I would like to try today to talk about Antigone, the play written by Sophocles in 441 B.C., and in particular about the economy of the play.
With the category of the beautiful, Kant says that only the example – which doesn’t mean the object – is capable of assuring its transmission insofar as this is both possible and demanded. Now, from every point of view, this text deserves to play such a role for us.
As you in any case know, I am reopening the question of the function of the beautiful in relation to that which we have been considering as the aim of desire. In a word, it may be that something new on the subject of the function of desire may come to light here. That is the point we have reached.
It is only a single point on our path. Don’t be astonished at how long that path is, Plato says somewhere in the Phaedrus, which is itself a dialogue on the beautiful: Don’t be astonished if the detour is such a long one, for it is a necessary detour.
Today we need to make progress in our commentary on Antigone.
Read this truly admirable text. It is an unimaginable highpoint, a work of overwhelming rigor, whose only equivalent in Sophocles’s work is his final work, Oedipus at Colonus, which was written in 401.
I will now attempt to analyze this text with you so as to make you appreciate its extraordinary stature.
As I said last time then, we have Antigone, we have something going on, we have the Chorus.
On the other hand, as far as the nature of tragedy is concerned, I quoted the end of Aristotle’s sentence on pity and fear effecting the catharsis of the emotions, that famous catharsis the true meaning of which we will try to grasp at the end. Strangely enough, Goethe saw the function of this fear and pity in the action itself. That is, the action would provide us with a model of the balance between fear and pity. That is certainly not what Aristotle says; what he says is as inaccessible to us as a closed road on account of the curious fate that has left us with so little material to confirm what he says in his text, because so much of it has been lost down through the centuries.
I will tell you one thing right away. Please note, and this is my first point, that at first glance, of the two protagonists, Creon and Antigone, neither one seems to feel fear or pity. If you doubt that, it is because you haven’t read Antigone, and since we are going to read the play together, I hope to point it out to you in the text.
My second point is that it is not “seems,” but it is “certain” that at least one of the protagonists right through to the end feels neither fear nor pity, and that is Antigone. That is why, among other things, she is the real hero. Creon, on the other hand, is moved by fear toward the end, and if it isn’t the cause of his ruin, it is certainly the sign of it.
Let us now take up the question from the beginning.
It’s not even that Creon says the play’s opening words. As composed by Sophocles, the play begins by introducing us to Antigone in her dialogue with Ismene; and she affirms her position and her reasons from the opening lines. Creon isn’t even there as a foil. He only appears later. He is nevertheless essential for our demonstration.
Creon exists to illustrate a function that we have shown is inherent in the structure of the ethic of tragedy, which is also that of psychoanalysis; he seeks the good. Something that after all is his role. The leader is he who leads the community. He exists to promote the good of all.
What does his fault consist of? Aristotle tells us, using a term that he affirms falls directly within the province of tragic action, ἁμαρτíα. We have some trouble translating that word. “Error,” we say, and in order to relate it to ethics, we interpret it as “error of judgment.” But perhaps it isn’t as simple as that.
As I told you last time, almost a century separates the period of the creation of great tragedies from their interpretation by philosophical thought. Minerva, as Hegel has already said, takes flight at twilight. I’m not too sure, but I think we should remember this formula, which has been so often evoked, to recall that there is after all some distance between the teachings embodied in tragic rites as such and their subsequent interpretation in the form of an ethics, which with Aristotle is a science of happiness.
Nevertheless, it is true that we do note the following. And I would not have any difficulty finding ἁμαρτíα in others of Sophocles’s tragedies: it exists, it is affirmed. The terms ἁμαρτἁvειv and ἁμαρτήματα are to be found in Creon’s own speeches, when at the end he succumbs to the blows of fate. But ἁμαρτíα does not appear at the level of the true hero, but at the level of Creon.
His error of judgment (and we come closer to it here than that thought which is fond of wisdom ever has) is to want to promote the good of all – and I don’t mean the Supreme Good, for let us not forget that 441 B.C. is very early, and our friend Plato hadn’t yet created the mirage of that Supreme Good – to promote the good of all as the law without limits, the sovereign law, the law that goes beyond or crosses the limit. He doesn’t even notice that he has crossed that famous limit about which one assumes enough has been said when one says that Antigone defends it and that it takes the form of the unwritten laws of the ∆íκη. One thinks one has said enough when one interprets it as the Justice or the Doctrine of the gods, but one hasn’t, in fact, said very much. And there is no doubt that Creon in his innocence crosses over into another sphere.
Note that his language is in perfect conformity with that which Kant calls the Begriff or concept of the good. It is the language of practical reason. His refusal to allow a sepulcre for Polynices, who is an enemy and a traitor to his country, is founded on the fact that one cannot at the same time honor those who have defended their country and those who have attacked it. From a Kantian point of view, it is a maxim that can be given as a rule of reason with a universal validity. Thus, before the ethical progression that from Aristotle to Kant leads us to make clear the identity of law and reason, doesn’t the spectacle of tragedy reveal to us in anticipation the first objection? The good cannot reign over all without an excess emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy.
What then is this famous sphere that we must not cross into? We are told that it is the place where the unwritten laws, the will or, better yet, the ∆íκη of the gods rules. But we no longer have any idea what the gods are. Let us not forget that we have lived for a long time under Christian law, and in order to recall what the gods are, we have to engage in a little ethnography. If you read the Phaedrus I was talking about just now, which is a reflection on the nature of love, you will see that we have changed the very axis of the words that designate it.
What is this love? Is it that which, as a result of the fluctuations of the whole Christian adventure, we have come to call sublime love? Is it, in effect, very close, although it was reached by other paths? Is it desire? Is it that which some people believe I identify with a certain central sphere, namely, some natural evil in man? Is it that which Creon somewhere calls anarchy? In any case, you will see that the way in which the lovers in the Phaedrus act in relation to love varies according to the “epopteia” in which they have participated. “Epopteia” here means initiation in the sense that the term has in antiquity; it designates very detailed ceremonies in the course of which certain phenomena occur. One comes upon these down through the centuries- and down to the present time, if one is willing to go to other regions of the globe – in the form of trances or phenomena of possession in which a divine being manifests itself through the mouth of someone who is, so to speak, willing to cooperate.
Thus Plato tells us that those who have undergone an initiation to Zeus do not react in love in the same way as those who were initiated to Ares. Just replace those names with those who in a given province of Brazil stand for a spirit of the earth or war or of a sovereign being. It is not our intention to engage in exoticism here, but that is what is involved.
In other words, this whole sphere is only really accessible to us from the outside, from the point of view of science and of objectification. For us Christians, who have been educated by Christianity, it doesn’t belong to the text in which the question is raised. We Christians have erased the whole sphere of the gods. And we are, in fact, interested here in that which we have replaced it with as illuminated by psychoanalysis. In this sphere, where is the limit? A limit that has no doubt been there from the beginning, but which doubtless remains isolated and leaves its skeleton in this sphere that we Christians have abandoned. That is the question I am asking here.
The limit involved, the limit that it is essential to situate if a certain phenomenon is to emerge through reflection, is something I have called the phenomenon of the beautiful, it is something I have begun to define as the limit of the second death.
I first brought this to your attention in connection with Sade as something that sought to pursue nature to the very principle of its creative power, which regulates the alternation of corruption and generation. Beyond that order, which it is no longer easy for us to think of and assume in the form of knowledge – and that is taken to be a reference point in the development of Christian thought – Sade tells us that there is something else, that a form of transgression is possible, and he calls it “crime.”
As I indicated, the form of the crime may only be a ridiculous fantasm, but what is in question is that which the thought points to. The crime is said to be that which doesn’t respect the natural order. And Sade’s thought goes as far as forging the strangely extravagant notion that through crime man is given the power to liberate nature from its own laws. For its own laws are chains. What one has to sweep aside in order to force nature to start again from zero, so to speak, is the reproduction of forms against which nature’s both harmonious and contradictory possibilities are stifled in an impasse of conflicting forces. That is the aim of Sadean crime. It isn’t for nothing that crime is one boundary of our exploration of desire or that it is on the basis of a crime that Freud attempted to reconstruct the genealogy of the law. The frontiers represented by “starting from zero,” ex nihilo, is, as I indicated at the beginning of my comments this year, the place where a strictly atheist thought necessarily situates itself. A strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of “creationism.”
Moreover, nothing demonstrates better that Sadean thought is situated at that limit than the fundamental fantasm one finds in Sade, a fantasm that is illustrated in a thousand or more exhausting images that he gives us of the manifestations of human desire. The fantasm involved is that of eternal suffering.
In the typical Sadean scenario, suffering doesn’t lead the victim to the point where he is dismembered and destroyed. It seems rather that the object of all the torture is to retain the capacity of being an indestructible support. Analysis shows clearly that the subject separates out a double of himself who is made inaccessible to destruction, so as to make it support what, borrowing a term from the realm of aesthetics, one cannot help calling the play of pain. For the space in question is the same as that in which aesthetic phenomena disport themselves, a space of freedom. And the conjunction between the play of pain and the phenomena of beauty is to be found there, though it is never emphasized, for it is as if some taboo or other prevented it, as if some prohibition were there, which is related to the difficulty we are familiar with in our patients of admitting something that properly speaking belongs to the realm of fantasm.
I will point it out to you in Sade’s texts, where it is so obvious that one fails to see it. The victims are always adorned not only with all kinds of beauty, but also with grace, which is beauty’s finest flower. How does one explain this necessity, if not by the fact that we need to find it hidden, though imminent, however we approach the phenomenon, in the moving presentation of the victim or also in every form of beauty that is too obvious, too present, so that it leaves man speechless at the prospect of the image that is silhouetted behind it and threatens it. But what precisely is the threat, since it isn’t the threat of destruction?
The whole question is so crucial that I intend to have you go over the passages of Kant’s Critique of Judgment that are concerned with the nature of beauty; they are extraordinarily precise. I will leave them aside for the moment except to note the following: the forms that are at work in knowledge, Kant tells us, are interested in the phenomenon of beauty, though the object itself is not involved. I take it you see the analogy with the Sadean fantasm, since the object there is no more than the power to support a form of suffering, which is in itself nothing else but the signifier of a limit. Suffering is conceived of as a stasis which affirms that that which is cannot return to the void from which it emerged.
Here one encounters the limit that Christianity has erected in the place of all the other gods, a limit that takes the form of the exemplary image which attracts to itself all the threads of our desire, the image of the crucifixion. If we dare, not so much look it in the face – given that mystics have been staring at it for centuries, we can only hope that it has been observed closely – but speak about it directly, which is much more difficult, shall we say that what is involved there is something that we might call the apotheosis of sadism? And by that I mean the divinization of everything that remains in this sphere, namely, of the limit in which a being remains in a state of suffering, otherwise he can only do so by means of a concept that moreover represents the disqualification of all concepts, that is, the concept of ex nihilo.
Suffice it for me to remind you of what you as analysts encounter directly, in other words the extent to which the fantasm that guides feminine desire – from the reveries of pure young virgins to the couplings fantasized by middle-aged matrons—may be literally poisoned by the favored image of Christ on the cross. Need I go further and add that in connection with that image Christianity has been crucifying man in holiness for centuries? In holiness.
For some time now we have discovered that administrators are saints. Can’t one turn that around and say that saints are administrators, administrators of the access to desire, for Christianity’s influence over man takes place at the level of the collectivity? Those gods who are dead in Christian hearts are pursued throughout the world by Christian missionaries. The central image of Christian divinity absorbs all other images of desire in man with significant consequences. From an historical point of view, we have perhaps reached the edge of this. It is what in the language of administration is referred to as the cultural problems of underdeveloped countries.
I am not as a result going to promise you a surprise here, whether it be a good one or a bad one. You will come upon it, as Antigone says, soon enough.
Let us go back to Antigone.
Antigone is the heroine. She’s the one who shows the way of the gods. She’s the one, according to the Greek, who is made for love rather than for hate. In short, she is a really tender and charming little thing, if one is to believe the bidet-water commentary that is typical of the style used by those virtuous writers who write about her.
By way of introduction, I would just like to make a few remarks. And I will come right to the point in stating the term that is at the center of Antigone’s whole drama, a term that is repeated twenty times, and that given the shortness of the text, sounds like forty – which, of course, does not prevent its not being read – ἂτη.
It is an irreplaceable word. It designates the limit that human life can only briefly cross. The text of the Chorus is significant and insistent – ἐκτος ἂτας.Beyond this Atè, one can only spend a brief period of time, and that’s where Antigone wants to go. It’s not a moving little journey at all. One learns from Antigone’s own mouth testimony on the point she has reached: she literally cannot stand it anymore. Her life is not worth living. She lives with the memory of the intolerable drama of the one whose descendence has just been destroyed in the figures of her two brothers. She lives in the house of Creon; she is subject to his law; and that is something she cannot bear.
She cannot bear, you tell yourselves, to live with someone whom she abhors. But why not after all? She is fed and housed, and in Sophocles, she isn’t married off like Giraudoux’s Electra. Don’t imagine by the way that Giraudoux invented that. It was Euripides, but in his play she isn’t married off to the gardener. So that’s the situation: Antigone cannot bear it, and it weighs down on her in such a way as to explain the resolution, which is affirmed from the beginning in her dialogue with Ismene.
This dialogue is of an exceptional harshness. Ismene points out that “Really, given our situation, we don’t have much room to maneuver, so let’s not make things worse.” Antigone jumps on her right away, saying, “Especially now, don’t ever say that again, for even if you wanted to, I won’t have anything to do with you.” And the term ἔχϑρα, emnity, is used in connection with her relationship with her sister and what she will find in the other life when she finds her dead brother again. She who later on will say, “I am made for love rather than hate,” is immediately introduced with the word emnity.
In the course of events, when her sister comes back to her to share her fate, and even though she hasn’t committed the forbidden deed, Antigone will reject her also with a cruelty and a scorn that are consciously calculated. She says to Ismene, “Go back to your Creon, since you love him so.”
This then is how the enigma of Antigone is presented to us: she is inhuman. But we shouldn’t situate her at the level of the monstrous, for what would that mean from our point of view? That’s all right for the Chorus, which is present throughout the whole story, and which at a certain moment after one of those breath-taking lines that are typical of Antigone, cries out, “She is ὠμός.” We translate that as best we can by “inflexible.” It literally means something uncivilized, something raw. And the word “raw” comes closest, when it refers to eaters of raw flesh. That’s the Chorus’s point of view. It doesn’t understand anything. She is as ὠμόςas her father – that’s what the Chorus says.
What does it mean to us if Antigone goes beyond the limits of the human? What does it mean if not that her desire aims at the following – the beyond of Atè?
That same word Atè is to be found in “atrocious.” That’s what is involved here, and that’s what the Chorus repeats at a given moment in its speech with an emphasis that is technical. One does or does not approach Atè, and when one approaches it, it is because of something that is linked to a beginning and a chain of events, namely, that of the misfortune of the Labdacides family. As one starts to come close to it, things come together in a great hurry, and what one finds at the bottom of everything that goes on at every level in this family, the text tells us, is a μέριμvα, which is almost the same word as μvήμη, with an emphasis on “resentment.” But it is very wrong to translate it thus, for “resentment” is a psychological notion, whereas μέριμvα is one of those ambiguous words that are between the subjective and the objective, and that properly speaking give us the terms of signifying speech. The μέριμvα, of the Labdacides is that which drives Antigone to the border of Atè.
One can no doubt translate Atè by “misfortune,” but it doesn’t have anything to do with misfortune. It is this meaning that is assigned by doubtless implacable gods, as she might say, which renders her pitiless and fearless. It is also this that, so as to have her appear in the course of carrying out her act, causes the poet to create the following fascinating image, namely, that first occasion when during the night she goes and covers her brother’s body with a fine layer of dust, so that it is disguised enough to be hidden from view. One cannot, of course, expose to the eyes of the world that carrion flesh visited by dogs and birds, who come to tear off strips and carry them away, as the text says, only to leave them on the altars in town centers where they promote horror and pestilence.
Thus Antigone carries out the deed the first time. But what goes beyond a given limit must not be seen. The messenger goes and tells Creon what has happened, assuring him that no trace has been found, that there is no way of knowing who did it. The order is given to scatter the dust once again. But this time Antigone is caught in the act. Upon his return the messenger describes what happened in the following terms: first, they removed the dust that was covering the body, and then, they placed themselves up-wind so as to avoid the awful smells, because it stank. But a strong wind began to blow, and the dust started to fill the air and even, the text tells us, the heavens themselves. And at the very moment when everyone tries to escape, to cover their heads with their arms, and to go to earth at the spectacle of the change in nature, little Antigone appears at the height of the total darkness, of the cataclysmic moment. She appears once more beside the corpse, emitting moans, the text says, like a bird that has just lost its young.
It’s a very strange image. And it is even stranger that it should be taken up and repeated by other authors. I found in Euripides’ Phoenissae four lines where she is also compared to the lonely mother of a lost brood, who emits pathetic cries. That proves what the image of a bird always symbolizes in classical poetry. Let us not forget how close pagan myth is to ideas of metamorphosis – remember the transformation of Philomen and Baucis. It is the nightingale that appears in Euripides as the image of that which a human being is transformed into through his plaintive cries. The limit we have reached here is the one where the possibility of metamorphosis is located – metamorphosis that has come down through the centuries hidden in the works of Ovid and that regains its former vitality, its energy, during that turning point of European sensibility, the renaissance, and bursts forth in the theater of Shakespeare. That’s what Antigone is.
The movement of the play toward its climax will from now on be obvious to you.
I must clear the ground further, but it’s impossible not to point in passing to a few lines spoken by Antigone. Lines 48, 70, and 73, where Antigone expresses a kind of idiocy that is apparent at the end of a sentence in the word μετά.
Mετά means “with” or “after.” Prepositions don’t have the same function in Greek as they do in French, in the same way that particles play a different role in English from what we know in French. Mετά is, properly speaking, that which implies a break. In response to Creon’s edict, she says, “But it has nothing to do with my concerns.” At another moment, she says to her sister, “If you wanted to come with me now and to carry out the sacred task, I would no longer accept you.” She says to her brother, “I will lie down, my loving friend, my almost lover, here with you.” Mετά is placed each time at the end of the line in an inverse position, for normally this preposition like the word “with” is placed in front of the noun. This feature implies in a signifying form the kind of fierce presence Antigone represents.
I will skip the details of her dialogue with Ismene. The commentary could go on and on; it could take at least a year. I am sorry that I cannot contain the extraordinary substance of the style and metre involved in the framework of a seminar. I will pass on. After this opening, which demonstrates that the die is already cast, we have the Chorus. This alternation between action and the Chorus is something that, I believe, recurs five times.
But be careful. It is said that tragedy is an action. Is it ἂγειν? Is it πράττειν? The signifier introduces two orders in the world, that of truth and that of the event. But if one wants to retain it at the level of man’s relations to the dimension of truth, one cannot also at the same time make it serve to punctuate the event. In tragedy in general there is no kind of true event. The hero and that which is around him are situated with relation to the goal of desire. What occurs concerns subsidence, the piling up of different layers of the presence of the hero in time. That’s what remains undetermined: in the collapse of the house of cards represented by tragedy, one thing may subside before another, and what one finds at the end when one turns the whole thing around may appear in different ways.
An illustration of that is the following: after having broadcast the fact that he will never yield an inch in his responsibilities as ruler, Creon starts to lose his nerve once old Tiresias has finished giving him a piece of his mind. He then says to the Chorus, “Shouldn’t I perhaps, after all … perhaps yield?” He says it in terms that, from the point of view of what I am arguing here, are extraordinarily precise, for Atè is used there again with a special appositeness. At that moment it is clear that if he had been to the grave before finally and belatedly granting the corpse its funeral honors, something that does after all take a little time, the worst might have been avoided.
Only there it is, it is probably not for nothing that he begins with the corpse; he wants, as they say, to come to terms with his conscience. Believe me, that is always the element that leads everyone astray whenever reparations are to be made. I have only given you a little illustration, for at every moment in the unfolding of the drama the question of temporality, of the way in which the threads in place are joined together, remains decisive, essential. But it is no more comparable to an action than what I referred to earlier as subsidence, as a collapse back onto its premises.
Thus, after the first dialogue between Antigone and Ismene, the music, the Chorus, the song of liberation, Thebes is beyond the power of those whom one might well call the barbarians. The style of the poem, which is that of the Chorus, represents Polynices’s soldiers and his shadow strangely enough as a huge bird hovering above the houses. The image of our modern wars as something that glides overhead was already made concrete in 441 B.C.
Once this first musical entrance is finished – and one cannot help feeling that there is some irony involved on the part of the author – it’s over or, in other words, things are about to begin.
Creon arrives and makes a long speech justifying his actions. But in reality there is only a docile Chorus there to hear him, a collection of yes-men. There follows a dialogue between Creon and the Chorus. The Chorus itself hasn’t altogether given up the idea that there is something excessive in Creon’s statements, but at the very moment when it is about to express the thought, that is when the messenger arrives and narrates what has happened, it gets told off in no uncertain terms.
The character of the messenger in this tragedy is a formidable one. He turns up shuffling and mumbling, and he says, “You can’t imagine how much I have been thinking things over on my way here, and how many times I came close to taking off in a hurry. That’s how a short trip turns into a long one.” He’s an impressive talker. He even goes so far as to say, “I am sorry to see that you are of the opinion that it is your opinion that you believe in lies.” In short, I am suspected of being suspicious. That style of δoκεî ψενδη δοκεîνresonates with the discourse of the Sophists, since Creon answers him right away, “You are in the process of making points on the subject of the δόξα.”In brief, throughout a whole ridiculous scene the messenger engages in idle speculations about what has happened, and in particular speculations about their safety, in the course of which the guards are in a state of panic, in which they nearly come to blows before they draw lots in order to decide which one of them will be chosen to go as messenger After having got it all out, he is the object of a stream of threats from Creon, who is the person in power and who on this occasion is excessively limited; Creon lets him know that they can all expect the worst if the guilty person is not found in a hurry. “I’ve come out of this in quite good shape,” the messenger comments, “since I haven’t been strung up right away to the end of a branch. They won’t see me again in a hurry.”
This scene is a bit like the entrance of the clowns. But the messenger is quite subtle; he is very clever when he says to Creon, “What is offended just now? Is it your heart or your ears?” He makes Creon turn around in circles; Creon is forced to face the situation in spite of himself. The messenger then explains, “If it is your heart, then it is the one who did the deed that offends it; I only offend your ears.” We have already reached the height of cruelty but we’re having fun.
And what happens immediately afterwards? A hymn of praise to mankind. The Chorus sets out to praise mankind. I am constrained by the time, so I can’t go on, but I will take up this praise of mankind next time.
Then right after the extraordinary tall tale that is this hymn of praise to man, we see Antigone’s guard turn up without any concern for verisimilitude, temporal verisimilitude at least. The guard is delighted. He’s had a rare piece of luck; his responsibility in the case has been absolved once he has laid hands on the guilty party. Then the Chorus sings its song on mankind’s relation to Atè. I’ll come back to that, too, another time.
Next comes Hemon, who is Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé. He begins a dialogue with his father. The only confrontation between the father and son causes the dimension to appear that I began to discuss concerning the relations of man to his good; there is a moment of doubt, a hesitation. This point is extremely important if we want to be clear about Creon’s stature. We will see later what he is, that is, like all executioners and tyrants at bottom, a human character. Only the martyrs know neither pity nor fear. Believe me, the day when the martyrs are victorious will be the day of universal conflagration. The play is calculated to demonstrate that fact.
Creon doesn’t lose his nerve, far from it; his son leaves to the sound of the most terrible threats. And what bursts forth again at that very moment? The Chorus once more, and what does it have to say? Ἔρως ἀνíκατε μáχαν, “Invincible love of combat.” I suppose that even those who do not know Greek have heard at one time or other those three words that have come down through the centuries with a number of melodies in their wake.
That song bursts forth at the very moment when Creon decrees the punishment Antigone will be made to undergo: she will be placed alive in a tomb – something that doesn’t suggest too tender an imagination. Let me remind you that in Sade it is number seven or eight on the list of ordeals to which the hero is submitted – the reference is a useful one for you to realize the significance of what is involved here. It is precisely at this moment that the Chorus says in so many words: “This story is driving us mad; we are losing our grip; we are going out of our minds; as far as this child is concerned we are moved to …,” what the text, using a term whose appositeness I ask you to remember, calls ἵμερος εναργης.
Ἵμερος is the same term that in the Phaedrus points to what I am trying to grasp here as the reflection of desire of the kind by which even the gods are bound. It is the term used by Jupiter to designate his relations with Ganymede. Ἵμερος εναργης is literally desire made visible. This is what appears at the moment when the long scene that leads up to the punishment takes place.
After Antigone’s speech, in which is to be found the passage discussed by Goethe that I talked about the other day, the Chorus starts up again with a mythological song in which at three different moments it evokes three especially dramatic destinies that are all on the boundary between life and death, the boundary of the still living corpse. Antigone herself even refers to the image of Niobe, who is imprisoned in the narrow cavity of a rock and will be exposed forever to the assault of rain and weather. It is around this image of the limit that the whole play turns.
At the moment when it is moving more and more toward a kind of explosive climax of divine delirium, the blind Tiresias appears. He doesn’t simply announce the future, however, because the revelation of his prophecy has a role to play in the preparation of that future. In his dialogue with Creon he withholds what he has to say until the latter – in whose rigid mind everything is political or, in other words, a question of interest – is foolish enough to say a sufficient number of insulting things for Tiresias to come out with his prophecy. The value attributed to the words of a seer is, as in all circumstances where tradition counts, decisive enough for Creon to give in and resign himself to countermanding his own orders, which, of course, proves catastrophic.
The situation is heightened even further. In its penultimate appearance the Chorus breaks out in a hymn to the most hidden and supreme god, Dionysos. The spectators imagine that this is once again a hymn of liberation, that everyone is comforted, everything will work out all right. Those, on the other hand, who knew what Dionysos and his savage followers represent realize that the hymn breaks out because the limits of the field of the conflagration have been breached.
After that there is hardly room for the final twist of the action, the one in which the deluded Creon goes and knocks in desperation at the doors of the tomb within which Antigone has hanged herself. Hemon kisses her and emits a few final groans, but we do not know what happened in the sepulcre any more than we know what goes on when Hamlet goes down into the sepulcre. Antigone was after all walled in at the limit of Atè, and one is justified in wondering at which moment Hemon entered the tomb. As when the actors turn their faces away from the spot where Oedipus disappears, we don’t know what happened in Antigone’s tomb.
In any case, when Hemon emerges, he is possessed by divine μαύια. He shows all the signs of someone who has lost his reason. He attacks his father, misses him, and kills himself. And when Creon returns to the palace where a messenger has already preceded him, he discovers his wife is dead.
At that point the text shows us, in terms that are calculated to remind us where the limit is situated, a Creon who is out of his mind demanding that he be carried off – “Drag me out by my feet.” And the Coryphaeus manages to find the strength to engage in a play of words in saying, “You’re right to say that: the pain that one feels in one’s feet is the best kind of pain; unlike other kinds, it doesn’t last long.”
Sophocles is no pedantic schoolmaster, but unfortunately he has been translated by pedants. In any case, that’s how the corrida ends. Have the arena raked over, the bull removed, and cut off his you-know-what, if there is any left. That’s the style in which he has been rendered. May he go off to the bright sound of little bells.
It is more or less in these terms that the play of Antigone has been translated. Next time I will take a little time to point out a few essential points that will enable you to link my interpretation directly to the very terms used by Sophocles.
I hope that that will take no more than half of my time, and that I will be able to speak afterwards about what Kant has to say on the subject of the beautiful.
June 1, 1960