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Heidegger’s Antigone comment is part of his lectures on the Introduction to Metaphysics that he held in 1935 in Freiburg. In these lectures, Heidegger develops the rehabilitation of poiesis for the matter of thinking in great detail. His retrieval of an original Presocratic concept of poiesis furnished his concern to move artistic production into the foreground and to free himself from his own transcendental framework at stake in his previous lectures and writings.1 This concern was influenced by his intensive involvement with Hölderlin at that time. Hölderlin had inspired him to ask the question of the historicity of Being from poiesis, the work of art. This question is motivated by the “attack” against the dominance of the divide between Being and thinking, which according to Heidegger forms the fundamental orientation of the spirit in the Western world.2 Brought into opposition to Being, the notion of thinking was since Plato transformed into logos as abstraction, meaning truth. Logos, in terms of reason, developed then in the long run into logics as a science of thinking that formed the basis of all other metaphysical distinctions in Western epistemology, until Hegel’s Science of Logics.3 Heidegger does not hesitate to announce that his “attack” aims to overcome that speculative division that defines Western thinking. He does so by going back to the time before Plato. This step was important, because for Heidegger, “Plato and Aristotle failed to grasp [the] Presocratic understanding of poiesis, because they covered over the Presocratic understanding of phusis [Being] – losing the sense of the Presocratic understanding of phusis prevented a deeper understanding of poiesis”.4 Heidegger calls on two Presocratic thinkers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, claiming that the origin of the divorce of Being and thinking necessarily includes the question of an essential togetherness of both that can be found in their writings; writings in which Heidegger aims to prove the possibility of a poetic thinking that connects to phusis as an event of Being. One might ask now: why is Antigone so important in Heidegger’s argument for the transgression of the divide between Being and thinking by the work of art? And how is his argument related to the law of tragedy, comprising the tragedy of law? According to the first question, it can be said in general terms that for Heidegger the thinking poetry of the Greeks was tragedy, “the poetry in which Greek Being and Dasein [human beings insofar as they relate to Being] were authentically founded”.5 In other words: exclusively in tragedy, the notion of the human being in its interrelation with noein, phusis, poiesis and eventually mortality is brought about, because, as Heidegger states, the human being is the only species that is capable of death.6 Heidegger finds this specific “poetic projection of Being-human among the Greek” most prominently presented in Antigone.7 According to him, Antigone even performs “the authentic Greek definition of humanity”.8 To prove this, he invites to listen to the first choral ode of the play (lines 368–412).9 It would extend this article too much if I would follow the path of the three (literal) passageways that Heidegger subsequently goes over to finally “assess who the human being is accordingly this poetic saying”.10 I will only concentrate on his considerations concerning those two notions that help to inform us about the role of Antigone in his endeavour to overcome the divide between Being and thinking through the work of art. While deinon is the central topical notion in Antigone that he uses to prove his argument, logos is the central poetical notion. I will begin with the latter one.

It is certainly no coincidence that Heidegger invites us to listen to the choral ode, because Heidegger brings the fundamental meaning of logos together with the act of listening. Heidegger asks: “What do logos and legein mean, if they do not mean thinking?” To answer, he goes back to the etymology of the term that includes various meanings:

Logos means the word, discourse (speech), and legein means to talk. Dia-logue is reciprocal discourse, and mono-logue is solitary discourse. […] Lego, legein, Latin legere, is the same word as our lesen (to collect): gleaning, collecting wood, harvesting grapes, making a selection; ‘reading [lesen] a book’ is only a variant of gathering in the authentic sense. This means laying one thing next to another, bringing them together as one – in short, gathering; but at the same time, the one is contrasted with the other.11

Heidegger ensures here a double re-evaluation of the term logos. First, he brings logos ‘back’ to the notion of word and speech. Secondly, he concludes that the fundamental meaning of logos is gathering, more precisely “the relation of one thing to another”12 and more extensively, “the originally gathering gatheredness that constantly holds sway in itself”.13 This double re-evaluation connects logos directly to the notion of phusis as emerging sway, because logos and Being are together in the gatheredness of Beings. It also most prominently includes the relation to the act of hearing. “Saying and hearing”, on their part, “are proper only when they are intrinsically directed in advance towards Being, towards logos”.14 And it is important to notice here that both notions are crucial parts of tragedy as breakaway into language and therefore into Being, as could be heard in the choral ode of Antigone. This close relatedness between logos as Being and hearing directly leads to the question of the human being. Assuming that the human being is part of the emerging sway and has part in the happening of appearance, Heidegger says that humans must themselves be, they must belong to Being. In other words: humans are part of nature, of the emerging sway. But at the same time they are alien to Being, because they do not grasp it. They are not able to grasp the gatheredness of Beings themselves. They do hear words and discourse, yet they are closed off to what they should listen to. This means: “they are distant to logos”.15 To understand this problem, it is important to mention that Heidegger remarks that logos certainly already means discourse and words, but in Presocratic thinking “this is not the essence of logos”. While discourse corresponds to mere hearing the words and therefore to doxa (as inessential part of logos), the essence consists in “genuine hearkening”. It is a hearkening that obeys what logos is and therefore follows (and does not define) the gatheredness of Beings themselves. So, because human beings are not able to grasp this kind of logos and therefore “are absently present; in the midst of the things […] and yet away”, defining humanity has to be a question, a questioning of Being. At this point, the eminence of tragedy and Heidegger’s notion of the tragic become especially relevant. This relevance is based not only on the connection between logos and phusis, but also between noein and poiesis, both implicit in tragedy as a medium that confronts the question of being human. How is this to be understood? The procedure of questioning the human being is echoed in Heidegger’s translation of noein as listening and apprehension (Vernehmung) as a specific human quality. Crucial in his interpretation of apprehension is the opening up towards Being, which is something else than just hearing, because one can for example hear words without understanding what they mean. Apprehending is the condition of human beings insofar as it enables them to “bring their Dasein to stand in the Being of the beings”.16 To bring Dasein to stand means to see that the Being of life includes death: “Everything that comes to life thereby already begins to die as well, to go towards its death, and death is also life”.17 Now we are close to Antigone dealing with the confrontation between divine and human law, between immortality and the capability to die. According to Heidegger, the question who is human can only be dealt with when humanity goes into confrontation: “We know that the disjunction of gods and beings happens only in polemos, in setting-apart-from-each-other [Auseinandersetzung]. Only such struggle sets out [zeigt]. It lets gods and human beings step forth in their being”. And only in the confrontation between beings by attempting to bring them into beings, “humanity sets beings into limits and forms, projects something new (not yet present), thus originally poetizes, grounds poetically”.18 In this, the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides relates to the thinking poetry of the Greek that is, according to Heidegger, tragedy, or, more precisely: Antigone. So, if logos refers to the performative part of tragedy through the notions of dia-logue and listening,19 it re-evaluates tragedy in terms of hearkening as a medium of thinking that originally poetizes.

At this point, the second, topical notion deinon has to be brought in. To understand it, it is necessary to give a glimpse of Heidegger’s own translation of the Greek text into German (that, unfortunately, can only be echoed in this article through its English version), because – not at least out of his involvement with Hölderlin in that period – it deviates quite drastically from ‘common’ translations. At the same time, these deviations have to be taken into account as a crucial part of his argumentation. To give an idea, I present here the first lines of Heidegger’s translation of that stasimon in English, next to a classical English translation:

Heidegger’s translation:Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothinguncannier than man bestirs itself, rising up beyond him.He fares forth upon the foaming tide,amid winters southerly tempestand cruises through the summitsOf the raging, clefted swells.20	The Harvard Classics translation:Many the forms of life,Fearful and strange to see.But man supreme stands out,For strangeness and for fear.He, with the wintry gales,O‘er the foam-crested sea,’Mid billows surging round, Tacked this way across.21
Heidegger’s translation in German:Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts dochÜber den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt …22	A German version:Es gibt viel Ungeheuerliches, doch nichts Ist ungeheuerlicher als der Mensch23

Heidegger translates the crucial word of the first line, deinon, with the word uncanny (unheimlich). This translation is breaking the way for the whole of his interpretation of Antigone, because it lays out the antagonism of the Being of the human. It is utterly expressed in one line of the stasimon that says: The human being is to deinotaton, the uncanniest of the uncanny.24 What does that mean?

According to Heidegger, deinon (unheimlich) connotes the notion of monstrous and the meaning of ‘to be thrown out of the homely’ (Heim = home). The human being is monstrous as well as condemned to be thrown out of the homely. This conflict is expressed in the term violence (Gewalt). But this notion is again divided into two different significations. On the one hand, violence signifies the ‘over-whelming’ (das Überwältigende), which is the essential character of the sway (walten) itself. On the other hand, it means the ‘one who needs to use violence’, but not in the usual meaning of brutality, but as a basic trait of man’s worldly existence:

Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities, but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming. Because it is doubly deinon in an originally united sense: it is to deinotaton, violence-doing in the midst of the over-whelming.25

Violence-doing happens when “they overstep the limits of the homely, precisely in the direction of the uncanny [unheimlich] in the sense of the overwhelming”.26 This explanation makes clear why Heidegger prefers the translation ‘uncanny’ to cover the sense of deinon most precisely. It is exactly what the human being sets out in struggle (polemos). It is a struggle, at the same time, between techné and diké. It defines the essence of the tragic conflict that the human being confronts and that is at stake in Antigone. How are techné and diké related? Heidegger links techné directly to doing violence, while he links diké to the overwhelming. According to Heidegger, techné means more than skills: it means knowing; diké signifies more than justice and also means Fug.27 Correspondingly, he translates diké in Antigone with the same word. In German, Fug contains a lot of notions that go along with Fügung (coincidence, providence, dispensation and construction). In the official English translation of Heidegger’s text it says “fittingness”. I quote the translation of the passage in which Heidegger introduces the notion: “Here we understand fittingness first in the sense of joint and structure. Then as arrangement, as the direction that the overwhelming gives to its sway, finally as the enjoining structure which compels fitting in and compliance”.28 Deinon comprises diké and techné as a reciprocal over-against. This over-against is insofar as “the uncanniest, namely human being, happens. Insofar as humanity unfolds in history [my emphasis, KR]”.29 Unfolding in history needs techné to break out against diké, which at the same time has techné to its disposal. At this point, art comes in. For techné (knowledge) is closely connected to art: “The Greeks call […] art techné in the emphatic sense, because it brings in the most immediate way Being to stand, in the work”.30 As work of art, it puts Being into work. Consequently, Being becomes confirmed and accessible as Being. On the other hand, the one who knows who creates, who sets out into the un-said and breaks through the un-known and who is therefore violence-doing, takes a risk. The uncanny is therefore also the potential of crash, decay or death. For the violence against the overwhelming is reciprocally shattered by the overwhelming. The result is human kind being thrown into distress. Therefore, the worldly existence of the human being as a historical being means being a breach, an abyss (Abgrund). Although Heidegger concedes that the choir in the last strophe turns against this human being, against the uncanny, because it is not the everyday manner of his worldly existence, he suggests that logos and noein – through techné (art) – are always an act of violence against the overwhelming (phusis), but at the same time always and only for it. In fact, the human being is therefore torn between Fug and Unfug. Only thinking poetry is able to express this most intimate relation of being there to Being and its opening up, i.e. not being here. This means the event of Being, and this is the case in Antigone. Here, in “the word of the poet”, in tragedy, “the most intimate relation of Dasein to being and its opening up” is expressed. “For the poet’s word names what is farthest from Being: not-Being-here [not being alive]. Here, the uncanniest possibility of Dasein shows itself: to break the excessive violence of Being through Dasein’s ultimate act of violence against itself”.31 Da-Sein cannot achieve complete mastery, because its violence shatters against one thing: death.

It has to be asked how Heidegger’s interpretation of Antigone relates to the law. Does it open up a way towards the transgression of the tragedy of law and the law of tragedy? The answer is ambivalent. Firstly, in his passageway through the chorus line, Heidegger acts as a thinker and as a dramaturge. He is practicing, in line with Hölderlin, thinking poetry (or poetic thinking), setting the drama, the tragedy, into work through translation. This means that, secondly, Heidegger, in contrast to Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone, does not tend to achieve a higher conciliation in philosophy. Instead, Heidegger recalls the mystic law of tragedy to remember that there is no distributive justice. It results, thirdly, in a critique on logos as logics and on poiesis as poetics reduced to formalized laws, pleading instead for the transgression of the law by a poetic thinking that translates logos into gathering and hearkening. In other words: Heidegger transgresses the law of tragedy by manifesting a relation between philosophy and tragedy that is mediated by the spoken word and directed towards listeners, overcoming the formalized laws of logos and poetics.

But does this inclusively lead to a transgression of the tragedy of law? Here, Derrida has to be brought in dialogue with Heidegger. Derrida’s interest in Antigone is mainly known through his interpretation in GLAS, which is clearly dedicated to the deconstruction of the Hegelian Antigone interpretation. Derrida diagnoses Antigone as the quasi-transcendental of the Hegelian system, because she represents an excessive difference that both exceeds and is necessary for the operation of the dialectic. Derrida accuses Hegel of making an example of Antigone and removing her from the history of tragedy by forcing her into a paradigmatic and universal ‘truth’ for modernity under the condition of her exclusion. In other words: Hegel enclosed Antigone in her tomb, nothing should survive Antigone and nothing should emerge out of her. But what has not been remarked yet, is the ongoing dialogue on Antigone that Derrida carries out in his later works, especially in Specters of Marx and Politics of Friendship, echoing Heidegger’s Antigone comment.32 While Hegel’s announcement of her death had to ring in the absolute end of history in the name of the spirit, Derrida opens in Specters of Marx the tombs for the return of the dead: the spectres of Hamlet’s father and Oedipus’ daughter! Their appearance poses the question of law and justice anew,

not for law, for the calculation of restitutions, the economy of vengeance or punishment […] [but] beyond an economy of repression [Verdrängung!] whose law implies it to exceed itself, of itself in the course of history, be it a history of theatre or of politics between Oedipus Rex and Hamlet.33

I would like to stress “between” here, because what Derrida is aiming at is bringing up “ethics itself: to learn to live”, which “can only happen between life and death”,34 thus on the threshold that is theatre as a space that makes present. An ethics that needs the theatre, because it brings up anew the question of justice as a question where “it is not yet” and not reducible to the law.35 This question, Derrida states, cannot be asked without “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there [which certainly is Antigone’s concern, KR], of those who are no longer present and living”. It is a question directed to what happens after the end of history and “deserves the name of event”.36 The motto that haunts this account is “The time is out of joint”.37 At this point, Derrida directly calls up Heidegger,38 because ‘joint’ means ‘Fug’ or ‘Fuge’, which in Heidegger’s translation of the choir ode in Antigone means ‘diké’. Derrida directs the following question to Heidegger: what if one translates diké still with justice, without running the risk that justice will be reduced once again to juridical, moral rules, norms or representations, within an inevitable totalizing horizon?39 “Heidegger runs this risk”, Derrida says, “despite so many necessary precautions, when he gives priority to gathering and to the same”.40 In this sense, Derrida reveals a kind of ambivalence in Heidegger’s thinking. While he went with Antigone for a transgression of the law of tragedy, the tragedy of law was reaffirmed by violence against the same and the gathering. By way of contrast, Derrida proposes to give priority to dis-juncture, to Un-Fug, to the other. Here is his project of deconstruction located at. It goes along with the proposal to think justice beyond the law, beyond right, beyond morality and beyond moralism. It is located where the possibility of justice is played out as deconstruction, on a stage where the spectres have the chance to appear. For Derrida, the necessary disjunction, the Un-Fug, the de-totalizing condition of justice, is indeed that of the present (in the double sense of the word): justice as a gift. This is “where deconstruction would always begin to take shape as thinking of the gift and of undeconstructable justice”.41 It is a justice beyond law and revenge, a justice of philia,42 on a threshold where the dead and the living can coexist. Derrida proposes hauntology instead of ontology. According to Derrida, it needs a performative interpretation that changes/transforms what it interprets.43

Does Antigone reveal a kinship between theatre and philosophy? Yes, under the condition of a logics of listening, a listening to the family of the spectres. In this kind of kinship, catharsis has made place for a notion of mimesis that goes beyond the Platonic order of ideas: mimesis as the work of repeating occupancy (appropriation), a mimesis coming along with phusis as event: mimesis = occupancy = event (Aneignung = Ereignung = Ereignis). According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger ignored the event of mimesis when he placed the work of art in the midst of the agon between diké and techné, in order to reveal phusis. If one had at least listened to Aristotle, who claimed that mimesis is able to do what phusis is not: “to bring into work”.44 This – I would say – can happen in the work of drama that performs the thinking of dramaturgy as a work of mourning.