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Kati Röttger (University of Amsterdam)

Nothing could be worse for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt. One has to know who is buried where – and it is necessary (to know – to make certain) that, in what remains of him, remains there. […] The spirit of the spirit is work […], a certain power of transformation.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 9.

Sophocles’ Antigone – more than any other tragedy – plays a crucial role in philosophy from the early nineteenth century on. Since the tragic plot of Sophocles’ Antigone ‘organizes the scene’ of the speculative dialectics that Hegel developed in Phenomenology of Spirit,1 it resonates in the thinking of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Butler, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou, Stiegler – to name only a few. In other words: Antigone is haunting philosophy in the long run, generating a genealogy that is based on what I would call a specific and sometimes tragic kinship between theatre and philosophy that is based on poiesis, as I will argue with Heidegger later on. To explore this kinship more extensively, I will outline two scenes in which an encounter between philosophers occurs, both occupied by Antigone as a specific work of poiesis. I will respectively arrange these scenes as a special type of dialogue. The first dialogue happens between Hölderlin and Hegel and the second between Heidegger and Derrida. My aim in doing so is twofold. Firstly, I will interrogate the relationship between what I call philosophical thinking and theatrical thinking.2 This interrogation is informed by Heidegger’s claim that thinking “is at bottom still a poiesis”.3 What is it in Antigone, the tragedy, that makes it so paradigmatic for philosophy? To answer this question, I will, secondly, start from the presumption that the relationship between theatrical thinking and philosophical thinking in Antigone is closely connected to the question of law. While this question of law keeps surfacing throughout the history of the Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigone exposes it in a specific tragic way. This applies in the first instance to the tragic plot. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, feels obliged to bury her brother Polyneices, regardless of Creon’s law. Antigone is convinced she acts justly, expounding the superiority of divine law over the law made by man. In the history of philosophy, this tragic conflict was often interpreted as unfolding between private/individual law and public/state law, causing a deep crisis for the governmental order. Antigone was therefore regarded as a representative of the family in collision with the state (Hegel), as a figure that absolves of the sphere of law and orders that govern the access to speech and speakability (Lacan), or as an allegory of politics that points to the limits of kinship and representation (Butler).

But whichever way Antigone is interpreted, the point that I want to make is that law does not only define the subject of the tragedy but also its composition. This leads to the question to which extend the tragedy of law relates to the law of tragedy (the poetic norms of composition) and how this relation connects philosophy to the dramaturgy of tragedy. In general terms, the consideration of the strong connection between antique tragedy and the institution of procedural law is no new idea. Walter Benjamin, for example, referred to Jacob Burckhardt when he stated in his seminal study on the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels that: “Athletic contests, law, and tragedy constitute the great agonal trinity of Greek life – in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte Jacob Burckhardt refers to the agon as a scheme – and they are bound together under the sign of this contract”.4 According to Benjamin, transcending the regular perimeters of this agon, together with transcending the procedural trail of opposed factions by the Dionysian power of the living speech, created

the ultimate affinity between trial and tragedy in Athens. The hero’s word, on those isolated occasions when it breaks through the rigid amour of the self, becomes a cry of protest. Tragedy is assimilated in this image of the trial; here too a process of conciliation [Sühneverhandlung] takes place. So is it that in Sophocles and Euripides the heroes learn; not to speak … only to debate.5

Like the trial in antiquity, dialogue is the medium of the debate, “because it is based on the twin roles of prosecutor and accused, without official procedure. It has its chorus”.6 While Benjamin traces here a cautious line between trial, living speech and tragedy in antiquity, hinting to the similarity of the dramatic form of dialogue and choir in both procedures, Christoph Menke, in a recent study, makes the connections between tragedy and law more explicit. He relies on Benjamin’s notion of fateful violence of the law worked out in Critique on Violence to trace the specific tragic experience of law.7 Benjamin makes clear to which extend the violence (Gewalt) of the law means a humiliation and violation of justice. According to Menke this is a paradox in law expressed in the relationship between vengeance and law. Vengeance creates an equal relationship, because the revenging act always reacts on a previous revenging act. The justice of revenge is thus a never ending repetition of bloody violence. Law, on the contrary, means the instalment of a juridical-procedural order of justice that interrupts the bloody circle of vengeance. Tragedy starts exactly at that point where the transition from vengeance to law creates a difference in the order of justice. With Benjamin this difference might be called the mythical and violent foundation of law in the Greek world, because it exposes the paradox of law as being violent. Menke is elucidating his point with Oresteia and Oedipus the King. In both tragedies, the installed juridical-procedural order puts an end to the endless repetition of revenge, establishing judgment. Judgment entails a recognition that two parties are involved, or on the scene. This recognition creates a new form of justice. It is grounded in the acceptation of the equality of the citizens through the instalment of a juridical-procedural order that takes into account the interests of both parties. In the Oresteia it is Athena who establishes a trial as a legal procedure against Orestes, who is punished by it. In Oedipus the King, Oedipus, in his double role of governor and accused, judges himself and executes self-punishment. But it is the very principle (the law) of tragedy to bring forth the law as a form of justice (Gerechtigkeitsform) that is, in its essence, a form of violence.8 The tragic in tragedy happens at the turning point or reversal (peripety)9 that defines the tragic conflict without a just solution that applies to all. The legal break with fateful violence means at the same time a legal peripety, a transformation into another violence that is the violence buried inside the law. To conclude with, we can state that tragedy and law are closely linked in subject and form. While tragedy can be described as a genre of the law, and therefore the form of representation (Darstellungsform) of law, the law is in turn inscribed in the justice of tragedy. To put it more precisely: law is not just the form of justice (Gerechtigkeitsform) of tragedy, but also – and even more so – the form of justice that is brought forth by tragedy as inherently tragic,10 namely in the situation in which the condemned produces violence.

This specific interrelation between the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law will lead in the course of my argument to the following question: how does this specific connection between law and tragedy help us to understand the interrelatedness between philosophical and theatrical thinking apparent in the case of Antigone? The plot yet bears some evidence. Antigone certainly executes justice with her demand to bury her brother. But with her deed she refuses to accept the king’s law. In doing so, she incorporates myth and therefore the order of revenge: to do what has to be done.11 Antigone is literally doing what she says: “I say that I did it and I do not deny it”.12 Therefore, she is punished by the law of Creon and sentenced to be buried alive. Confronted with this, she takes responsibility and decides to end her own life. She executes self-punishment. But does she execute the procedural law, like Oedipus did? The problem is that this tragedy neither knows a third position that recognizes the two parties, nor does Antigone act in the double role of governor and accused like her father Oedipus. She is accused by the governmental law of Creon, and therefore declared guilty. In spite of acting according to the mythical realm, she does not carry out an act of revenge; she does not repeat the bloody circle of killing to create justice. On the contrary, she goes for another kind of justice, out of philia. She cares for the work of mourning that has to be done by making certain that what remains of her brother, remains there, buried. So what is the tragic plot here? Antigone breaks with the violence of the law and she breaks with the violence of revenge. This is why she has to execute herself.13 Antigone incorporates the mythical order of the legal break with fateful violence and the violence of law at the same time. She tends towards another form of law. Following Hölderlin, it can be called a modern form that opens up a space for the work of mourning, as I will explain in a more detailed way later in this article. It encompasses a transformation that happens on a threshold where an old order loses ground while a new one is not yet fully created: a time out of joint. And this might be the reason for Antigone’s prominent inscription in the philosophy of history. Consequently, it can be interpreted as an instruction of that historical-philosophical consideration of the law, which Walter Benjamin summarized in the sentence: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history”.14 Therefore, it might be no coincidence that Antigone prominently appears in those historical moments of transition or rupture when a demand for a different law is imminent, which claims to bring with it another form of (legal) justice.

In the following, I will pick up two historical moments when Antigone infiltrated scenes of philosophical thinking, as mentioned at the beginning. One of these moments coincided with the genesis of a philosophy of history in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was the moment when Hegel conducted the construction of speculative dialectics after the model of tragedy, and most prominently after Antigone. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, he had dramatized the experience and exposition of abstract thought according to the law of tragedy, to implement a law executed by the spirit. Hegel’s counterpart in this scene is Hölderlin, who shared his speculative adventure, but who pleaded for a transgression and deconstruction of the law of tragedy.

The second scene is located two hundred years later, after 1989. It stages Jacques Derrida who reacts to the “totalitarian terror” of the twentieth century.15 In Specters of Marx, he locates his project of deconstruction at this historical moment, because

the eschatological themes of the ‘end of history’ […] were […] our daily bread. It […] was, on the other hand and indissociably, what we had known or what some of us for quite a time no longer hid from concerning totalitarian terror in all Eastern countries […] Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed.16

I will argue that next to the spectre of Marx and the spectre of Hamlet’s father, the spectre of Antigone plays a crucial role in this project of deconstruction. It is haunted by Heidegger’s comment on Antigone, which was part of his lectures on the Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935. More precisely, I propose to stage a spectral dia-logue not only between Derrida and Heidegger, and between Hamlet and Antigone, but, foremost, between the spectres of Hamlet’s father and Oedipus’ daughter/sister Antigone. I will demonstrate in the following to which extend this spectral dialogue might help to transgress what I call the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law. While Hegel still encloses Antigone in her tomb and while Heidegger invites us to listen to the voice of tragic poiesis, Derrida opens the tomb for the return of the dead Antigone. While Heidegger still runs the risk to enclose justice in the laws of tragedy, Derrida tries to give justice a chance through the deconstruction of the tragedy of law. In short, I propose with Derrida a transgression that embraces hauntology instead of ontology,17 following up Heidegger’s Philo-Logics of Listening.