Exhuming the Remains of Antigone’s Tragedy: The Encryption of Slavery

Abstract

In this paper, I will attempt to read the traces that have been left by Antigone on the cultures of South Africa, Nigeria and Northern Ireland, in an effort to allow those traces to put into question, and re-inscribe, the traces that Antigone has left on a western canon that ritually cites ancient Athenian culture as its origin, embracing Antigone as a tragic hero, without attending to the system of chattel slavery that facilitated her heroic status. In Sophocles, mythical Thebes stands as an Other to Athens, a culture rife not only with incest, but also, I am suggesting—though these traces have been less well read—one in which the precarious boundary separating those who are free from those who are slaves is allowed to appear in all its fragility. This Thebes, counterpart of Athens, thus functions as a literary repository onto which can be projected the deep and abiding anxiety of Athenian, adult males, concerning the legitimacy of their own right to freedom, citizenship, and inheritance, their right to stand, unambiguously, on their own two feet, while requiring others to crawl on all fours, under the blows of torture, thereby returning them to a state of infancy—a fate from which Hegel, along with the continental philosophical tradition, has desperately tried to help the heroes of Greek tragedy to definitively escape. This evasion leaves in its wake an excess, washed up by the tides of Aufhebung/repression, on the shores of philosophy/psychoanalysis, an excess that goes beyond that of sexual difference, an excess that still remains to be thought beyond the Oedipus of Hegel and that of Freud, beyond Derrida’s explorations in Glas, and beyond Antigone’s feminist reclamations: the traces of slavery that the dominant interpretive annals of Antigone’s tragedy have attempted to entomb, along with Antigone. Just as the ‘hostility’ of ‘other communities’ rises up, according to Hegel, when their altars are ‘defiled’ by the birds and dogs, when the body is not returned to the earth, in accordance with the ‘sacred right’ of burial, so the traces of slavery return to haunt us, sometimes erupting violently, when representation banishes them to a ‘mute unconscious’ undercurrent to which an outlet of expression is denied.