some (what I thought were) in ter est ing ideas and a lot of loose ends. I r eally enjoyed and appreciated the discus- sion and sort of left Antigone there. And then, well into the first year of the pandemic and its lockdown, I returned to my notes, picking up a few loose ends, and started writing about Antigone again— with a surprising and unexpected ease and force driving my work. I do not want to say that the text “wrote itself,” but the original “accident,” the contingency that triggered my starting to think about Antigone, certainly began to look like a necessity and an enjoyable necessity at that. One t hing led to another, as they say, and I followed the ideas as they kept coming, not knowing where it would all end up or if it would end up anywhere at all. An unexpected privilege of the stand- still induced by the pandemic? Or perhaps the workings of a slightly peculiar state of mind, a mind closed in on itself, locked down upon itself? vii viii PREFACE Yet if this was madness, there was method in it. And it became clearer day by day, with regard to both general perspective and par tic u lar points of inquiry. There is prob ably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and cre- ative response than Sophocles’s Antigone. The general perspective from which I read it could be summarized with this simple ques- tion: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of (always) con temporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages— correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three par tic u- lar “obsessions” have driven my writing and thinking about Antigone. First, her vio lence. And I do not use this term simply pejoratively, as it is most often used t oday. Nor do I mean the graphic vio lence to which we have become so accustomed in movies and in the media. By and large, the vio lence in Antigone is the opposite of “graphic”; it is sharp and piercing. It takes up almost no space but goes straight to the bone. It is the vio lence of words, the vio lence of princi ples, the vio lence of desire, the vio lence of subjectivity. It is a vio lence quite dif fer ent from the one that Creon wields; it is a vio lence that does not come from Power and what it can do but nevertheless amounts to a considerable power. What is this vio lence? How to conceive of it, both philosophically and po liti cally? Although chapter 1 focuses explic itly on t hese questions, they run throughout the text. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeas- ing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted an investigation into the relationship between language, sexuality (sexual reproduction), death, “second death,” and a peculiar nonlinguistic Real that occurs as a by- product of language yet is not reducible (back) to language or to the symbolic. PREFACE ix And then t here is what prob ably “obsessed” me the most in my writing, namely, Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out t here, she would let them rot (tḗkō) and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. How does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Poly- neices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, accord with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? The attempt to answer this question led, step by step, to the interroga- tion of what this par tic u lar (Oedipal) family’s misfortune (átē), of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity? It led to the question, “What is incest?”; to the hypothesis of a certain “incestuous” dimension of language; and to the possibility of universal relevance of a violent subjective desire. Clearly, t hese are by no means minor preoccupations or “obses- sions,” and t here is certainly enough in them to drive one’s thinking and writing fervently for a while. At the same time, I r eally wanted to stick to t hese— and only t hese— Ariadne threads while I was find- ing my way around the constellation called Antigone. The argument follows, I hope, a fairly rigorous logic or necessity. And the inherent logic that directed my questioning has also led me to take certain turns rather than others and follow their course. Among the many seminal contributions to the Antigone debate, I have chosen to include only the contributions with which I was working in developing my points and hence to cite only t hose authors who have a direct place in the construction of my argument. Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Par- allax is not intended to be a polemical text, although its arguments clearly differ from those of some other readings. It is more like a specific philosophical “intervention” in a broad and prominent field of study. The ambition of this book is thus both very modest and very immodest. It is modest because it r eally wants to intervene only at some precise points of what takes place in Sophocles’s Antigone. It is not so modest b ecause it assumes, at least implicitly, that t hese specific or localized points have effects and consequences that