COLLOQUY text theory critique A special section on ANTIGONE

349 Pages·2006·1.88 MB·English

COLLOQUY text theory critique
issue 11, may 2006

A special section on ANTIGONE
edited by Dimitris Vardoulakis
and
GENERAL ISSUE
Editorial Committee: Editorial Board:
Geoff Berry Bill Ashcroft
Genna Burrows Andrew Benjamin
Jasmin Chen Andriana Cavarero
Mark John Crees Joy Damousi
Sam Everingham Alex Düttmann
Michael Fitzgerald Jürgen Fohrmann
Rhiannyn Geeson Sneja Gunew
Leah Gerber Kevin Hart
Barbara Ghattas Susan K. Martin
Rhonda Khatab Steven Muecke
Jenny Kohn Paul Patton
Hamish Morgan Georg Stanitzek
Keith Redgen Terry Threadgold
Carlo Salzani
Robert Savage
Sabina Sestigiani
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Jessica Whyte

Advisory Board:
Axel Fliethmann
Rose Lucas
Alison Ross

COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/issue11.pdf

ISSN: 13259490
Issue 11, May 2006

Editorial 4
ANTIGONE – ED. DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
Introduction
Dimitris Vardoulakis 6
Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
Carlo Salzani 8
Mourning the Public Body in Sophocles’ Antigone
Jennifer R. Ballengee 31
A Danish Antigone
Sabina Sestigiani 60
Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy: Hegel’s Antigone
Rhonda Khatab 76
The Precedence of Citation: On Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles
Robert Savage 99
No Longer Lost for Words: Antigone’s Afterlife
Alison Forsyth 127
Irish Antigones: Burying the Colonial Symptom
Kelly Younger 148
GENERAL ARTICLES
Imperial Therapy: Mark Twain and the Discourse of National
Consciousness in Innocents Abroad
Daniel McKay 164
“Nothing New Under the Sun”: Postsentimental Conflict in Harriet E.
Wilson’s Our Nig
Karsten H. Piep 178
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature of Time and Space in Contemporary
Installation
Victoria Baker 195
Writing the Subject: Virginia Woolf and Clothes
Carolyn Abbs 209
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/contents11.pdf
2 Contents ░
REVIEW ARTICLES
Liz Conor. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the
1920s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. ISBN: 0 253 21670 2
Juliette Peers. The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie. Oxford:
Berg, 2004. ISBN: 1 85973 743 9
Robyn Walton 227
REVIEWS
Elizabeth Grosz. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely.
Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2004. ISBN: 1-74114-327-6
Elizabeth Grosz. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Crows Nest:
Allen and Unwin, 2004. ISBN: 1-74114-572-4
Claire Perkins 247
Astrid Henry. Not My Mother’s Daughter: Generational Conflict and Third
Wave Feminism. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 2004. ISBN: 0253344549
Anthea Taylor 251
Avital Ronell. Test Drive. Chicago: Illinois UP, 2004. ISBN: 0-252-02950-X.
Faye Brinsmead 256
Matthew Sharpe. A Little Piece of the Real. London: Ashgate, 2003. ISBN:
0 7546 3918 5
Geoff Boucher 260
James Phillips. Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. ISBN: 0-8047-5071-8
Andrew Padgett 264
John Sellars. The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of
Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. ISBN: 0-7546-3667-4
Michael FitzGerald 268
Juliana de Nooy. Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Look
Twice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN: 1-4039-4745-7
Dimitris Vardoulakis 271
Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw (eds). Amy Lowell, American
Modern. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. ISBN: 0-8135-3356-2
Ce Rosenow 275
A.L. McCann. Subtopia. Carlton: Vulgar, 2005. ISBN: 0 9580795 6 0
Jay Thompson 278
Clare Archer-Lean. Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Writings of Thomas
King and Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo). Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press,
2006. ISBN: 0-7734-5864-6
Carlo Salzani 281
░ Contents 3
Simon Featherstone. Postcolonial Cultures. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2005. ISBN: 0 7486 1743 4
Barbara Ghattas 285
CREATIVE WRITING
Writings from Turkey: Rıfat Ilgaz and Sunay Akın
Burcu Alkan 289
Blues for Allah
Ahmede Hussain 298
Frank Schätzing. Extract from Death and the Devil
trans. Rhiannyn Geeson 319
Fatty’s Cyclopaedia
Vanessa Russell 338
Editorial
Issue 11 of Colloquy: text theory critique is divided into two parts. The
first part is a collection of papers on Sophocles’ Antigone, while the second
part consists of the usual general issue articles, reviews, and creative writ-
ing. The present issue would have been impossible without the generous
contribution of the many referees who have reviewed articles prior to publi-
cation.
The following issue of Colloquy will be the proceedings of the confer-
ence Be true to the earth, which took place at Monash University on March
31-April 1, 2005 and which was co-organized by Colloquy. The collection of
papers, edited by Samantha Capon, Peter Coleman Barbara Ghattas and
Kate Rigby, will largely focus on eco-criticism and eco-philosophy, and it
will be published in November 2006.
Colloquy is presently seeking unsolicited submissions for Issue 12, a
general issue to be published in May 2007. The deadline for Issue 12 is
December 15, 2006. Academic articles, review articles, reviews, transla-
tions and creative writing will be considered.
The November 2007 issue, Issue 13, will be the proceedings of the
conference Imagining the Future: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction,
which was held at Monash on December 6-7, 2005. It will be co-edited by
Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage.

THE EDITORS
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/editorial11.pdf
ANTIGONE
Edited by
DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
Introduction to Antigone
… a body politic is always threatened more from its citizens
than from any external enemies [hostes] …
Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, VI, 6
Sophocles seems to have already reached in Antigone the same in-
sight about the body politic which will again be expressed in the seven-
teenth century by Spinoza: namely, the political has as its condition of pos-
sibility the potential for being challenged from within. Sophocles’ play starts
immediately after Thebes has successfully stoved off a challenge from an
external enemy – from Argos, another city state. However, during the bat-
tle, Eteocles, the king, and his own brother, Polynices, who in fact was
heading the Argeans, both died. Thus afterwards Creon is elected ruler of
Thebes. Creon’s first act of government is to decree that Polynices’ body is
to remain unburied. If the new king thought that the worse was past him af-
ter the end of the battle, he was sorely mistaken. A challenge to his degree
from one of the citizens and his own niece, Antigone, will not only lead to
the decimation of his own family, but also to the new king being stranded
alone at the end of the play, in charge of a self-incurred desert. Antigone, a
stubborn teenage girl, is the cause of challenging the sovereign of Thebes
and hence the city’s body politic.
Antigone’s challenge to the body politic results in the distinction be-
tween politics and the political. Her rebellion is, indeed, the precondition of
the political. This insight is precisely what links Sophocles and Spinoza.
Moreover, it is an insight fiercely opposed by the tradition. Thus, Aristotle in
books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics explicates a politics based on
friendship (philia), which provides the bonds for the state to function, while
what has to be excluded is stasis or rebellion which dissolves the state.
However, a close look at the text makes the achievement of philia prob-
lematic, for instance because, as Aristotle states, if men are friends, then
they no longer need justice to mediate their relation (1155a). Inversely, if
the elimination of justice is impossible, then stasis challenges the primacy
that philia is granted in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is this ineliminability of
justice that the political affirms, and which is not commensurable with the
empirical manifestation of a state or sovereign.
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
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░ Introduction to Antigone 7
Following Aristotle, the Western tradition of political philosophy has
striven to erase this possibility of rebellion intimately connected to the jus-
tice of the city, but without success. One of the most prominent examples
of this attempt in relation to the Antigone is carried out by Hegel. The ar-
gument adumbrated in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right is
clear: there is a distinction between two legal orders, the family and the
state. It is only by privileging the latter that politics can successfully create a
community. However, as Judith Butler has recently demonstrated in Anti-
gone’s Claim, all attempts to find a stable origin of politics – such as the
distinction between family and state – are bound to fail. Consequently, not
only are the ‘abnormal’ filiations arising from Oedipus marrying his mother
not to be expunged, but rather they point to the fundamental condition of
the political: namely, the impossibility of a stable origin and the affirmation
of a multiplicity of relations which challenge norms and normalcy as the
condition of the possibility of the community.
Indeed, as Stathis Gourgouris has noted in Does Literature Think?, the
name “Antigone,” as a compound of “anti” and “genos,” means three things:
an opposition between kinship and state, an opposition to kinship, and the
force of opposing as such. It is only by affirming all three elements together
that a just community can be conceived. Of course, this requires the in-
scription of opposition inside the political. In other words, rebellion as a
regulative principle is constitutive of the ontology of the political.
Due to this polyphony of meaning in the name “Antigone,” it has been
deemed appropriate to title this special section of Colloquy simply “Anti-
gone.” The various articles presented here approach this polyvalent proper
name from different perspectives: offering close readings of the Greek text,
showing its reception in Western thought, and presenting its impact on the-
atrical production and playwriting. What remains invariable is the need to
talk about the political – and this is the legacy, if there is one, of Antigone.
Finally, two notes are necessary. First, the inspiration for this special
edition of Colloquy on Sophocles’ Antigone has been a fascinating series of
seminars on Sophocles’ play, conducted by Professor Andrew Benjamin at
the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash Uni-
versity, from March to May 2004. Andrew Benjamin’s breadth of knowledge
and skill in closely reading the text have been a catalyst in showing to all
those present the philosophical import of Antigone. Second, because of
technical reasons related to the production of the journal, the diacriticals
and spirits of the Greek text have been simplified to a monotonic system.
This has been necessary to ensure that the characters are read properly by
computer software.
DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
Carlo Salzani
Premise: Incipit Tragoedia
Ω κοινόν αυτάδελφον Ισμήνης κάρα. The famous incipit of Sophocles’
Antigone presents various problems to the translator. Κοινόν is what is
“common,” “shared,” and this “sharing” is repeated and reinforced in
αυτάδελφον, “my own sister,” where αυτός evokes a link of blood and flesh,
a profound, archaic commonality of kinship. The invocation is directed to
Ισμήνης κάρα, which literally means the “head of Ismene.” As George
Steiner points out, “to claim this head to be ‘common to us both’ and as
‘shared in the totality of sisterhood,’ is to negate, radically, the most potent,
the most obvious differentiation between human presences. … Antigone’s
prolusion strives to compact, to ‘ingest,’ Ismene into herself. She demands
a ‘single-headed’ unison.”1 This “totality of sisterhood” is reaffirmed four
times, in the terms κοινόν, αυτός, άδελφον, κάρα. The translator must work
out a periphrastic solution – like Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ “My own sister Ismene,
linked to myself”2 – to avoid a monstrum, like Hölderlin’s Gemein-
samschwesterliches.3
As Steiner emphasizes, “a fertile duplicity”4 inhabits the term κοινόν.
On the one hand, κοινόν means the “ordinary,” “general,” what is “common”
to many; on the other hand – and specifically in this context – it indicates a
commonality of blood, a carnal bond, what is common within kinship. Within
the incestuous stock of Labdacus though, κοινόν takes on much darker and
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
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