41 1 Honig

Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism
Bonnie Honig
New Literary History, Volume 41, Number 1, Winter 2010, pp. 1-33 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0140
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v041/41.1.honig.html
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Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the
Politics of Humanism
Bonnie Honig
By insisting on a ‘common’ corporeal vulner-

ability, I may seem to be positing a new basis
for humanism.
—Judith Butler
Certain great themes such as ‘humanism’ can

be used to any end whatsoever.
—Michel Foucault
Only tragedy can deal adequately with human-

ism on its high horse.
—Laurence Michel1
H
umanism is making a comeback; not the rationalist, univer-
salist variety discredited by poststructuralism and the horrific
events of the twentieth century, but a newer variant, one that
reprises an earlier humanism in which what is common to humans is
not rationality but the ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to
reason but vulnerability to suffering. This resurgent mortalist human-
ism is connected to what has been dubbed recently “the turn to ethics”
or “the ethical turn.”2 Finitude is said to soften us up for the call of
the other, to open us up to the solicitations of ethics and bypass the
intractable divisions of politics. I argue here that even this humanism
is implicated in political divisions it claims to transcend and, moreover,
that an ethics of mortality and suffering is no adequate replacement
for a (post)humanist politics with agonistic intent.
I proceed by way of Sophocles’ Antigone, the tragedy of lament and
suffering that has been centrally important in the last forty years to po-
litical theorists and for centuries to both humanists and antihumanists.
Quarrels about whether Antigone is a political or ethical actor have been
unrelenting since Hegel used the play to confine an ethical care for the
New Literary History, 2010, 41: 1–33

2 new literary history
dead to the private realm. This essay offers a historical reading of the play
that shows Antigone is not merely the lamenting sister Hegel admired
nor the political martyr appropriated since by dissidents all over the
modern world. She is a lamenting sister and she does die for her cause,
but she is, more fundamentally, a political actor embroiled in fifth-century
burial, kinship, and polis politics. Her until-now-little-appreciated uses
of parody and mimicry, tracked in detail here, stage the dilemmas of
resistance politics in ways still relevant to us. But that relevance can be
overstated, abused, or misconstrued. When some compare contemporary
mourning mothers to Antigone, they do so intending to underscore the
politicality of actions they admire, but their comparison also undermines
that aim. Classicizing the mourning mother naturalizes the maternal
and the human, and creates a new universalism: we humans are and
always have been, or had, mothers who mourn our mortality. And this
universalism, into which tragedy is said to interpellate us, grounds the
mortalist-humanist turn to ethics, displacing the conflicts and divisions
that are fundamental to both tragedy and politics.
Humanism and Tragedy
Humanists have long found in Greek tragedy an illustration of their

ideal, but tragedy seems a strange genre on which to pin the celebration
of the human. In tragedy, after all, “everything humanistically worth-
while is blighted, then irretrievably cracked; men are made mad, and
then destroyed,” says Laurence Michel. Rather than depict a “Human
Spirit” that is “autonomous and transcendent” (634), tragedy debunks
such “pretensions.” Humanist critics miss this, Michel argues, because
they focus in Aristotelian fashion on the spectators’ assumed pity for
tragedy’s victims (“the heart of the beholder”) rather than on the play’s
disposal of them (“the heart of the play” [636]).
This split between text and reception, recently revived by a turn to
reception studies in Classics, is not necessary to explain humanism’s
appropriation of this difficult genre, however, for where Michel sees
only death and defeat, others find inspiring self-sacrifice and redemp-
tion. (Is Michel’s approach secularist and that of many humanist critics
providential?) If humanists promote tragedy as their genre of choice, it
is because they think tragedy renders clear the human spirit, exhibiting
human willingness to sacrifice on behalf of a principle, commitment,
or desire, or knowingly to accept one’s implication in unchosen acts
or defiantly to march to one’s death with head held high or to refuse
vengeance or even justice on behalf of love for another or perhaps even
antigone’s two laws 3
an ideal of self.3 Tragic characters die but their principles live on. They
suffer, but something beautiful is made of their suffering.
For other humanists, it is not the tragic protagonists’ martyrdom, but
rather their vulnerability that is attractive. Enduring unspeakable pain,
tragedy’s protagonists are reduced often to wordless suffering before
they die or shamble off stage. Stripped of their civilizational trappings,
they seem bare but not abject. There are exceptions: Lear is too abject,
for some; Persians’ laments are unbearable for others. But as a rule, the
protagonists of tragic theater are said to dignify, universalize, and human-
ize suffering. For Dorothea Krook, such tragic heroes make suffering
intelligible, redeem it, and reconcile us to it. Terry Eagleton calls hers
“a square-jawed masculinist ideal of tragedy, replete with pugnacious,
public-spirited heroes who take their punishment like a man even when
they are not guilty.”4 But many humanists share Krook’s view; they stop
short of redemption but do see promise in identification with suffer-
ing: a certain human commonality is furthered by tragedy’s tendency
to depict with sympathy the suffering on all sides of a conflict. Just as
the “cry” of suffering gets under language’s surface to access a common
humanity said to underlie our linguistic divisions, so tragedy gets under
the skin of politics to scratch the essence of the human. Here tragedy’s
power is not that it redeems suffering but that it exemplifies it in ways
that highlight the human’s most basic common denominator.5
This is something like what Judith Butler is after when she identifies
the power of the Levinasian “face” with the cry that is “the sound of
language evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization
that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense” (PL 134).
But what is this preceding and limiting substratum of sonorosity? Is it
an extrapolitical, extralinguistic, ethical commonality, as some human-
ists argue? Or the mark of a trace that variously ruptures all linguistic
systems but does not itself signify or humanize, as Lacanians suggest
when they connect it to monstrosity? Or is it the excess of/in language,
sounds that language delegitimizes as mere noise while promoting others
as meaningfully worded, poetic, musical, and more? This last option,
indebted to Jacques Rancière, takes its bearings also from Wittgenstein
who rejects the idea that there is any external, common, or private
referent for language. Even our unworded cries of suffering are, for
Wittgenstein, part of the language game of pain.6
Keening over her brother’s body, Antigone is compared by the sentry
to a bird at an empty nest. For humanists, her cries mark an extralin-
guistic, universal experience of human grief or the isolating solitude of
deep human pain. For antihumanists, they are signs of a dehumanizing,
monstrous animality. But are these the only options? A humanism of

universal or principled suffering versus an antihumanism of death-driven,
desiring monstrosity? Wittgenstein and Rancière direct us toward a third
option in which cries and suffering are sonorous emissions that are part
of but not the foundation of an alternative humanism. This third option
is an agonistic humanism that sees in mortality, suffering, sound, and
vulnerability resources for some form of enacted universality, but also
sees these as no less various in their significations than are the diverse
languages that unite and divide us. Moreover, agonistic humanism is
not centered on mortality and suffering; it draws as well on natality and
pleasure, power not just powerlessness, desire not just principle, in quest
of a politics that is not reducible to an ethics nor founded on finitude.7
The agonism in this humanism means it even insists on attenuating
rather than resecuring the human/animal distinction on which other
humanisms are focused.
This alternative, agonistic humanism grows out of my reading of
Sophocles’ Antigone, focused on Antigone’s dirge for herself, a speech
that has captured the attention of humanists and antihumanists alike. In
her dirge, Antigone says she would have violated Creon’s edict against
burying Polynices for no one but her brother, not even for husband
and children, had she had any. Goethe was horrified by the speech and
declared it a later addition, hoping a good philologist might excise it
one day.8 His horror prepared the way for Lacan’s later antihumanist
celebration of the very same speech as the monstrous, deeply spoken
truth of the play’s tragic heroine. But between Goethe’s humanism of
principled equality (betrayed by the speech) and the Lacanian antihu-
manism of monstrous desire (instanced by the speech), there are other
options. In particular, I suggest here, Antigone’s strange speech, read
contextually, makes political sense. Through parody, mimicry, and cita-
tion, she reworks the binaries of word versus sound, principle versus
desire, to make her case and posit a place from which to be heard. Her
acts exceed the (anti)humanism of dignified suffering or monstrous
desire she has often been taken to model—and a good thing, too, for
such solitary affects and shared vulnerabilities are not themselves a rich
basis for the democratic, concerted, or oppositional politics that draw
on humanism but on which humanisms also depend.
A New Humanism? Mortalism in Loraux, Butler, and

White
As Mark Griffith notes, renewed interest in Antigone since the 1970s

may be attributed to the rise of feminist theory in Classics as well as
to the influence of Jacques Lacan’s famous seminar on the play.9 But

there may also be another factor. The turn to Antigone has taken place
as scholars reworking humanism have shifted from an enlightened hu-
manism whose exemplary figure is Oedipus, the much-admired albeit
ultimately thwarted, self-knowing, puzzle-solving sovereign of Thebes, to
a post-Enlightenment humanism of lament and finitude whose model
is Antigone, the woman who keens and cries and demands death rites
for her brother in resistance to sovereign power. In contrast to the “uni-
versality fathered by Oedipus,” Victoria Wohl argues, “there might be a
different humanist tradition.”10 This alternative humanism is “mothered
by Antigone” and it “exposes the limits and limitations of the masculine
universal.”11 For Wohl, “critique” stands out as the trait Antigone brings
to humanism, but other Antigonean humanists replace humanism’s
focus on knowing with dying, reason with lamentation, sovereignty with
finitude.12
This humanism, which finds compelling universals in the cry of pain
and in the fact of mortality, is instanced in statements like Lord Eames’
(co-chair of the Consultative Group on Irish Reconciliation) defending
a proposal to provide recognition payments to survivors on both sides
of the Northern Irish conflict: “‘There is no difference in a mother’s tears.’”13
Antigone is not a mother: she refuses to be one and laments the fact
that she will never be one. (Wohl is just the most recent in a long line to
turn to Antigone to mother something.) But her insistence on lament-
ing equally both her brothers, one who attacked the city and the other
who defended it, stands for many as a statement of the pure equality to
which we are solicited by finitude, but which eludes our grasp in most
every other domain of life.
For Nicole Loraux, this shift from reason to finitude is reason to
turn to tragedy. The disappointment of Enlightenment promise in a
world “convulsed by history” leaves us particularly needful of tragedy’s
“meditation on the aporias” of such a world.14 For Gloria Fisk, this his-
tory repeats itself: “It makes sense that tragedy works during the periods
before and after modernity because our age resembles the ancients’ to
the degree that the limits of our political communities are in flux.”15
For David Scott, this history is irresistible: “The hoped-for futures that
inspired and gave shape to the expectation of the coming emancipation
are now themselves in ruin; . . . they are futures past. And this is why a
tragic sensibility is a timely one.”16 Other students of tragedy, like Bernard
Williams, Olga Taxidou, Dennis Schmidt, and Rita Felski, see such worldly
convulsions together with “the growing self-doubt of philosophy and the
questioning of reason, analytical method, and conceptual knowledge” as
solicitations to tragedy.17 For Schmidt, today’s worldly convulsions seem
to reprise philosophy’s earlier ones, as in Schelling’s call to return to
tragedy because he thought tragedy showed how “thinking can endure

rather than shirk the most extreme contradiction, namely the contra-
diction between freedom and necessity” made unavoidable by Kant’s
antimony of reason.18
Loraux suggests, however, that if we turn to tragedy now, it is not just
because tragedy stages irresolvable conflicts in a way that might well
inform an irredeemably conflicted and never entirely free world. If trag-
edy speaks to late-modern crises and self-doubt, it does so specifically as
oratorio which interpellates us as mortals defined by finitude. Oratorio
accesses a world in which such finitude is managed by way of sound,
song, dance, and dirge. When performed on stage outside of Athens,
Loraux says, tragedy’s sung laments were particularly effective in bringing
together diverse spectators. From the particularities and partisanships
of polis citizenship, audience members were moved to experience their
commonality as mortals. In other words, for Loraux, tragedy does not
just mirror or even explore the divisions of the political world. It offers
an “anti-politics” that points beyond them. Her antipolitics of grief is
an example of what I call here mortalist humanism.
Mortalist humanism commonly takes Antigone, the great lamenter,
as its representative, though Loraux prefers Cassandra in whom Loraux
finds a particularly compelling “tragic configuration of the mingling
of voices” (MV 74–75). Presumably this is because Cassandra, who can-
not be understood, is farther than Antigone from the pellucid polis
discourse Loraux wants to resist. Antigone keens and laments, but she
also reasons. And Antigone participates in the official, permitted burial
of her brother, Eteocles, while of Cassandra “the inspired seer,” Loraux
says: “Elegiac lament is not for her.”19 However, in The Birth of Tragedy,
a key text in Loraux’s construction of an extrapolitical humanism of
song and cry, Nietzsche does not choose between these two protago-
nists. Noting “how ‘the Dionysian and the Apollonian, in new births
ever following and mutually augmenting one another, controlled the
Hellenic genius,’” he says “the child of this long combat or this union,”
tragedy, is “‘at once Antigone and Cassandra’” (BT 8, cited in MV 74).20
Thus Nietzsche resignifies as natals two women normally associated with
lamentation and death. Loraux, who does not miss much, misses the
significance of this move away from mortality to natality, and she also
neglects Nietzsche’s “at once.” Ironically, aiming to rescue Nietzsche
from a century-long misreading that claims that he opposes Apollonian
to Dionysian, Loraux herself reads binarily when she homes in on Cas-
sandra, not Antigone.
In The Invention of Athens, her early work on tragedy, Loraux saw tragedy
as in the service of the city.21 She argued that fifth-century Athenians
watching Aeschylus’s tragedy Persians would have been reconstituted as

Athenians by the shared joy they felt watching their enemies, the Persians,
grieve and lament. In her later book The Mourning Voice, she is not so sure.
Focusing on the fifth century’s ban on lamentation, which constrained
and marginalized loud, showy lamentations, then identified with women
and elites, Loraux wonders whether tragedy with its own loud, showy
laments might not have been perhaps subversive rather than complicit.
Where earlier Loraux thought the city of forgetting’s ban on laments
was upheld by staging banned laments safely away from the city in the
circumscribed space and time of the theater, now she wonders whether
maybe the opposite is taking place: what if tragedy did not interpellate
citizens into polis ideology, as she earlier argued, but instead interpel-
lated spectators into membership in an extrapolitical community? Rather
than impress citizens into polis identification, tragedy may overcome
political divisions by way of nondiscursive sound, moving spectators into
a mortalist humanism of universal voice, cry, or suffering.22
Fully occupied by the music and threnody Loraux once thought it
merely conveyed, tragedy as an institution now is lamentation (MV 74).
Persians is important here because the play performs lamentation and
proliferates mourning sounds to such an extent that it is referred to by
one critic as one long lamentation.23 “These variations, from semantics
to phonology,” from ordered language to sound, “have led us far from
the expressive clarity and mastery of meanings of civic discourse,” says
Loraux (MV 40). In the city, aei, the civic always, promises the only reli-
able guarantee of immortality—that of the city. But tragic theater visits
us with a different always, aiai, the keening cry of bereavement central to
Loraux’s “anti-politics” of mourning. Antipolitical means “any behavior
that diverts, rejects or threatens, consciously or not, the obligations and
prohibitions constituting the ideology of the city state” which is the belief
that the city state “must be . . . one and at peace with itself” (MV 26; italics
original).24 The alternative to the city is a humanism that threatens the
polis’s narrow citizenship ideology. With its diverse, panhellenic audi-
ence and its appeal to human finitude, the theater, Loraux now argues,
is not a civic but a humanist institution that solicited spectators “less as
members of the political body than as members of that entirely apolitical
body known as the human race or, to give it its tragic name, ‘the race
of mortals.’” The effect was powerful: “It may be that that experience
abolished the boundaries so carefully drawn in ancient Greece to define
the communal and the individual spheres” (MV 88–89). Once tethered
to the city’s purpose, tragedy takes flight.25
Stephen White finds intimations of a similar mortalist humanism in
ancient Greece. In The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, White comments
on what happens in Homer’s Iliad when Priam visits Achilles to ransom

Hector’s body.26 White sees unity in grief as the two enemies, Priam
and Achilles, weep together and then go on to eat and drink in each
other’s company that night. White concedes that Priam leaves quickly,
anxious perhaps that Achilles’ hospitality may not last long. But, White
insists, when Achilles suspends Greek hostilities against Troy so as to
allow Trojans a mourning period for Hector, Achilles goes beyond
what the gods require him to do, and it is the spirit of shared finitude
that enables him to do this. White focuses on the two men’s shared
mourning because he seeks to identify the minimal bases out of which
ethical conduct may arise. Ontologically, he argues, mortality is a more
minimal condition than most others on offer in political theory, such
as autonomy or individuality.
Judith Butler also finds humanist promise (of which she professes to
be wary) in “violence, vulnerability and mourning” in her quest for a
still “more general conception of the human . . . in which we are, from
the start, given over to the other . . . to some set of primary others” (PL
31). This primordial dependence on others means we are defined by
vulnerability, which demarcates a range of possibilities from “the eradi-
cation of our being at one end [of the range, to] the physical support
for our lives at the other.” Notably the two end points of Butler’s range
of possibilities map onto Hannah Arendt’s labor (in which we are gov-
erned by the time of mortality) and work (in which we insulate ourselves
from the time of mortality by way of fabrication of those physical objects
that outlast a human life). But what about Arendt’s third element of
the human condition? Arendtian action, whose principle is natality,
also exposes us to vulnerability (if action goes awry, we may be hurt or
misunderstood) and it helps produce the physical supports of life (the
web of human relationships).27 Arendtian action is uniquely governed
by the timelessness of immortality and postulates human (nonsensual)
pleasure, individuation, vulnerability, and risk. Thus it points beyond
the mortalist humanism to which labour and work direct us.
The mortalist-humanist idea that we should dwell longer in grief or
forge in grief new solidarities may seem attractive now, given contem-
porary democracies’ tendency to suppress or instrumentalize grief on
behalf of national aims. But the focus on mourning and the claim of
minimalism are problematic, given that lamentation and the so-called
fact of mortality are always also wrapped up in—inseparable from—
their meaning, which varies (as Butler concedes). Just as Butler in her
earlier Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter argued against a sex-gender
distinction in which sex was the natural, univocal, and material ground
of gender, which was plural, culturally constructed, and behavioral, so
too here, we might say, we need to deconstruct the binary of death and
burial in which death is said to be the univocal, natural, and universal fact
that undergirds burial, which varies by culture and is constructed.28
Mortalist humanists neglect the pleasure-oriented politics to which Ar-
endt’s third term, action, directs us. White focuses on the shared mourn-
ing of Priam and Achilles but not also on their shared feast. Loraux and
Butler turn to mortalism alone to animate the sorts of shared action on
which democracies depend. But late-modern democratic citizens arguably
need resources of feast and finitude, appetite and hunger, abundance
and lack, festival and lamentation. We may all be mortals (with varying
attitudes toward and experiences of death) but we are also, as Arendt
insists along with Nietzsche, natals as well; and a focus on natality—which
is no less minimal than mortality, ontologically speaking—may generate
new commonalities while orienting humanism differently than mortality
does. In Sophocles’ Antigone, the chorus’s response to divisions of civil
war and conflict is to issue an invitation in the play’s fifth stasimon to
go to the feast of Dionysus and forget in dance. No one takes up their
invitation. But its issuance is enough to indicate an alternative that
mortalist humanists do not consider: not a dwelling deeper in grief (as
in White’s Iliad and Loraux’s late reading of Persians) nor its displace-
ment or suppression (as in Creon’s ban on burying Polynices), but a
natal’s pleasure-based counter to grief that supplements solidarity forged
in sorrow and points in the direction of generative action rather than
ruminative reflection or ethical orientation.
Freud considers the idea of a pleasure-based counter to grief in
“Mourning and Melancholia,” an essay often read as a brief in favor of
the work of proper mourning.29 Melancholy is the failure of such work-
ing through, a stuckness in grief that comes from overidentification with
the lost object, the dead. But a close reading suggests that grief is ended
not by mourning, per se, but rather by way of its interruption by pleasure,
by hunger for food or sex. Mourning, Freud says, begins with the ego
wanting to die along with the “lost object.” But in the end, the ego “is
‘persuaded’ [as it were] by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it de-
rives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been
abolished.”30 Thus, although White does not note it, it is surely important
that, in that night with Priam, Achilles also sleeps with Briseis.
The chorus’s effort to interrupt the city’s tragedy by calling every-
one to dance at the festival is mirrored by and may be a comment on
Creon’s effort to interrupt Antigone’s dirge by calling for her imme-
diate immurement. Both are unheeded. The politics of interruption
become even clearer when we attend to the parallel between Achilles
and Antigone.31 Both in love with their brother-like lovers or lover-like
brothers, Patroclus and Polynices, neither can stop grieving without

being forcibly interrupted. But the interruptions differ. Achilles is inter-
rupted by his mother, Thetis, sent by the gods to stop him desecrating
Hector’s body, then again by his appetites, which return to claim him for
life, and finally by the need to act.32 Antigone is interrupted by Creon
who says that if she is not stopped by force her dirge will go on forever.
Sophocles’ theatrical device of interruption calls attention to the costs
of the polis’s displacement of the song-wail-speech of lamentation with
the sovereign-enforced, tuneless reason-giving consolation of epitaphios
logos.33 The interruption of mourning by hunger and pleasure, central to
the Iliad, is replaced in Sophocles’ Thebes, as in the democratic Athens
it distortedly mirrors, by the insistence of sovereign power.
Antigone’s Dirge
In her final scene, Antigone bemoans her fate and introduces a new
reason for violating Creon’s edict against burying her brother Polynices.
Having claimed that the dead are all equal and are owed proper rites,
she now says she acted as she did out of fidelity to a law that directed
her to hold Polynices “first” in honor, and insists she would not have
done the same for any husband or children she might have had. This
conflicts with Antigone’s earlier plea to treat the dead equally (though
when she says about Polynices’ desecration “it was not some slave who
died” [518 (581)], she shows she grants equality to a limited circle of
persons).34 It also seems uncharacteristically cold and calculating, and
so Goethe, H. D. F. Kitto, R. C. Jebb, and others reject this final speech
as inauthentic.35
When read in historical context, however, Antigone’s dirge is less
conflicted, less chilling, and politically telling. It parodies Pericles,
mimics Creon, and cites a story told by Herodotus about Darius. These
references suggest that Antigone’s dirge is both an integral part of her
intervention into fifth-century politics, and also a still powerful solicita-
tion to contemporary audiences to see grief and lamentation in political
not ethical terms. When on the verge of death Antigone recounts her
suffering, speculates about its causes, and mourns the life she will not
get to lead, the marriage and children she will never have, she gives, as
Creon recognizes, a dirge for herself, and a long one too. “Can’t you
see?” he says, breaking into her performance: “If a man could wail his
own dirge before he dies, he’d never finish” (883–84 [970–71]). Creon
mocks Antigone as a narcissist—if her dirge is endless, it is because she
cannot say enough about herself—and he mocks her heroism. Not-
ing that an unending dirge allows a man to put off death indefinitely,
Creon demotes Antigone from a heroic actor who does not fear death
to a more ordinary, cowardly human who seeks to defer it. But Anti-
gone will soon (perhaps even in response to Creon’s insult) give the
lie to Creon’s implication that she does not have the true hero’s taste
for death. She does not wait for the long slow demise to which Creon
has sentenced her. Nor does she linger, hoping for rescue. She takes
matters into her own hands and kills herself. Self-indulgent she may be,
but she is no coward.
Antigone’s dirge for herself, like the one she wanted to perform for
her brother, is prohibited. When Creon enters in the middle of her
laments (883 [970]) and interrupts her, he tells his soldiers, “Take her
away, quickly! Wall her up in the tomb, you have your orders.” But the
soldiers delay and Antigone goes on to complete her dirge, at length.
It is only after her lines (891–928 [978–1021]) that the chorus leader
will comment on her wild passion and Creon will repeat to the guards
his earlier instruction: “Take her away. You’re wasting time” (931–32
[1023–24]). He adds, “You’ll pay for it too,” and this time they listen.
What occurs during that “wasted” time? In her now twice-forbidden
dirge, Antigone introduces a new reason for her dissidence. She has
said all along she buried Polynices because the gods and divine law
demand it: her brother deserves proper burial regardless of his deeds
in life because the dead are all equal. But here, in her final scene, she
cites another reason for her actions; she calls it a law, and although she
has not mentioned it before, she says here that she defied Creon be-
cause this law exclusively commands her fidelity: her brother is uniquely
singular. What she did for Polynices, she says sliding into apostrophe,
she would have done for no other family member: “A husband dead,
there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the
first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of death, no brother
could ever spring to light again. For this law alone I held you first in honor”
(909–13 [1001–5]).
It is an offensive speech.36 It offends those who expect consistency of
character: when Antigone ranks family members she seems to betray
her commitment to the equality of the dead.37 And it offends almost
everyone with a moral sensibility when Antigone treats some family
members as mere goods that can be replaced. But the offensiveness of
Antigone’s speech also has partly to do with its character as a reason-
giving speech. A parody of reason giving (what kinds of reasons are these?
Child or husband I might have had another . . . ?), it calls attention to
the politics, promise, and violence of reason giving itself. I turn now to
look at the speech in detail in relation to three contexts, one historical
(Pericles), one textual (Creon), and one intertextual (Darius as portrayed

in Herodotus’s Histories).38 All are part of Antigone’s agon with Creon
and of her effort to frame her story and the field of interpretation by
which she will be judged.
Parodying Pericles
Pericles’ Funeral Oration memorializes the dead by collectivizing

lament, focusing on the dead’s contribution to the polis, and not—as
in Homer or in women’s laments—on the unique individuality of the
dead and the grievous loss to surviving family and comrades. In Homer,
vengeance alleviates the ache of grief, feast and games return survivors
to life. But in fifth-century democratic Athens, other seemingly more
stable responses are encouraged: the Funeral Oration offers the dead
the immortality of the polis—the always of the city—and directs griev-
ing Athenian parents to the solace of other children. Delivered after
Sophocles wrote Antigone but capturing themes current in the discur-
sive context eleven years earlier when Pericles was strategos in Athens,
Pericles’ Oration urges parents if they are still of childbearing age not
to mourn too long over their lost sons but to have more children to
replace them. “Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to
have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not
only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget
their own lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not
be left desolate and she will be safer. For a man’s counsel cannot have
equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the
general danger.” 39
When Antigone says that a husband or a child can be replaced,
Goethe is horrified. But is she cold? Or does she lampoon Pericles’ civic
ideology? Parody certainly seems to be in play when Antigone points
out that Polynices is irreplaceable because his parents are dead: being
dead means Polynices’ parents are beyond the slim consolations of the
Oration. They are, as it were, too old to have more children, much too
old. When Antigone insists on the specific irreplaceability of the lost
brother, she opposes a more general fifth-century Athenian claim that
individual lives are replaceable; that past lives may be forgotten if future
ones take their place.40 Her parody is lost on modern readers because
most read Antigone as dead serious: earnest, shrill, determined, perhaps
mad, but not wry, funny, or arch. This assumption, however, is a mark
not of fidelity to the text but of bewitchment by its canonicity.41
Mimicking Creon
Antigone’s second allusion is to Creon. Earlier in the play, Creon

had dismissed Ismene’s concerns that Haemon, his son and Antigone’s
betrothed, will suffer if Antigone is put to death. Nonsense, Creon re-
plied. If Haemon cannot marry Antigone, there are “other furrows for
his plow” (569 [642]). In her offensive speech, Antigone takes up that
male position for herself. If she ranks a brother above a husband, that
is, she all but says, because there are other furrows for her plow as well,
or . . . other plows for her furrow. She can always have another husband.
Here the scandal of her speech is that she claims for herself a preroga-
tive Creon would reserve for his son and perhaps for all sons.
Antigone does not succeed fully in this, however. When Haemon
finds her dead, he kills himself in an iconic marriage-to-death scene
that reappropriates her for the conjugal family she rejected in life.42 The
contention over her suicide and its meaning begins almost immediately,
as the chorus weighs in on Haemon’s side (“He has won his bride at
last, poor boy”).43 Anticipating this, as it were, Antigone uses her final
moments of life to frame her act. Right before Creon interrupts her
dirge, Antigone calls attention to the issue of natal versus conjugal kin-
ship politics when she positions herself between her mother’s and her
brother’s doomed marriages, her mother’s incestuously confined to
the natal (she married her own son), and her brother’s exogamously
tethered to a foreigner: “O mother, your marriage-bed, the coiling
horrors, the coupling there—you with your own son, my father . . . O
dear brother, doomed in your marriage—your marriage murders mine”
(863–71 [951–57]).44 Creon then breaks in, interrupting his niece. Why?
Was it something she said?
Antigone returns to her theme of natal versus conjugal family ten-
sions after Creon’s interruption but she is now subtle, perhaps fearing
another interruption. As she underlines her brother’s irreplaceability,
her voice and meter change, helping some, like Goethe, to argue this
speech is a later addition. The change in voice and meter may signal
something else, however. Here Antigone cites, without naming it, a
story told by Herodotus about a woman famous for privileging natal
over conjugal family.
Citing Herodotus
In Herodotus’s story, a woman referred to only as Intaphrenes’ wife

reasons similarly to Antigone and earns the admiration of a powerful
king.45 Intaphrenes’ wife is forced by Darius to choose among husband,

children, and brother lest they all be put to death on account of the
husband’s suspected treason. The wife chooses to save her brother be-
cause, she reasons, with their parents dead he alone is irreplaceable. The
king, impressed with her reasoning, rewards her and releases not just
the brother she asked for but also her eldest son.46
To anthropologists, the story is a familiar illustration of the universal
gift of generation. Intaphrenes’ wife is given by Darius precisely the
two elements needed for social reproduction in a matrilineal structure:
where fathers vary but the mother does not, the mother’s brother op-
erates as a male head of household; he is the only male the offspring
share, and the son represents a future, the next generation. But there
is still more to the story. If we look at it closely, we find that it serves as
a legend for the play.
Herodotus reports: Darius suspected Intaphrenes of plotting treason
and had him and all his male family arrested and sentenced to death.
Intaphrenes’ wife “came to the palace and began to weep and lament
outside the door, and continued so long to do so that Darius, moved to
pity by her incessant tears, sent someone out to speak to her.” “‘Lady,’
the message, ran ‘the king is willing to spare the life of one member
of your family—choose which of the prisoners you wish to save.’” The
woman thinks over the offer and then informs the messenger that if
she could only have one family member, she would choose her brother.
“The answer,” Herodotus reports, “amazed Darius, and he sent again
and asked why it was that she rejected her husband and children and
preferred to save her brother, who was neither so near to her as her
children nor so dear to her as her husband.” The woman now responds
with the argument that earned her the admiration of the king and the
puzzlement of readers through the ages: “‘My lord,’ she replied, ‘God
willing, I may get another husband and other children when these are
gone. But as my father and mother are both dead, I can never possibly
have another brother. That was the reason for what I said.’” In classic
parable fashion, the supplicant’s words find favor with the king and
“to mark his pleasure, [he] granted her not only the life she asked,
but also that of her eldest son. The rest of the family were all put to
death.” The end.
Carolyn Dewald and Rachel Kitzinger, two of the few classicists to
compare Herodotus’s story in a sustained way with Sophocles’ play
(though even their essay is only eight pages long), ask why the king
would take pleasure in such antipatriarchal reasoning. They suggest
that, since the husband is charged with treason, to be antipatriarchal
in this context is to be differently patriarchal—that is, loyal to the king.
We can strengthen their case further, observing that this may be why
Darius presses the woman to reason her choice. When he asks, “Isn’t your
husband more dear?” he does not just toy with her (as he was indeed
wont to do with his subjects)—he probes her loyalties: “You asked for
your brother but are you sure you are not, nonetheless, still loyal to the
traitor Intaphrenes?” The woman’s crafted responses reassure Darius and
win her brother back. Dewald and Kitzinger conclude that the woman
outfoxes Darius: “Darius has invited her to negotiate the most basic fa-
milial bonds . . . and she has risen to the challenge.”47 But if loyalty to
natal over (traitorous) conjugal family is what reassures the king, then
why does Darius seem needlessly to complicate matters by throwing in
the eldest son, a remnant of the conjugal family, a son of the traitorous
Intaphrenes?48 Darius’s pleasure must have a different cause than that
identified by Dewald and Kitzinger: he may take pleasure not in the
woman’s reasons, but in the fact that she now reasons.
That is, although Antigone’s readers do not stop to note it, the story of
Intaphrenes’ wife is about a woman who laments too much and a sov-
ereign’s determination to put an end to it. With her family condemned
to death, Intaphrenes’ wife sets up camp outside the palace and begins
“to weep and lament outside the door.” Her tears are “incessant.” The
sovereign, Darius, seeks just like Creon does in Antigone to end this
woman’s laments. But Darius is moved by pity, while Creon finds An-
tigone impitiable.49 And so Darius does not respond, like Creon, with
prohibition, threats, and edicts, even though the person on behalf of
whom the woman laments is no less a traitor, in Darius’s eyes, than is
Polynices in Creon’s. Darius seeks to end the woman’s lamentation,
which like Antigone’s dirge had gone on so, so long, with inducements.
Pick one, he says, and I will release him. His offer propels Intaphrenes’
wife out of lamentation, which casts loss as infinite, into a vernacular
of commensuration in which some compensation, if not consolation,
is possible.50 When he then asks the woman to reason her response, he
incites her into rationality and moves her from lamentation to logos.
Antigone tries to make that leap as well. She too will give reasons—
her brother is unique, her parents are also dead—but she, unlike
Intaphrenes’ wife, gives those reasons in a context where it is already
too late and they cannot therefore do the work of reasons: persuade,
clarify, yield understanding, break the grip of grief. But they can do
something else: by citing (after Creon has ordered her to stop speaking)
Intaphrenes’ wife, Antigone shifts attention from herself to Creon—she
puts Creon on trial. Darius feels pity, offers inducements, but Creon is
cold and deals out violence: he is no Darius.
Dewald and Kitzinger argue that in this scene Antigone is in over
her head. Comparing an actual brother to a husband and children she
can only imagine having, she moves beyond her own experience and is
forced into faulty reasoning. This, they charge, shows how frantic she
has become. Seeking a way to persuade others to side with her, she is
pushed to extremes until finally logos betrays her: she stops making
sense. On my account, Antigone’s alien language in her final scene
marks not her failure but her power. It is her way of outfoxing Creon;
through indirection, she charges him with inadequacy and injustice
right to his face. She may die for her cause but she succeeds in making
her case. Citing the law of the irreplaceable brother, she indicates the
issue is not, contra Hegel and Lacan, the very thing she seems to say it
is—the uniqueness of her irreplaceable brother—but rather the larger
political situation: citing Intaphrenes’ wife, the law directs attention to
Antigone to intervene in the politics of lamentation (first allusion), ad-
dress tensions between natal and conjugal family loyalties (second allu-
sion), and broadcast Creon’s failure to meet the standard of governance
set by Darius (third allusion).
This finding unsettles a remarkable convergence among almost
all those who take Antigone’s dirge seriously: all see it as a threat to
politics—a welcome threat for some, unwelcome for others. For Hegel,
Antigone’s dirge is an expression of a dangerously destabilizing but ad-
mirably intimate sisterly devotion. For the antihumanist Lacan, it is an
expression of pure monstrous desire, outside of politics and disruptive
to all economies. For Slavoj Žižek, it is an absolute, total “no” to Creon’s
merely political power. Meanwhile, mortalist humanists also treasure
Antigone because she is anti- or postpolitical. They see in her a woman
who transcends politics to lament her brother; she homes in on the fact
of finitude by which mortalist humanists claim we are defined and out
of which they hope a new ethical equality may yet be founded. Thus
the humanist (ethical) and the antihumanist (monstrous, totalitarian)
readings all cast Antigone as beyond or above politics, and this all by
itself suggests it is worth lingering a bit longer with the one possibility
they converge to exclude: the possibility, established by her dirge when
read in historical context, that Antigone is a political actor.51
The Meaning of Antigone’s Death
Antigone’s dirge, part of her political struggle with Creon, is also

about her legacy and her worldly afterlife. With her speech, she frames
her actions for posterity. And yet, for Jacques Lacan, what is remark-
able about Antigone is that she is unconcerned with posterity. This is
what it means to die a conscious death, Lacan argues, and Oedipus
models it as well: “[Oedipus] doesn’t die like everybody else, that is to

say accidentally; he dies from a true death in which he erases his own
being.” He subtracts himself “from the order of the world. It’s a beauti-
ful attitude and, as the madrigal says, it’s twice as beautiful on account
of its beauty.”52 The beautiful death of Lacan’s antihumanist imagining,
which leaves no trace, inverts the beautiful death of Homeric heroes,
catalogued by Jean Pierre Vernant, which is all about leaving a trace,
an epic story to inspire others forever more.53 Lacan’s beautiful death,
by contrast, affirms the resounding lack of redemption. Oedipus’s body
disappears, his burial place is unknown and unmarked, his daughters
grieve the fact that without a body and a burial they are unable properly
to lament their loss. For Lacan, Oedipus’s disappearance is part of his
mortal perfection. The body and the burial enable survivors to avoid
rather than confront death’s meaning(lessness). Thus rather than inhibit
mourning, the body’s disappearance is the condition of the only true
lamentation, the sort that does not evade the fact of mortality.
Antigone does not quite fit Lacan’s frame, however, for she tries with
her dirge to make or find meaning in the moment of mortality. Lacan
ignores her meaning-making efforts and proclaims his disinterest in the
evidence tracked here: the citational character of Antigone’s final speech.
Perhaps he means to guard her purity, but in so doing he obscures
her politics. Lacan’s focus on her monstrous desire elides Antigone’s
language and argument. Loraux, who criticizes Lacan’s reading, does a
version of the same thing when she focuses on extralinguistic pain and
casts tragedy as antipolitical. That Lacan and Loraux should mirror each
other makes sense: antihumanist and humanist both write in quest of
the passion, desire, or pain of encounter with death (an encounter that
renders us monstrous, for Lacan, and universally human, for Loraux)
which, both argue, is fended off by the ordinary political construction
of want satisfaction called “the service of the goods” by Lacan and the
“logos of the city” by Loraux.
Lacan may not see that meaning making is what is at stake in Antigone’s
dirge, but Creon does. This is why he interrupts Antigone: his awareness
that her dirge is, pace Lacan, a bid for immortality, an effort to frame
the meaning and significance of her act in opposition to Creon’s effort
to do so. Creon wants to deprive Antigone of immortality; he wants An-
tigone to die quietly, away from the city and without fanfare. She wants
the chorus to tell her story as she wants it told. Her dirge is part of her
agon with Creon. She tries making the case that she is like Niobe, the
ceaselessly lamenting goddess petrified into rockface. The chorus mocks
her. Too much? Antigone responds: what about Intaphrenes’ wife? She
laments ceaselessly but she is human. That option goes down better with
the chorus, but not with Creon.
The decisive making of meaning is something Creon considers to

be his right. This is what drives him throughout: the quest to own
the power of definition (who is friend, who is enemy?) and to control
the dissemination of meaning (“follow my orders closely,” he tells the
chorus [215 (240)]). That Creon will seek to control not just what An-
tigone says but, more broadly, her power of speech is foreshadowed in
Creon’s first exchange with Antigone, when he asks her to respond to
the sentry’s charges that she has broken the law: “You, tell me briefly,
no long speeches—were you aware a decree had forbidden this?” (446–47
[495–96]; emphasis added).
Antigone goes on to give several long speeches but it is not within
her power to secure the meaning of her death. For Lacanians, she is
the revolutionary suicide, a heroic subject of conscious death; for some
political or feminist theorists, an antistatist advocate for the private
realm’s virtues (Jean Bethke Elshtain); for others, a heroine of the
public (Mary G. Dietz, Costas Douzinas).54 For Butler, Antigone models
kinship structures yet to come; but for Lee Edelman, Antigone exhib-
its a valuable antipathy to child-centered kinship as such.55 This is the
contested terrain into which the reading tendered here ventures not
unwarily, for Antigone’s passion is something about which her devotees
are quite passionate.
Working the Interval
Against those who treat Antigone as a representative of extrapolitical-

humanist or monstrous mortalism, I have argued that her dirge and her
death are political acts. Against those who seek in lamentation a universal
humanism of sound and cry, I have argued that Antigone’s dirge is a
partisan political intervention. However, even if Antigone’s words are
political, that may leave intact the mortalist-humanist claim that lamenta-
tion accesses or stages a commonality that eludes politics and on which
a new (post)politics or ethics should be built. Like a dog whistle, the
sound of the lamenting cry may reach hearers on a different register
than words and solicit us into an extrapolitical universalism, even while
the words of grief usher us into political partisanships or consensus. But
phone and logos are not as easy to untangle as this objection implies.
Parody, mimicry, and citation postulate not just worded repetition but
also intonation and inflection. That is, analytically distinguishing phone
and logos, though useful, misleads us into thinking of phone and logos
as parallel and distinct logics, or of logos as epiphenomenal to the real
human register of phone. What if instead phone and logos inspirit and
interrupt each other?
When Loraux identifies the sound of grief with marginalized women’s

laments, she seems to collapse sound and lamentation, or at least to
focus on the wordless aspects of lamentation. But her study of lamenta-
tion’s sound in The Mourning Voice calls attention to a more agonistic
process in which phone erupts into logos rather than collapsing it. For
example, she points out the name Ajax is a homonym; in addition to the
hero’s name it is also a word, alas, and onomatopoeiacally a sound of
lament, aiai, a point subtly noted by the chorus of sailors in Sophocles’
play by that name when they say “Ajax of the mournful name” (914;
qtd. MV 39). Elsewhere, Loraux notes a similar slippage. She casts the
shift from the city’s word, aei or always, which connotes the eternal city
of Pericles that is worth dying for, to the lamenter’s cry, aiai, as a shift
from meaning to sound and from politics, which she sees as the realm
of sense, to an antipolitical encounter with meaning’s aporias. But if
phone erupts into logos, might not logos erupt into phone as well? If
the aiai of lament breaks through the aei of the city, then might not
listeners also hear the aei of the city in the sound of the aiai of lament?
If the civic “always” is riven by universal cry, might not universal cry be
riven by the civic always? Hearing lament in Ajax’s name, we may also
hear his name in cries of lament. Each is the trace of the other. Politics
may be riven by mortalist humanism but mortalist humanism is riven
by politics as well.
In For More Than One Voice, Adriana Cavarero deconstructs the binary
of phone and logos and argues that phone does not only disrupt logos
from outside, as it were, but also inspirits it from the inside.56 In Plato
and elsewhere, Cavarero tracks logos’s denial of its dependence on voice,
its claim to be superior because immaterial, abstract, anticorporeal. We
could add to her arguments, since logos has other strategies as well. It
neutralizes or appropriates phone not only by casting it as mere voice
(nonsense, noise), but also by bringing phone into the fold of sense,
as when phone is figured as onomatopoeia which combines sound
and word into an undecidable unity and blurs the distinction between
symbolic (studied by semantics) and semiotic (studied by phonology).
An evocative example is Loraux’s tragic aie/aiai, with its connotations
of “forever” or “always” as well as the sound of pain. But Loraux and
Cavarero differ on an important point: replaying the difference between
Goethe and Lacan, Loraux hears universal equality on the register of cry
(Antigone’s first law, privileged by Goethe); Caverero hears singularity
(Antigone’s second law, privileged by Lacan).
Rousseau, in the Essay on the Origins of Languages, valued onomatopoeia
because the word that sounds like what it is is doubly protected against
the alienation that Rousseau feared of presence through language and
writing. But what for Rousseau is a sign of presence is for Cavarero

rather a ruptural power because of voice’s corporeality. Voice’s corporeal
emanations, like the cries emitted by Antigone “like a bird at an empty
nest,” introduce alienness into the situation rather than insulating us
from it. Even where logos seems to establish its hegemony, abstracting
reason from the body and accounting for phone by way of onomato-
poeia, nonsense, and more, logos remains, Cavarero says, dependent
upon unruly voice, which is its alien register, its embodied materiality,
its undecidable supplement: its différance. In short, what Loraux sees
as shifts between phone and logos (even as she describes the former
interrupting the latter) are for Cavarero signs of a mutual inhabitation
that both inspirits and ruptures phone and logos.
Jacques Rancière pushes the idea in a similar but slightly more agonis-
tic direction when he posits phone as part of the political situation, not
prior to or apart from it.57 Rancière does not identify logos with politics
and phone with antipolitics, as Loraux does, nor does he insist on their
mutual inhabitation, as Cavarero does. Instead, he insists these are simply
two kinds of sound distinguished by a political partition of the sensible:
“The simple opposition between logical animals and phonic animals is
in no way the given on which politics is then based. It is . . . one of the
stakes of the very dispute that institutes politics . . . Politics exists because
the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the
account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous
emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just,
whereas some other emission is merely perceived as noise signaling
pleasure or pain, consent or revolt” (D 22–23). Phone is the name for
the sonorous emissions of the excluded, and logos is the name claimed
by the included for their own sounds. When Rancière’s political actors
seek equality, they appropriate the logos that excludes them. They do
not claim commonality with their oppressors as mortals, they aim to be
able to say that “from being ‘mortals’ they have become ‘men’” (D 25).
And they stage their dissensus using the very same tactics Antigone uses
in her dirge: parody, mimesis, citation.58
Parody, mimicry, and citation are possible because of the excessiveness
of language, what Rancière calls its “literarity,” which we domesticate by
way of figurations, like onomatopoeia, which name that excessiveness
and give it a function.59 But dissidents mobilize that excessiveness in
a different way, aiming to disrupt the dominant order, what Rancière
calls the police order. It is uncanny that such excess or literarity, along
with the parody, mimicry, and citation enabled thereby, should be most
evident in Antigone’s dirge, a triply allusive speech (excessive in its three
allusions) that is also a speech of suffering (excessive in its emotion)
and a crux (excessive to the text, suspected of inauthenticity) which,

like all cruxes, is much suffered over by critics.60
Like Lacan, Rancière is drawn to scandalous speech. But where Lacan
sees in Antigone’s offensive speech the “suggestion of scandal” because
the speech’s purity suggests she has reached the limit point of desire, for
Rancière the scandal is in the speaker’s contaminated, mimetic, thiev-
ing entry into logos. The scandal is political because, as Rancière says,
criticizing Habermas: “Politics’ penchant for dialogue has much more
to do with literary heterology, with its utterances stolen and tossed back
at their authors . . . than with the allegedly ideal situation of dialogue”
(D 59).
Stealing from the dominant language might mean we engage in mere
mimicry. Is that a dead end, as Žižek seems to suggest when he distin-
guishes, in Donald Pease’s parsing, “the radical aspect of Antigone’s
ethical act and a merely performative reconfiguration of one’s symbolic
condition?” Such “marginal configuration of the predominant discourse
would nevertheless remain within the social order that it would simply
reorganize,” says Pease in support of Lacan and Žižek.61 But there is
another option: a truly political Antigone (rather than an ethical and/
or monstrous one) evades the trap of radicality versus complicity by
practicing a mimicry that is self-overcoming: “Through transgression,”
Rancière’s political actors “find that they too, just like speaking beings,
are endowed with speech” (D 24).62 Since Rancière’s focus is on efforts
to change the dominant order, he may orient us to the question of
success or failure in altering the current partition of the sensible. But
sometimes we have another aim—to live otherwise.63 When, if the action
of dissensus fails in instrumental terms, it may still succeed for, in such
action, equality is enacted and experienced. As Butler points out, “In
the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new” (PL
44). That possibility inheres in the excessiveness of language, its iter-
ability; contra Žižek, Butler points out that the law of the irreplaceable
brother is not a stammering repetition of his name, but rather a kinship
location occupied by more than one (AC 68).
The agon of dissensus and consensus is what Rancière calls politics,
and it provides the perspective from which he criticizes Edmund Burke
and Hannah Arendt for opposing universal human rights to the rights
of citizens. Human rights are said to be empty and citizen rights are
never full enough to fulfill the equality demands of the stateless. Ran-
cière criticizes Burke and Arendt for what he sees as their forced choice
between the universal’s identity of human/mortal and the civic’s identity
of citizen. Instead, Rancière argues, there is a third option in which we
work “the interval between the two identities,” using parody, mimicry,
citation. Notably these interstitial rhetorical devices themselves work

the interval between the serious and the comic, the internal and the
external qualities of language, enabling democratic actors to reconfigure
distributions of public and private, universal and particular, mortal and
citizen. This is always needed because even the universal, Rancière says,
“is incessantly privatized by police logic.” 64
Critics have for centuries interpreted Antigone as embracing one or
another identity—for example, private (family) goods versus public (po-
lis) goods. Others, like Lacan, have embraced her as an anti-identitarian
who represents the true desire that exceeds and destabilizes all identities.
But Ranciere’s idea of “working the intervals” invites us to see Antigone
inhabiting the two identities whose contention is staged here—Pericles’
polis-centered lamentation and the women’s laments outlawed in the
fifth-century polis—and then working the intervals between them. First,
she performs the accepted rites for Eteocles, in complete accordance
with the logocentric polis’s funerary requirements. Then later, when
she keens and calls for vengeance over the body of her other brother,
Polynices, she performs lamentations, to a T, as they have been outlawed
by the fifth-century polis: keening in broad daylight and loudly calling for
vengeance. Finally, in her third and final performance of lamentation,
her dirge for herself, she does exactly what Rancière’s political actors do
when they work the interval between the identities whose oppositional
logic might otherwise have frozen them. Her dirge neither conforms to
the expected form nor simply violates it. Instead, she parodies, mimics,
lampoons, and cites the stories, figures, and speech of the powerful,
insinuating her views into their discourse, not absolutizing them, as
Žižek says, nor losing hold of her capacity to make sense, as Dewald
and Kitzinger argue.
If Antigone stages dissensus by working with materials provided by
the city of consensus, then we can now see her as working the interval
between lamentation and logos, singularity and equality, between the
aiai of tragedy and the aei of the city, in an effort to make a new kind
of sense.65 She suffers for this, but she is not defined by her suffering.
She dies, but she is not defined by her mortality. When Nietzsche cast
her as natal, he accented other aspects of her character and invited us
to see in her, perhaps, a different (post)humanism than that of the new
mortalist humanism that is now being developed, often in her name.
Following Nietzsche’s lead, we may see that this tragedy does not just
provide resources for our deeply political, conflictual time by soliciting
us to an extrapolitical ethics of mortalist humanism: in Antigone we find
elements of an agonistic humanism that works the intervals between
word and cry, natality and mortality, equality and singularity, and (“like
a bird at an empty nest”) between human and animal.
“Working the intervals” is also a good way to respond to the philo-

sophical reception of Antigone, which has historically claimed Sophocles’
protagonist for humanism as well as antihumanism. We can say that
Antigone invites us to “work the intervals” between them as well and
in so doing to develop an agonistic humanism that might respond to
Loraux’s occasionally expressed longing for a politics that is beyond the
binary by which her account is often gripped: neither a polis politics
nor a tragic antipolitics of mortalist humanism. “What if the word ‘po-
litical’ had more than one meaning?”66 Loraux asks, expressing dismay
that such a politics is only imagined. But no politics can be real without
being imagined.
Four Women and a Funeral
So-called “peace mom” Cindy Sheehan has been likened many times
to Antigone in the popular and scholarly press. Donald Pease calls Shee-
han “Antigone’s kin.” Jan Hartman calls her an “American Antigone.”67
The aim of the likening is political, to ennoble certain dissidents by
classicizing them and to lend the grandeur of classics to the often small-
seeming events of our own time. But that political aim is to some extent
also undercut by such classicizations, which give the impression that the
pain to which mourning mothers appeal now is the same pain as that
experienced by spectators at the tragic theater in the fifth century. Thus,
maternal pain is universalized as both wide and deep: it is one unitary
thing with which we are all familiar, and it reaches all the way back to
the fifth century. This distills the agonistic conflicts of politics into the
mortalist humanism criticized here for staging the ethical turn away from
politics. Rancière resists such moves when he says “the ethical turn is not
a historical necessity.”68 Given the ahistorical nature of classicization, it
is surely just as important to say that the ethical turn is not an ahistori-
cal necessity either, and that some attention to historical and political
specificity can help us resist the lure of a timeless, mourning-centered
humanism that Sophocles’ play helps us to politicize. In conclusion
then, and aiming to perform that classicization differently, I turn to
both Antigone and Intaphrenes’ wife to engage critically depictions of
women like Sheehan as dissident mourning mothers.
Unlike Sheehan who is depicted in the popular media as a mother
whose political agency is ignited by loss, Lila Lipscomb is depicted in
Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 as a mourning mother whose
agency is undone by loss. A woman who suffers, Lipscomb seems more
like Intaphrenes’ wife than Antigone. After her son dies in the second
Iraq war, Lipscomb decides to go to the White House, seeking, she says,
a place to put her anger, not an opportunity for political activism. But
en route to the White House something happens, and we see the power
and limitations of mortalist humanism.
In Lafayette Park, Lipscomb has an unlikely encounter with a woman, a
stall protestor, whose cardboard shelter is festooned with pictures of dead
babies and who blames Bush for lives lost in Spain. While the woman
makes her charges, Lipscomb nods in shared vulnerability and murmurs
“yes, my son [too].”69 Stephen White might note with approval how shared
finitude brings these women together, reprising the improbable connec-
tions between Achilles and Priam enabled by mortalist humanism. But,
as in that scene from Homer, the parties here are easily driven apart.
They are soon interrupted by a third, conservative-looking woman who
stumbles on the scene and questions its authenticity. Is it a crux? “This
is staged,” she says for the camera’s sake, as she contradicts the stall
protestor and rejects Lipscomb’s lament, first, with disbelief (“Oh, yeah?
Where did he die?”), and then by cruelly countering her authenticating
facts (“Karbala, April 2nd”) with neo-Periclean cold equality: “There are a
lot of other people too.” This not untrue (but not only true) effacement
of Lipscomb’s singular loss silences Lipscomb and drives her away from
this scene of potential political awakening. She leaves behind the ugly
conflict, gives up her fledgling solidarity with the stall woman, and turns
to the White House. Alone and away from the two politicized, equality-
centered women in Lafayette Park (the stall protestor speaks on behalf
of the dead, the conservative woman rejects Lipscomb’s focus on her son
above all others), Lipscomb returns to her focus on her singular son:
“I need my son. God, it’s tougher than I thought it was gonna be . . .
to be here. But it’s freeing also . . . because I finally have a place . . . to
put all my pain and all my anger . . . and to release it.”
In Moore’s film, Lipscomb is a woman brought down by grief and
incapable of political engagement. In real life, however, Lipscomb joins
Sheehan in political activism, founding Gold Star Families for Peace. But
it is Sheehan, not Lipscomb, who is depicted in the popular media as a
mourning mother radicalized into activism by her son’s death. Resisting
the regime’s effort to instrumentalize all military deaths on behalf of the
ongoing Iraq war, Sheehan is, perhaps unsurprisingly, classicized more
than once. True, she does not stand up for the right to bury her son;
his burial is not forbidden. But when Sheehan takes a stand on behalf
of a dead loved one against the unapologetic power of the state, she
calls to mind none other than Antigone.
The comparison may enrich our appreciation of Sheehan, who can
be seen as trying to work the intervals among the various identities on
offer to dissidents. When, like Intaphrenes’ wife, Sheehan sets up camp

outside the palace (Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas), Sheehan does not
keen; she makes demands. First, she speaks in ways that are unlicenced,
writing an open letter to Bush in which she demands democratic ac-
countability for the war, enacts equality with the president when she
refers to him as “George,” and does not limit her communication to the
President but rather publishes her letter in an effort to address the U.S.
public.70 Second, rather than take up the “Gold Star Mother” identity
offered to those who have lost children in the military, Sheehan helps
found Gold Star Families for Peace in 2005, a pacifist parody of the
official organization of maternal mourning. Gold Star Families prizes
peace over sacrifice and includes all self-identified family members, not
just “mothers.” And third, Sheehan allows her loss of her son to press
her into encounter not just with mortal finitude but with political loss;
it dawns on her when she is fingerprinted after an arrest: “That’s when
the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First
Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America
go? I started crying in pain.”71 The aiai of mortality bleeds into the aei
of the city.
But Sheehan also embraces the media’s label “peace mom” (so titling
her memoir), mobilizing maternity for peace no less than Lord Eames
did, and failing to attend to the label’s reinstatement of contested heter-
onormative identities. Is “peace mom” a new subject position, on behalf
of which we work the intervals? Or does the label just fold Sheehan into
a very old and undivided subject position? Perhaps Žižek is right and
there is no avoiding the to-ing and fro-ing whereby parodic reiteration
yields to mere repetition, especially when our story’s protagonist is not
a mythic heroine but an imperfect person who takes up or is taken up
by worthwhile causes but is then buffeted by giant media and turns out
to be much smaller than the hopes we invest in her (as when Sheehan
embraces Hugo Chávez, seems to flirt with anti-Semitism in her criticisms
of the Iraq war, and leverages her personal pain into blunt criticism of
U.S. foreign policy).
If the most important critical question is not whether Sheehan and
Lipscomb are worthy of classicization but rather what political-cultural
work such classicizations do, then the most important critical answer
is surely that such classicizations displace the very politics they mean
to ennoble, enshrining a humanism without spatiotemporal difference
that occludes the divisions that politics and tragedy postulate. If there is
no difference in a mother’s tears, then that very claim is not a ground
but rather a problem for politics, which postulates division, not a lack
of differentiation. However, the claim is belied by the fact that both
mourning and maternity are internally differentiated. Mourning may

licence vengeance or pacifism, and maternity may issue in adoration
or rage. Such rifts in mourning and maternity are covered over by the
iconic figure of the mourning mother that grounds a universalism built
undecidably on mourning and/or maternity, in a way that allows each
to supplement the other and create a naturalized identity—the mourn-
ing mother—insulated from any trace of différance. The mourning
mother, possessed of the sort of disavowed but often telling political
power that only a nonpolitical figure can have, plays into the identities
whose intervals Rancière would have us rework on behalf of more radi-
cal alternatives.
That Antigone should be the icon of this icon is particularly telling
(it runs roughshod over the differences that stand in its way). As we
know, she is no mother, and the speech in which she laments this fact,
while also making it undeniably clear, is not an ethical but a political
speech that works the intervals between the various identities tracked
here and points in the direction of an agonistic, not a mortalist, hu-
manism. Constitutively divided and bound by Antigone’s two laws and
committed to working the intervals between mourning and maternity,
this agonistic humanism promotes a natal/mortal politics of struggle,
pain, and conflict but also of mutuality, pleasure, and care.
American Bar Foundation and Northwestern University
NOTES
This essay was written with support from The American Philosophical Society, the American
Bar Foundation, Northwestern University, and Oxford University’s Center for Political
Ideology and Nuffield College. Thanks to audiences at the Centre for Political Ideology,
The Futures of Critical Theory (March 2009 graduate-student conference in Frankfurt),
St. Andrew’s University’s Politics and International Relations colloquium, the 2009 an-
nual Government department graduate-student conference at Harvard University, the
“Lectures in Political Theory” series at NYU’s Gallatin School, Ohio Wesleyan University’s
Sagan National Colloquium series, the 2009 American Political Science Association meet-
ings, the 2007 Feminism and Classics Conference at University of Michigan and the Law,
Political Theory, and Philosophy colloquium at University of Victoria. I am particularly
indebted to George Shulman, Marc Stears, Richard Seaford, Matt Landauer, Jeremy
Webber, Diego Rossello, and Chris Finlay. For manuscript preparation, thanks to Rachel
Ricci and Demetra Kasimis. Thanks as well to Miriam Leonard, Arlene Saxonhouse, Yopi
Prins, and Jill Frank for responses to a very early draft. Bruce Robbins’s and Jason Frank’s
questions about humanism drove the final version, which is indebted also to Rita Felski
and readers for NLH.
1 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso
Books, 2004), 42 (hereafter cited in text PL). Michel Foucault, “Politics and Ethics: An
Interview,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984),
374. Laurence Michel, “Shakespearean Tragedy: Critique of Humanism from the Inside,”
Massachusetts Review II (1961): 649 (hereafter cited in text).
2 Ella Myers, “Resisting Foucauldian Ethics: Associative Politics and the Limits of the
Care of the Self,” Contemporary Political Theory 7, no. 2 (2008): 125–46; Todd Davis and
Kenneth Womack, eds., Mapping the Ethical Turn (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press,
2001); Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons 7,
no. 1 (2006): 1–20; Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., The
Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000).
3 Terry Eagleton dissents, however, noting (against Dorothea Krook, Elements of Tragedy
[New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1969]) that tragedy (in particular the Greek form) is
about events, not characters: “Characters for Aristotle, in what not so long ago might have
been dubbed ‘theoretical antihumanism,’ are a kind of ethical colouring on the action
rather than its nub” (Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002]: 77).
4 Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 76.
5 This may be the curiously attractive achievement of Giorgio Agamben’s theorization
of bare life in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press,
1998). Here we have precisely the decivilized human celebrated by humanism, recast in
devalued form—as the abject product of biopolitics. The same may apply to Hobbes’s
observations about universal human vulnerability in the state of the nature, which however
grounds not humanism but statist political order.
6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. Gertrude Elizabeth and Margaret
Anscombe (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), 86. Wittgenstein’s idea of a language game
is not reducible to vernaculars or semantic codes. It includes bodily movements, noises,
and other elements of (non)meaning that exceed the linguistic, narrowly understood
(that is, pain is also a language game not just a language game). With this in mind, we can
see Creon’s wailing grief at the end of the play as a disruptive trace that unsettles exist-
ing codes of lamentation, as I argued in “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning,
Membership, and the Politics of Exception,” (Political Theory 37, no. 1 [2009]: 5–43), and
yet is not an extralinguistic referent.
7 Political interventions slide easily into ethical ones: “Within the ethical frame of the
Levinasian position, we begin by positing a dyad. But the sphere of politics, in his terms,
is one in which there are always more than two subjects at play in the scene . . . what if
there is an Other who does violence to an Other? [This is posed as a political question
but Butler then asks:] To which Other do I respond ethically?” (PL 139–140)
8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans.
John Oxenford (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2005), 227.
9 Mark Griffith, “The Subject of Desire in Sophocles’ Antigone” in The Soul of Tragedy:
Essays on Athenian Drama, ed. Victoria Pedrick and Steven M. Oberhelman (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 2005), 91.
10 Victoria Wohl, “Tragedy and Feminism” in A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca W.
Bushnell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 158–59.
11 Wohl, “Tragedy and Feminism,” 159.
12 Rancière agrees there is a shift from Oedipus to Antigone (or Antigone! He slips from
the character to the play without notice) but he does not value it: “Under Oedipus’ sign
the trauma was the forgotten events whose reactivation could cure the wound. When An-
tigone replaces Oedipus in the Lacanian theorization, a new form of secret is established
[beyond] any saving knowledge. The trauma that is summarized in Antigone is without
beginning or end” (“The Ethical Turn,” 5).
13 “BBC Radio 4.” 7:10 a.m., 28 Jan. 2009. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00gtdlv>.
Is this statement about the universality of suffering? Or the universality of motherhood?
In other words, what is doing the work here: the mother or the tears? Or do the tears
make the mother (into a signifier of universality)? That is, isn’t maternalism at work as the
ground but also as the political effect of such humanist efforts to get beyond politics?
14 Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell
Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2002), 13 (hereafter cited in text as MV).
15 Gloria Fisk, “Putting Tragedy to Work for the Polis,” New Literary History 39, no. 4
(2008): 895.
16 David Scott, “Tragedy’s Time,” in Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008), 201.
17 Rita Felski, introduction to Rethinking Tragedy, 1 (citing Dennis Schmidt).
18 Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans & Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington:
Indiana Univ. Press, 2001), 76.
19 Loraux, Mothers in Mourning: With the Essay of Amnesty and Its Opposite, trans. Corinne
Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), 61.
20 She finds in the Birth of Tragedy an invitation thus far unaccepted by the discipline
formed around his expulsion to follow: the strain of language to music, the stretch of
semantics to semiotics and song (74).
21 Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans.
Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 50.
22 Similarly, Page duBois says, by way of grief and mourning spectators come to “a moment
of recognition that exceeds the homogenous civic community, to an acknowledgement of
his or her place among humankind, as mortal” (“Toppling the Hero: Polyphony in the
Tragic City,” in Rethinking Tragedy, 127–47 and Martha Nussbaum, “The ‘Morality of Pity:’
Sophocles’ Philoctetes” in Rethinking Tragedy, 151.
23 Edith Hall, The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions Between Ancient Greek Drama and
Society (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 277.
24 The antipolitical shades into the political, as when Loraux refers to “Electra’s ‘politics
of the feminine’” (MV 27), suggesting Loraux understands the difficulties she courts with
her distinction.
25 Loraux often defines her project in opposition to Aristotle, but he travels a similar
path, offering Charles Segal a historical context for humanism: “Aristotle shifts his em-
phasis from the civic solidarity expressed by Athenian tragedy as an intensely political and
communal form to its universality as a dramatization of the sufferings and uncertainties
in the lives of all of us as fellow-mortals who share a common humanity” because, in his
lifetime, Aristotle saw “the large-scale export of Athenian drama from its intensely local
setting in the Periclean theater in Athens to the rest of Greece.” The fourth-century “ex-
pansion of the audience from Athens to the rest of the Greek oikoumene requires a new
mode of interpretation for tragedy, a new horizon of expectation. Tragedy ceases to be
Athenian tragedy and becomes Hellenic tragedy and eventually world tragedy” (“Classics,
Ecumenicism and Greek Tragedy,” TAPA 125 [1995]: 23–24).
26 Stephen K. White, Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
2009).
27 Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958). Else-
where the third appears, when Butler mentions “mortality, vulnerability, agency” as all
implied by the body [PL 26]).
28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
29 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of The Complete
Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957),
14: 239–58.
30 My reading of Freud is indebted to Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: From Homer to
Lacan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001). Note that Freud juxtaposes
narcissistic satisfaction to mourning here, though for Achilles, in the night with Priam,
narcissistic satisfaction is arguably derived from mourning when Achilles imagines his father
mourning the loss of his son. Butler resists one possible implication of Freud’s view: that
we deal with mourning by way of substitution, libidinal reinvestment. The subject does
not reinvest; instead it is deeply altered by loss, she argues. I agree but it is important to
note that, in Freud’s own account, what prevents mourning from sliding into melancholy
is the appetites’ claim of the body for life, not simply (as Butler suggests and opposes) the
subject’s voluntarist free choice of another libidinal investment to replace (if that were
possible) the lost one (PL 21).
31 That Antigone, a transgressive woman, takes the place of Achilles, may be a comment
on Creon’s (and Pericles’) project of postheroic politics. Mark Griffith comes close to
this point when he asks rhetorically: “What does it mean that the only person brave and
noble enough to speak and act up in resistance to Creon’s unjust edict is the daughter
of Oedipus?” (“The Subject of Desire,” 97)
32 If he returns to life, is that because the cultural economies of vengeance and burial
work? But they do not, as Richard Seaford points out (Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and
Tragedy in the Developing City-State [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994]: 67): Patroclus’ body
is left unburied for too long; Patroclus begs to be released to go through Hades’ gates but
Achilles seeks vengeance first. Satisfaction eludes him there, however; it is as if Hector dies
too soon. Achilles drags his foe’s body around in unsated rage for days, like a cat flipping
a dead mouse from one paw to the other, disappointed that his prey has died before he
is done playing with it.
33 A trace of this may appear in modern lamenting the bones rituals which, Andrea Fish-
man points out, end when a male authority figure enters to interject a ‘rational,’ calming
influence to the mourning session” (as in Theseus in Suppliants, so in modern times, the
Maniat men in the periphery of the klama). (“Threnoi to Moirologia: Female Voices of
Solitude, Resistance, and Solidarity,” Oral Tradition 23, no. 2 [Oct 2008]: 1–24, 16; Nadia
Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1991): 100–11).
34 Citations to the play indicate first the Greek lines and then, in the square brackets, the
lines from Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Press, 1982).
35 For some detail on this, see Mark Griffith, Commentary (904) in Griffith, ed., Sophocles
Antigone (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), concluding the passage “should not
be doubted.” (278).
36 Griffith calls it “notorious” (“The Subject of Desire,” 95). Miriam Leonard says it is
difficult to account for (Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French
Thought [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005]). I think it is the key to the play. Leonard
gives us a great account of interpretative struggles over the speech’s authenticity and
meaning in “Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond: Antigones and the Politics of Psychoanalysis,”
in Laughing With Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, ed. Vanda Zajko and Miriam
Leonard (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).
37 The inconsistency forces on some critics a choice: Goethe embraces the first law at
the expense of the second, and Jacques Lacan does the opposite. But the inconsistency
that seems to be a dramatic flaw may be a political plus, for Antigone’s two laws are the
twinned, agonistic commitments of democracy: singularity and equality. Both prohibit the
exchange of any person’s life for another’s. This combination of singularity and equality
is what Hannah Arendt named “plurality” (The Human Condition, sections II, V, VI).
38 Sheila Murnaghan (“Antigone 904–20 and the Institution of Marriage,” American
Journal of Philology 107, no. 2: 192–207) also notes the allusions to Pericles, Creon and
Herodotus, but not as part of a performative politics of parody, mimicry and citation. Also,
Murnaghan argues for the rationality of Antigone’s speech (195). In “Antigone’s Laments,
Creon’s Grief,” I attend to the three allusions as well (though my treatment of Herodotus
here is more extensive). My earlier focus, however, is on the allusions’ privileging of (the
aristocratic value of) singularity in opposition to the democratic treatment of individuals

as substitutable.
39 Notwithstanding the later dating of Thucydides’ record of the Oration (The History of
the Peloponnesian War § 2.44), others also track echoes of the annual orations in the Antigone.
Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub (“Tragedy and the Greek City,” in A Companion to
Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005]), note that in both Sophocles’
Ode to Man and the Oration, “peace, stability and the city’s prosperity can be achieved
only by respecting, reconciling, weaving together the two sets of values”—Antigone’s and
Creon’s.
40 David Kawalko Roselli, “Polyneices’ Body and His Monument: Class, Social Status,
and Funerary Commemoration in Sophocles’s Antigone,” Helios 33s (2006): 135–77;
H. A. Shapiro, “The Wrath of Creon: Withholding Burial in Homer and Sophocles,” Helios
33s (2006): 119–34. The claim is supported by Seaford’s Reciprocity and Ritual (especially
chapter four), and more briefly by Boedeker and Raaflaub in A Companion to Tragedy: “The
conflict over Polynices’ burial reminds us of the Athenian burial of war dead in a public
cemetery, a custom introduced soon after the Persian Wars, in which the state clearly ar-
rogated a family function (Thucydides 2.34).”
41 On parody in ancient Athens, see Robert Hariman, “Political Parody and Public
Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 247–72.
42 The point is contemplated by Griffith as well who, notwithstanding his canvassing of
the politics of natal versus conjugal family loyalties (in “The Subject of Desire,” 116), finds
“uncomfortable” rather than symptomatic the idea that Antigone is perhaps in this scene
“possessed (reclaimed) by her exogamous husband, Haemon, in a posthumous but in
some sense effective act of sexual consummation (rape? marriage?) that seeks to reinstate
her within the world of the ‘normal’ and socially acceptable” (121). I note elsewhere the
necrophilic rape is not only about reclaiming Antigone but also about Haemon’s always
thwarted efforts to claim equality with his father (“[Un]Dazzled by the Ideal? James Tully’s
Politics and Humanism in Tragic Perspective,” in Political Theory, forthcoming).
43 Theirs is the second reception of her act, and their emplotment of the scene as ro-
mance governs most critical readings to this day, according to which Haemon dies in an
iconically tragic “marriage to death” scene, embracing Antigone’s corpse. When he dies
ejaculating blood on her cheeks, he mimes the rather different intimacies that would have
occurred in life had things not gone so horribly awry. But this obscures the appropriative
power of Haemon’s act. As her dirge and her suicide make clear, Antigone’s loyalty is
not first and foremost to Haemon. Butler admires Antigone for this without noting that
Antigone’s rejection of conventional marriage may be undone by the marriage to death
she cannot resist.
44 The play presents the two extremes of marriage in prescriptive terms: first, Antigone,
as an incest, represents the extreme of endogamy, (she has, as Helene Foley points out,
“implicitly foregone marital bonds for those with blood relations” [Female Acts in Greek
Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press), 175]) and its outcome—barrenness and
death. Second, Polynices, who married a daughter of the Argive Adrastos, and then raised
an army there to attack his native Thebes, represents the extreme of exogamy, and its
outcome—enmity or treason and barrenness and death.
45 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Sélincourt (New York: Penguin Classics,
2002), 221–22. All references to Herodotus are from this section. The play’s reference to
the story has been used to discredit Antigone’s speech; Herodotus wrote his Histories a few
years after Sophocles wrote Antigone. But those who defend the speech as original note
that Aristotle refers to it not many years later. Griffith: “The Histories, though probably
not completed until the 420’s, were doubtless circulating earlier, and there is a tradition
that Hdt. and S. were friends” (in “The Subject of Desire,” quoting Jacoby, 233–7). And
most critics now treat the passage as authentic. Also, if Lewis (“An Alternative Date for
Sophocles’ Antigone,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 29 (1988): 35–50) is right to redate
the Antigone to the early 430s rather than the late 440s, the play can be seen in relation
to the conflict with Samos, and the distance between Sophocles’ text and Herodotus’ is
considerably diminished. Also, if the play is redated, Creon’s brutal desecration of Polynices
may comment on Pericles’ brutal treatment of the Samians.
46 Helene Foley, Female Acts, 168. Dewald and Kitzinger are unusually detailed. Most
readers focus on the (in)effectiveness of the reasons rather than on the critical question
of the costs of a certain form of reasoning’s emergence (“Herodotus, Sophocles, and
the Woman Who Wanted Her Brother Saved,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus,
ed. Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006]:
122–29).
47 Dewald and Kitzinger, The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, 124–25.
48 The importance of sons to the fathers is well known to the women of Greek tragedy
and myth. The son alleviates the ache of the father’s mortality by carrying the paternal
name into the future. That is why, from Procne to Medea, women angry with their chil-
dren’s father kill the children, because the women know they are the father’s children
(Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. Willian McCuaig [New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009], 101; cf. Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and
Slaves [New York: Schocken, 1975]). Sheila Murnaghan notes: Darius’s “reward is not only
a reward but also a correction of her choice” (“Antigone 904–920 and the Institution of
Marriage,” 203). When he grants the life of her eldest son, he indicates this is the relative
she should have chosen, the one she should have valued the most. If Darius maternalizes
Intaphrenes’ wife, he mirrors Haemon, who also corrects a woman’s prioritization of her
natal family when he marries Antigone in death.
49 On this point, I am indebted to Laura Slatkin.
50 The pain cast as infinite by lamentation is interrupted to make a specific request—the
brother. Dewald and Kitzinger see the agon between the woman and Darius as internal
to logos, but I see it as a displacement of lamentation by logos.
51 The claim that Antigone acts politically was made by Mary Dietz (“Citizenship with
a Feminist Face: The Problem with Maternal Thinking,” Political Theory 13, no. 1 (1985):
19–37) in the context of a very different reading of the play and a different conception of
politics in order to criticize maternalism, promoted by Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Antigone’s
Daughters,” democracy 2, no. 2 (1982): 46–59. Over twenty years later, it seems to me ma-
ternalism has become the tail, and humanism is now the dog.
52 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1997), 306.
53 Jean Pierre Vernant, “A ‘Beautiful Death’ And the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic,”
in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991).
54 Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Antigone’s Daughters,” 53–59; Costas Douzinas and Ronnie
Warrington, “Antigone’s Law: A Geneaology of Jurisprudence,” in Politics, Postmodernity,
and Critical Legal Studies: The Legality of the Contingent, ed. Costas Douzinas, Peter Goodrich,
and Yifat Hachamovitch (New York: Routledge, 1994), 187–225; Mary G. Dietz, “Citizen-
ship,” 28–30.
55 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke Univ.
Press, 2004).
56 Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward A Philosophy of Vocal Expression
(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005). Cavarero’s emphasis on voice seems to put us
back into the metaphysics of presence criticized by Jacques Derrida. One response might
be to attend to voice as both corporeal and extracorporeal, as a marker of the remainders
of both logos and lamentation, as I do here. Cavarero’s is to locate her seeming move to
presence on the register of intersubjectivity not ontology.
57 Jacques Rancière, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1999) (hereafter cited in text as D).
58 Her traffic in citationality presumably poses a problem for Phillipe Nonet, who harshly
criticizes the citational history of the Antigone. For a fabulous critique of Nonet on this
point, see Adam Sitze, “What is a Citation?” in Law, Culture and Humanities 2 (2006):
349.
59 For Ranciere on literarity, see The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (Stanford, CA:
Stanford Univ. Press, 2004): 103–11. See also Samuel Chambers, “The Politics of Literar-
ity,” Theory and Event 8, no. 31 (2005): 1–21.
60 On the crux and the cross, see Jeffrey Masten, “The Passion of the Crux: Rhetorics
of Shakespearean Editing” (presented at Shakespeare Association of America meeting,
Washington, D.C., April 9–11, 2009).
61 Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
2009), 199. Rancière says this is repetition with a difference: faced with the refusal of the
patricians to grant that the plebs could speak and had made claims, the plebs “execute a
series of speech acts that mimic those of the patricians; they pronounce imprecations and
apotheoses; they delegate one of their number to go and consult their oracles; they give
themselves representatives by rebaptizing them. In a word, they conduct themselves like
beings with names” (D 24). On aping as a political act, see also my own Emergency Politics:
Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), 40–64.
62 There are tensions between the democratic theory of Rancière and Hannah Arendt,
but Rancière’s description of the plebs’ action strikingly resonates with and invites a new
reading of Arendt’s account of the frenzy of compact making with which the original
English colonists settled the New World. Could this be a mimicry by way of which the
colonists tasted a freedom that had been reserved for others? Arendt would not call it
mimicry, but it may be useful to rethink her example in Rancière’s terms. For more on
Rancière and Arendt, see Jason Frank, Constituent Moments (Durham, NC: Duke Univ.
Press, 2010).
63 On living otherwise as an enactment of freedom, see Tully, Public Philosophy in a New
Key, 1:128.
64 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2007),
61–62. Rancière’s reading of Burke and Arendt provides a different critique than another
tendered by Zygmunt Baumann who says that if universality and particularity are our only
choices, we have a problem: “while universal values offer a reasonable medicine against
the oppressive obtrusiveness of parochial backwaters, and communal autonomy offers an
emotionally gratifying tonic against the stand-offish callousness of the universalist, each
drug when taken regularly turns into poison” (Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality
[Oxford: Blackwell, 1995], 181, cited in Kimberley Hutchings, “Moral Deliberation and
Political Judgment,” Theory Culture, and Society 14 [1997]: 131).
65 By contrast with my argument in “Antigone’s Lament, Creon’s Grief,” which treated
the play mainly in historical context and claimed Antigone represented singularity, here
the claim is that she works the intervals among various political divisions.
66 Loraux, “Essay on Amnesty,” 93.
67 Jan Hartman, Cindy Sheehan: “American Antigone,” CommonDreams.org, Thursday, August
18, 2005.
68 Ethics, Rancière says, abolishes the division that is constitutive of politics (although
notably the division is variously depicted by him, as “the separation of law and fact” or as
the “classical form of political conflict” which “opposes several ‘peoples’ in one” (“The
Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006): 6). Shifting trag-
edy from politics to ethics by way of mortalist humanism, W. Geoffrey Arnott (“Realism
in the Ion: Response to Lee,” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. S. Silk [Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2003], 110–18) argues that, central to Euripedes’s Ion are not its conflicts but
rather “the tragic force of Creusa’s suffering,” which he says is in no way minimized by
the play’s “happy ending” (110–11). Demetra Kasimis ably exposes the insistent nature
of arguments that Ion ends happily in Drawing the Boundaries of Democracy: Immigrants and
Citizens in Ancient Greek Contexts, Ph. D. diss., Northwestern University, Political Science,
2010.
69 Farenheit 9/11, DVD. Directed by Michael Moore. 2004. (http://www.script-o-rama.
com/movie_scripts/f/fahrenheit-911-script-transcript.html).
70 On Sheehan, see Amy and David Goodman, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders,
and the People Who Fight Back (New York: Hyperion, 2006), and Donald Pease, “Antigone’s
Kin: From Abu Ghraib to Barack Obama,” in The New American Exceptionalism. On Sheehan
as Antigone, see also Nicholas Powers, “Antigone Now,” The Independent (December 8,
2005): 5; Richard Brookhiser, “Democracy Takes Root, Slowly, in Post-Saddam Iraq,” The
New York Observer (August 25, 2008), http://www.observer.com/node/37535; Marianne
McDonald, “Translating Antigone: Staging Anti-Colonial Protests,” CounterPunch (March
23, 2007): 1–15; Carol Brouillet. “Listen, Ring, Scream—100,000 Bells Toll,” South Bay
(October 28, 2005), http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2005/10/28/17790201.php;
and Anne Fernald, “Women Must Weep or Prepare for War,” Fernham (August 15, 2005),
http://fernham.blogspot.com/2005/08/women-must-weep-or-prepare-for-war.html. In favor of
“post-Antigonean interventions” in mourning practice, on behalf of dissident politics, see
Madelyn Detloff’s wonderful reading of Virginia Woolf in The Persistence of Modernism: Loss
and Mourning in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).
71 Sheehan, Cindy. “A Capitol Offense,” Los Angeles Times (February 3, 2006), http://
articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/03/opinion/oe-sheehan3?pg=2.

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Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism

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By insisting on a ‘common’ corporeal vulner-

Certain great themes such as ‘humanism’ can

Only tragedy can deal adequately with human-

New Literary History, 2010, 41: 1–33

Humanism and Tragedy

Humanists have long found in Greek tragedy an illustration of their

monstrous animality. But are these the only options? A humanism of

A New Humanism? Mortalism in Loraux, Butler, and

As Mark Griffith notes, renewed interest in Antigone since the 1970s

to the influence of Jacques Lacan’s famous seminar on the play.9 But

tragedy because he thought tragedy showed how “thinking can endure

watching Aeschylus’s tragedy Persians would have been reconstituted as

on what happens in Homer’s Iliad when Priam visits Achilles to ransom

brothers, Patroclus and Polynices, neither can stop grieving without

(Pericles), one textual (Creon), and one intertextual (Darius as portrayed

Pericles’ Funeral Oration memorializes the dead by collectivizing

Antigone’s second allusion is to Creon. Earlier in the play, Creon

In Herodotus’s story, a woman referred to only as Intaphrenes’ wife

king.45 Intaphrenes’ wife is forced by Darius to choose among husband,

The Meaning of Antigone’s Death

Antigone’s dirge, part of her political struggle with Creon, is also

models it as well: “[Oedipus] doesn’t die like everybody else, that is to

The decisive making of meaning is something Creon considers to

Working the Interval

Against those who treat Antigone as a representative of extrapolitical-

When Loraux identifies the sound of grief with marginalized women’s

writing. But what for Rousseau is a sign of presence is for Cavarero

and a crux (excessive to the text, suspected of inauthenticity) which,

citation. Notably these interstitial rhetorical devices themselves work

“Working the intervals” is also a good way to respond to the philo-

Four Women and a Funeral

offer to dissidents. When, like Intaphrenes’ wife, Sheehan sets up camp

mourning and maternity are internally differentiated. Mourning may

American Bar Foundation and Northwestern University

aristocratic value of) singularity in opposition to the democratic treatment of individuals

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