Beyond Steiner's "Antigones"

This article focuses on the interrelations between myth, mythical character and rewriting. Faced with myth as an epistemological challenge, hermeneutics often is torn between two reductionist temptations: either to ontologize its object or to dissolve it into a kind of original nothingness. We will here first and mainly focus on George Steiner's Antigonesconsidered as a milestone in literary mythography because of its anti-reductionist approach characterized by attention to plurality and emphasis on the complexity inherent in myth. Secondly, and in a much more tentative manner, it will endeavor to propose a new conception of myth, supposedly able to satisfy the so far identified primordial demands it faces us with. We end up proposing a conception of rewriting as visitation and of myth as a face (visage) in Lévinas' sense, thereby ourselves revisiting notions like memory and transcendence. As memory of the immemorial, myth rewriting thus reveals itself paradoxically as a future-oriented, meaning making and hope inspiring task

Art · Education Pedagogy and Practices · Social and Economic Solidarity · Social and Political Issues