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Charlotte Gruber, Katharina Pewny, Luk Van den Dries, Simon Leenknegt

The articles on Antigone collected in this anthology are based on contributions to the international conference Occupy Antigone: Tradition, Transition and Transformation, which took place on 18 and 19 March 2014 in Ghent, Belgium. This conference was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. As part of the research-branch on contemporary tragedy within the Research Centre Studies in Performing Arts and Media (S:PAM) of Ghent University, the conference was organized by Katharina Pewny and Charlotte Gruber (both involved in the BOF-funded project Antigone in/as Transition, 2012–2016) in collaboration with Luk Van den Dries and the Research Centre for Visual Poetics of the University of Antwerp.

Being a result of the conference, this anthology puts together some of today’s most relevant perspectives on the tragedy Antigone from a variety of different fields – in the first place perspectives with an outlook on the significance of the tragedy in terms of (especially contemporary) performance practice and theoretical reflections with regard to the notion of performativity. This anthology thus provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to Antigone from a performance studies angle. In doing so, this specialized issue draws attention to what could easily be called a boom of the tragedy’s occurrence and relevance in both theatre spaces and academia, which unravelled ever since the turn of the millennium and has just taken on momentum again during the last five years. This is apparent in the multitude of very recent publications addressing Antigone in particular, such as The Returns of Antigone. Interdisciplinary Essays,1 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor. New Essays on Jaques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,2 and Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery.3 These were preceded by, for instance, Les Antigones contemporaines: de 1945 à nos jours,4 and Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora.5

Hans-Thies Lehmann, one of the most influential figures in discourses on contemporary performance strategies, published a contribution to Tragödie – Trauerspiel – Spektakel in 2007,6 which preceded his extensive publication Tragödie und Dramatisches Theater that appeared in 2013.7 These publications demonstrate the overlooked relevance of tragedy in postdramatic theatre. In a chapter on what he calls “Das Modell Antigone” (not to be confused with the Antigonemodell by Bertolt Brecht), Lehmann has yet again assigned a special position to the figure of Antigone. It is Antigone whom he calls “the embodiment of tragedy”.8

Occupy Antigone elaborates on the neglect of the vast multitude of performances of Antigone, while at the same time providing a scholarly encounter between theory and theatre practice. This publication is hence located between – and inspired by – specialized anthologies such as Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism9 and Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage.10

These publications reveal a trend of radically rethinking the canonical classic and critically engage with the heritage and legacies formed by earlier interpretations. Within the German speaking humanities, and particularly under the influence of Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s influential interpretation, Antigone had come to mark the conflict-laden transition from an ethics of the family and divine law to an ethics of the state and humanism.11 Since Hegel’s account, however, the myth of Antigone and its essential dynamics have been read in a great number of ways rather contesting his position. In 1984, George Steiner published a versatile analysis of the Antigone myth in various artistic, cultural and intellectual fields.12 Therein, the author describes Antigone as “object of obsession from the end of the eighteenth century until the present”.13 In twentieth-century French academia, Antigone entered psychoanalysis mainly due to Jacques Lacan,14 whose emphasis on the heroin’s death-drive was later radically criticized by his former student Luce Irigaray.15 She accused Lacan of denying and undermining female desire and marked an important moment in early feminism. Hegel, Lacan and Irigaray have all been crucial influences on Judith Butler’s quintessential publication Antigone’s Claim.16 Butler, in contrast to Hegel, points out the linkages between the symbolic orders of language, the family and the state. Similar themes had been taken up before in the cryptic deconstructionist writing of the literary-philosophical text collage Glas by Jaques Derrida.17 It is interesting that in theory on Antigone (and Antigone in theory), particularly against the background of Butler’s and Derrida’s publications, the fields of psychoanalysis and philosophy seem to find an important meeting point. Since then, different proclamations of the notion of an ‘Antigone Complex’ played a role in publications by Cecilia Sjöholm18 and Bernard Stiegler,19 whose work frequently crosses the borders between philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Occupy Antigone investigates the vibrant life – since the beginning of this millennium – of a mythical figure that is after all more than 2500 years old. One of the earliest records of Antigone, mentioning her as being one of the daughters of Oedipus, is a fragment of Pherecydes of Athens that dates from around the beginning of the fifth century BCE.20 The first known tragedy in which Antigone appeared was Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, which probably premiered in 467 BCE.21 It is of course mainly due to the tragedy entitled Antigone, which Sophocles wrote around 441 BCE, that the figure became and remained important, especially on theatre stages. Besides the original text, famous twentieth-century adaptations, such as the one by Bertolt Brecht (1948) and those written by Jean Anouilh (1944) and Jean Cocteau (1922), continue to inspire today’s theatre makers. Performances that are built around the mythical figure of Antigone are hence an exceptionally rich and ever-growing field of research for performance analysis. First and foremost, there is an immense amount of material from the boom of re-stagings of ancient tragedies since the 1980s, and contemporary stagings of Antigone are found in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and India. Antigone adaptations have, for example, told the story of the founding of the nation of Ghana (Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Chioce, Ghana, 1962) or critiqued the neo-colonialism at the turn of the century (Femi Òsófisan’s Tègònni, USA, 1994). The forbidden burial of one’s kin provides a point of departure for Latin American versions of Antigone, for example in Argentina and Peru, where civilians were abducted by military regimes in the second half of the twentieth century (Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa, Argentina, 1986 and José Watanabe’s Antígona, Peru, 2000). There is especially in Africa a continuing trend of theatrical, postcolonial deconstructions of the classic that is a part of Western heritage. This might partly have to do with the renowned drama The Island (South Africa, 1973) by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in which two prisoners of the apartheid era prison Robben Island prepare to perform Antigone for the other prisoners. Two more recent African plays have gained a similar level of popularity, namely Òsófisan’s Tègònni and Koffi Kwahulé’s Bintou (France, 1997).

But also in Europe and the United States the amount of Antigone performances in recent years is strikingly high. Some productions even travel to different continents, often actualizing the tragedy by building it up around recent political issues. In 2012, Volker Lösch, known for his controversial choruses for which he often uses amateurs from specific, marginalized groups, presented his Antigona Oriental in Uruguay. In this performance, he worked with Uruguayan women that were victims of political persecution and imprisonment during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. Flemish director Ivo van Hove, who works across Europe and the United States, chose, on the contrary, a deliberately unspecific setting, starring Oscar-winning French actress Juliette Binoche as Antigone and using a new translation by T.S. Eliot Prize winning poet Anne Carson (Antigone, UK, 2014). Besides the slightly grimmer translation she did for Van Hove,22 Carson published together with Bianca Stone a wonderfully crafted (hand-lettered and illustrated), witty book entitled Antigonick in 2012.23 In California, theatre company Shotgun Players made a very dedicated effort to bring the aesthetics of the book to the stage (Antigonick, USA, 2015). At Paris-Sorbonne University, as part of the Theater, Performance, Philosophy conference in 2014, Ben Hjorth organized a performative public reading with Judith Butler as Kreon: a public proof of the intense link between academia, new translations of classic texts and innovative performance practice. Roy Williams’s Antigone: a play for today’s streets is another exciting, inventive adaptation. Translated in gang-slang, the tragedy was first performed by Pilot Theatre in the United Kingdom in 2014. Another example worth mentioning is Dutch dramatist Lot Vekemans’s monologue of Ismene entitled Zus Van (“Sister of”), which received many lauding reviews.24 It was produced in Belgium and the Netherlands by Allan Zipson (2005–2013) as well as in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, directed by Stephan Kimmig in 2014 during the annual Autorentheatertage. Previously, Kimmig was the director of Ödipus Stadt, a performance that combines Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus the King with Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and Euripides’ The Phoenician Women (also at Deutsches Theater, 2012). This performance was, among other cities, invited to Prague, Santiago de Chile and Beijing. Among the other performances that combine Antigone with other tragedies are kReon by Jorgen Cassier (Belgium, 2009), Ödipus/Antigone by Michael Thalheimer (Germany, 2009) and These Seven Sicknesses by Sean Graney (USA, 2012). The list can be extended almost endlessly and gives us only a peek at the prominence of Antigone on contemporary stages. The limited amount of publications that actually consider performance practice reveals that research on contemporary performances of Antigone are still at the very beginning in both theatre and performance studies.

The title of the conference and this resulting anthology Occupy Antigone refers to the amount of projects, publications and people occupied with Antigone. ‘Occupation’ is of course a term that strongly echoes political force. Especially in postcolonial discourses, histories of occupation are addressed as being related to violence and oppression. Occupation, however, and this is particularly true for the global counteractions of the Occupy Movement, can also refer to bottom-up approaches to resistance and empowerment. Occupation can then be understood as an act of seizing a certain object, usurping it, collectively using it in a different way and thereby giving new meaning to it. The contributions collected in this volume emphasize the political impact of performance practice and academic writing with regard to present sociopolitical realities.

Three key sections form the structure of this collection: “Antigone’s Transformed Heritage”, “Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance” and “Antigone’s Scenes of Death”. In the first section questions are raised such as: what were the links between philosophy, art and performance and the figure of Antigone in the past? What is the state of these relations today? Within which philosophical frameworks do we encounter Antigone today? What is the tragic element in these frameworks? Are there connections between changes in how the tragic is conceptualized and changes in how Antigone is interpreted?

Freddie Rokem, author of Performing History and Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance and also one of the driving forces behind the research network Performance Philosophy, opens the first section. Referring to Aristotle, Rokem postulates that in tragedy, principles from basic formal logic are central to critically approaching the philosophical question of what it means to be human. Claiming that “one of the distinguishing features of tragedy is that it both integrates and at the same time confronts and subverts the classical forms of logical argumentation” (p. 17), his paper is a unique example of the fertile exchange between performance practice, philosophy and classic propositional logic. He then performs a careful reading of the famous “Ode to Man”, with regard to the different translations and interpretations of deinon and their respective contexts, from Sophocles’ original and Hölderlin’s translation to Heidegger’s reading and Brecht’s production The Antigone of Sophocles; A version for the stage after Hölderlin’s translation. Rokem provides a particularly complex reflection on the manifold meanings of the term, the philosophical questions it touches upon and how this has had an impact on both philosophical writing and performance practice throughout the centuries.

Kati Röttger dives even deeper into the history of philosophy, seeking the traces Antigone has left in this field. In her contribution “Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone”, she detects subtle differences between approaches to the figure of Antigone and scrutinizes them against their historical backgrounds, unravelling an “interrelation between the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law” (p. 36). This is the point of departure to reveal the commonalities “between philosophical and theatrical thinking” (p. 36), which she finds to be strikingly present in Antigone. Focusing on the significance of the notion of poiesis and agon, she contrasts dialogues between Heidegger and Hölderlin with dialogues between Derrida and Heidegger, while also taking relevant remarks by Walter Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe and others into consideration. Röttger stresses that the remarkable kinship between theatre and philosophy “is founded on dialogue” (p. 38) and can be seen as a matter closely related to dramaturgy.

In “Against the Unwritten Laws. The Figure of Antigone and the Political Occupation of the Public Space”, Klaas Tindemans deals with a more concrete mode of the abstract concept of law and the politics of undermining them. Engaging with Hannah Arendt’s ideas on the construction of a democratic political realm and studies by contemporary thinkers such as Cecilia Sjöholm, Bonnie Honig, Florence Dupont and Cornelius Castoriadis, he moves between historical analysis and contemporary philosophical ideas to reflect on public space as political space. He connects examples from film and theatre productions with their political realities – particularly the aftermath of the ‘German autumn’ in the 1970s – to tackle the problem that while “[a] public, political space needs written laws in order to frame itself, […] it of course also needs an Antigone to occupy it” (p. 53).

The article “Beyond Kinship: From Antigone to ANT” by Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera closes the section on “Antigone’s Transformed Heritage”. They reveal the transformation the concept of kinship has undergone in both philosophy and psychoanalysis. Starting from Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, they investigate her claim that “stable kinship norms support our abiding sense of culture’s intelligibility”25 within popular culture. Through original case studies such as the science fiction film Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009), the film Stoker (Park Chan-Wook, 2013) and the TV series Game of Thrones (2011-present) they shed new light on the traditional Oedipal scenario that Freud read in Sophocles’ Antigone. With an innovative theoretical twist in their analysis, they extend Butler’s ideas by means of the Actor-Network Theory that Bruno Latour develops in Reassembling the Social as a “circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society”.26 They deploy Latour’s theory to open up a path that goes beyond the philosophy of causality. Performativity is defined as something that is constantly being made and remade.

The second section, “Antigone’s Mechanisms of Exclusion and Resistance”, addresses the appropriation of Antigone as a canonical text of Western heritage against the critical background of postcolonial theory, with two contributions turning their attention to the African context, which has frequently been the subject of analysis.27 The readings of Antigone and related performances that are addressed in the second section deal with the legacy of domination of Western thought and the repression of cultural diversity and difference, while showing the relevance of an independent cultural heritage to form and nurture an independent cultural identity. However, the manifest focus on the few exemplary popular performances (of which Femi Òsófisan’s Tègònni is one) in the second section and in many other publications in the English-speaking performance studies also reflects that the access to – and consideration of – non-Western performances remains restricted and problematic.

Tina Chanter has recently edited the anthology The Returns of Antigone28 and is author of the critical analysis of Sophocles’ original entitled Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (2011).29 The publication received acclaim for the fact that Chanter traces Antigone’s influence on Western thought to reveal and problematize how the marginalization of the position of slaves, which is crucially inherent in the tragedy and was so fundamental to the society of the Attic polis, has been gone more or less unnoticed for more than five centuries. In her contribution “The Returns of Antigone and the Remains of Antigone: to Bury or not to Bury”, she unfolds this argument anew and shows “how [Antigone’s] efforts to inscribe her burial of her brother as meaningful, legitimate, and intelligible underwrite the marginalization of others” (p. 81).

With the subsequent articles by Wumi Raji and Izuu Nwankwo, two African scholars provide their view regarding the production by Femi Òsófisan. In “Between Antigone and Tègònni: Tragic Visions and Translations”, Raji draws from Sophocles’ original as well as Òsófisan’s performance to “undertake a comparative exploration of the formal and visionary continuities and transformations between these two related tragedies” (pp. 94–95). He does so by “[f]ocusing specifically on the private theme of inter-racial love” (p. 95). While Raji links the Greek tragedy to the African adaptation, Nwankwo starts from Òsófisan’s Tègònni to make comparisons with the illustrated translation Antigonick by Anne Carson and Bianca Stone.30 In his paper “Antigone, Tègònni and Antigonick: Performing Resistance in a Glocalised Society”, Nwankwo uses Derrida’s concept of différance to look “to other characters who surround Antigone to determine how their (in)actions shape hers” (p. 108). The shift towards a more careful consideration of the other characters in Antigone is a trend that can be seen in both performance practice (e.g. Lot Vekeman’s Zus Van, 2005) and philosophical theory (e.g. the focus on the neglected role of Ismene in Bonnie Honig’s Antigone Interrupted).31

In her contribution “The Other Antigone(s): Performing Deconstructed Legacies”, Charlotte Gruber, who also engages with theoretical concepts by Derrida, addresses this shift towards the Other and its relevance for introducing a critical distance from Eurocentrism and logocentrism in two recent European theatre productions, namely Zus Van by Lot Vekemans (Belgium, 2005) and Antigone by Nicole Beutler and Ulrike Quade (The Netherlands, 2012).

The articles that constitute the last section revolve around “Antigone’s Scenes of Death”. While in Hegel’s account the ritual and religious aspects of the burial performed by Antigone stood central, today Antigone often comes to represent the radical politicality of the right to mourn and bury the deceased as a basic human right and as a tool of political power. Especially when contemplating for example Foucault’s work on biopolitics32 and Judith Butler’s reflections on ‘grievable life’,33 questions surrounding the dead and their righteous place become important.

In “Not Even His Dead Body: Polyneices, the Excluded Brother”, Francesca Spiegel gives a detailed analysis of the role of Polyneices from a variety of angles, stressing that “[e]ven though Polyneices is not the most important character of Antigone, his life, and the end of his life, is ultimately what provokes all of the arguments, crisis and tragedy of Antigone” (p. 149). She investigates how the group dynamics in the play are influenced by the presence of his corpse and are as much social and political as they are ideological. She points out his neglected position, for even though “[t]he dead Polyneices does not speak in Antigone, […] the presence of his body and of his spirit weigh heavy on the whole character constellation” (p. 149).

Małgorzata Budzowska addresses the concept of ‘post-memory’ by Marianne Hirsch in her article “The Political Theatre of Dying in the Antigone Production by Marcin Liber”. According to Budzowska, the Polish performance, which premiered at the New Theatre in Łódź in 2013, deals with post-war trauma and connects themes of a global and a local level, as well as public and individual modes of mourning. Her analysis of Liber’s adaptation is the point of departure for critically examining how political engineering influences questions of who and what is worth to be commemorated and how this should be done.

The paper “(Un)Dead and (Un)Buried: From Antigone to Chelsea Manning” by Aneta Stojnić, establishes a connection between Antigone and Chelsea Manning by interpreting the figure of the whistleblower as a contemporary Antigone, while also tackling aspects of gender performativity against this background. Citing Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler as well as Arthur Danto, Stojnić presents an exciting case of how contemporary resistance works and fails on various levels.

Butler’s theories also play a central role in the joint contribution “Ritual Failure Remains? The Inaccessibility of the Dead (Corpse) in Antigone and in Contemporary Post-Conflict Art” by Katharina Pewny and Inge Arteel. They particularly elaborate on Butler’s work on grievable life and relate it to the concept of ‘ritual failure’, which originated in a context of religious studies and social sciences. Combining approaches from performance studies and literary studies, they analyse the novel Frozen Time (2010) by Anna Kim and the film Élevage de poussière/Dust Breeding (2013) by Sarah Vanagt. In their analyses, they unravel ‘Antigonal’ motives in contemporary art practices and close this anthology by showing that “mourning is not simply a private matter, but also something that constructs political, social and ethical norms” (p. 180).