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In his comprehensive critical study on Antigone, George Steiner dedicates a short passage to the encounter between Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling in the theological seminar in Tübingen between 1789 and 1793.1 They shared a passion for Sophocles and especially for Antigone. For Hölderlin, this tragedy was the most Greek one and incorporated therefore the very essence of tragedy, “the strongest of all poetical forms”.2 For Hegel, it was the most consummate form of art human effort had ever brought forth.3 In addition, they recognized in that play, amid the devastating terror following the French Revolution, the violent and unresolved conflict between private and public law that was at stake at that time. Following Steiner, Antigone knitted a close tie between the three friends, but it was also the starting point for a keen polemics. That applied especially to Hegel and Hölderlin. Only one year after the publication of Hölderlin’s Anmerkungen zur Antigone (1804), Hegel on his part wrote the crucial pages of his Phenomenology of Spirit dedicated to Antigone and these, from then on, deeply influenced the whole modern interpretation of tragedy until at least Heidegger. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hegel’s intention then was not just to correct Hölderlin’s analysis,4 it was also of a dramaturgical order: Hegel resisted Hölderlin’s dramaturgical approach to antique tragedy to defend the dominance of philosophy. While the tragic form and plot of Antigone organized the theoretical scene of Hegel’s phenomenology,5 Hölderlin took Antigone as a point of departure to develop a modern theory of tragedy. How should this be understood? Let us follow Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument further. Hegel adapted antique drama as a model for philosophy, Hölderlin combined both dramaturgy and philosophy. In a close “dialogue with Sophocles”, Hölderlin theorized tragedy on the one hand and experimented with translations of tragedies on the other hand.6 In doing so, he opened up a way towards a specific theory and practice of modern tragedy that goes beyond the concept of antiquity. Hegel’s Antigone interpretation, on the contrary, conjures up the antique concept of tragedy. Antigone resonates in his Phenomenology of Spirit, because Hegel is adapting the conflict between the political law of the state and the private law of kinship to speculative thinking. He is creating a dialectical scene that is structured by the dissymmetrical opposition between the law of the particular and the law of the general; an opposition that entails a whole series of further pairs of oppositions, like divine law and human law, family and state, man and woman, life and death, all antithetically arranged according to the plot of the tragedy. This conflict, consequently, is translated into a dialectical procedure that leads to an abstraction in the realm of ideas: this abstraction is moral justice, more precisely: moral justice as a concept. The formal law of tragedy (aspects of conflict, crisis, peripety, and catharsis) thus illustrates the dynamics of collision and synthetical dissolution Hegel’s dialectics stands for. But more than this, Hegel offers a solution to the conflict through sublation, a good end (that is the end of history) to achieve higher conciliation. ‘Good infinity’ means the dissolution of the historical collision in the concept of spirit, thus in philosophy! According to Lacoue-Labarthe, this dissolution is identical with the “philosophical exploitation of the Aristotelian concept of catharsis” – in the name of idealism.7

While Hegel adapted Antigone to foresee the course of history through philosophy, the opposite was true for Hölderlin.8 The latter conceived the uniqueness, the Greekness of tragedy as a work (organon) that is not identically repeatable and not transferable, neither to the realm of ideas, neither to his actual time. This was the reason for him to think that antique tragedy was only able to survive by a transformation into a modern tragedy, and modern meant for him: different, resistant, a disorganized model of tragedy,9 a tragedy out of joint. The way to do so was for Hölderlin the work of translation as a disarticulation of tragedy. Hölderlin introduced the notion of caesura to define this means of disarticulation. With caesura he meant those parts in tragedy that resist the totality of its form.

According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hölderlin’s modern approach to a theory of tragedy results from a dramaturgical interest in deconstruction. For Hölderlin “modern tragedy only exists in the form of deconstruction of antique tragedy. Similarly a theory of the tragic and tragedy was only possible in the deconstruction of classical poetics and her speculative reinterpretation”.10 This form of deconstruction has to be understood as an adaption of the violence of tragic catastrophe. Hölderlin proposed to comply with the law of tragedy only so far as the catastrophe of its original meaning would be turned into the catastrophe of occupancy or appropriation (Aneignung) through the dramaturgical processing. The catastrophic transgression of the classical form of tragedy creates at the same time “the paradox of the dramaturge”.11 The clue of Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s dramaturgical intervention is that this catastrophe of occupancy occurs in terms of mimesis, and not catharsis like in Hegel’s view. And here it is important to know that mimesis in English inclusively means occupancy or appropriation. Dramaturgical processing is understood thus as a mimetic act of translation as the catastrophe of translating the catastrophic plot of tragedy into modernity. In that sense, the dramaturgical process comes close to the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), a notion that recalls Trauerspiel. In dramaturgical terms, it results in the need to “de-organize [tragedy], to de-systematize it, to get it out of joint”, concludes Lacoue-Labarthe.12

Hölderlin had proposed a way to occupy Antigone that leads through logos to poiesies that is a combined ergon (work) and algos (pain).13 This turn to poiesies deliberately haunts Heidegger’s thinking and hence, Derrida’s. Therefore, Hölderlin is the forerunner of the next scene of encounter that is occupied by Antigone. It is a scene defined by dramaturgy in the literal sense of the word: namely in the combination of the words drama (to act) and ergon (work), meaning ‘to bring drama to work’. Bringing drama to work involves, as we will see, a transgression of the law of tragedy, and with this also of the tragedy of law, towards a work of mourning. It is a work of mourning, as I will demonstrate, that turns out to be a crucial concern for justice, in Derrida’s Specters of Marx. But to understand this, we first need to understand how Heidegger’s Antigone comment, and especially his translation of diké (justice) with the German term Fug (fitting, joint) as well as his understanding of logos as listening, has influenced Derrida’s project of deconstruction, which achieves a performative approach to Antigone.