Dusting Antigone

Dusting Antigone Carol Jacobs For millennia, now, we have stood sentinel: hoping to see her—to catch her in the act, to say plainly and clearly what Antigone is about. Yet no vigilance could be adequate to the task. History offers a long succession of separate, disconnected experiences of Antigone—impossible to gather together into a single completed shape. Hegel and Irigaray are exemplary in this regard, and not only because their readings are at odds with one another. For each, as we shall see, was already of at least two minds about Sophocles’ play: in the words of the guard who reports to Creon: their “thoughts gave [them] many pauses, as [they] wheeled round in [their] tracks to return.” 1 Moreover, unlike the heroine of the play, who, at the most critical moment, leaves no stroke, no impression, no sign, Hegel and Irigaray (and so many others besides) marked out their tracks most clearly for us to see. Perhaps, then, there is no way to break new ground. No matter. The stakes for Hegel, as for Irigaray reading Hegel, are sexual difference, the relation between family and state, and the movement from matriarchy to patriarchy in the pagan world. 2 Grave issues. No doubt. And yet woman’s place in all this, as Hegel would have it, leaves something to be desired in the realm of the serious. In The Phenomenology of Mind, towards the end of the section entitled “Ethical Action” (“Die sittliche Handlung”), in that most questionable of phrases, Hegel speaks of “Womankind” as “the eternal irony of the community (die ewige Ironie des Gemeinwesens).” 3 Everything hinges, one could argue, on how one understands this phrase. Irigaray takes it as the title for her essay on Hegel in Speculum of the Other Woman. No red-blooded woman, after all, can fail to enjoy the [End Page 889] irony of wearing Hegel’s slur as something of a crown. But just how eternal is this irony, of womankind, and above all of Irigaray? How eternal can irony be or, rather, in what sense can irony possibly be understood to be eternal? Is it a position to be maintained? Irigaray’s essay, “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” after all, is overcast with a certain pall of seriousness. Sophocles’ play, on the other hand, is itself no comedy. No comedy and yet no tragedy from a certain point of view, from the point of view, namely, of certain questions that Irigaray herself poses, following in the footsteps of Hegel and taking a few sidesteps of her own. So how can we too follow—in the path of Irigaray, Hegel, Sophocles, and especially in the path of Antigone, which is not one? No less preoccupied than Hegel before her, Irigaray returns again and again to Antigone—in Speculum of the Other Woman, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 4 in “The Female Gender” (Sexes and Genealogies). Refusing to identify with her, “So let me return to the character of Antigone, though I shall not identify with it” (Ethics, 115F, 118E), calling her “anti-woman,” Irigaray regards Sophocles’ figure, however tragic, as “a production of a culture that has been written by men alone” (Ethics, 115F, 118–19E). Antigone appears merely as “the desexualized representative of the other of the same” (Sexes, 125F, 111E). She functions in the service of, as the representative of, the male, 5 the only sex society recognizes, in a tradition that has always operated as though there were only one sex, which is not to say an equality of male and female. When engaged in redressing her brothers’ crime, Antigone is no longer fulfilling her own task, her affirmative relationship to ethics, she no longer serves her gods. The female gender, in its singularity, has been lost in this character who resists but nonetheless submits, out of womanly—or maternal?—fidelity to the male gods and to war among men. . . . In order to wipe a stain away once more. What stain? Fundamentally, the stain of her consciousness, of belonging to the female race, of having a maternal filiation. Sexes, 125F, 111E) Antigone as traitor to the position of woman, to “maternal filiation,” then, at least

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Hegelianism · Literature · Patriarchy · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Psychology

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