SUNY series in Theology and Continental Thought

On the Matrix of Love

Lenart Škof

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438482750
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Antigone's Sisters, Lenart Škof explores the power of love in our world—stronger than violence and, ultimately, stronger even than death. Focusing on Antigone, Savitri, and Mary, the book offers an investigation into various goddesses and feminine figures from a variety of philosophical, mythological, theological, and literary contexts. The book also elaborates on the feminine aspects of selected concepts from modern philosophical texts, such as the Matrix in Jakob Böhme, Clara in F. W. J. Schelling, beyng in Martin Heidegger, chóra in Jacques Derrida, and breath in Luce Irigaray's thought. Drawing on Bracha M. Ettinger's concept of matrixiality, Škof proposes a new matrixial theory of philosophy, cosmology, and theology of love. Despite its many usages and appropriations, love remains a neglected topic within Western philosophy. With its new interpretation of Antigone and related readings of Irigaray, Kristeva, and Ettinger, Antigone's Sisters aims to identify some of the reasons for this forgetting of love, and to show that it is only love that can bring peace to our ethically disrupted world.

PART I

COSMOLOGY / THEOLOGY OF LOVE

walled rocks

1

ANTIGONE / SAVITRI

In this chapter, we wish to delineate new ethical spaces, by following the deeds of two heroic women from the literary and religious tradition—Sophocles’s Antigone and Savitri from the Mahabharata. What they have in common is that in their lives and/or deaths, and in their heroic deeds, they were in a close relationship to the deceased and to death. But also to life. In this, they were guardians of cosmic laws, with their sacred sexual and generational genealogies. Despite their tragic fates, they were and remained sacred guardians of basic cosmic laws, related to the living and deceased, heaven, earth, and the underworld. In Heideggerian language, they were, as it were, in a close proximity to the elements of ancient cosmic order and cosmic laws; in their deeds, they acted and spoke out of a belonging to Being (to deinon).

Today, it seems that we have lost our relation to the cosmos and its ethical order. We live in a civilization offering us a plenitude of earthly goods, including various ethical and political laws, and justice in one of its forms. In this fabricated world we (who are we?)1 (un)willingly tolerate evil and violence in one of its varied forms and are thus not able to posit an unconditional ethical demand against them. Being subjected to different forms of power, we cannot find a peaceful repose, a place to host (hospitality) and protect peace for the concrete living others. This chapter wishes to place Sophocles’s Antigone into a new ethical framework and point toward some elements for a possible new cosmico-feminist interpretation of justice. It will elaborate on the logic of agrapta nomima (unwritten/divine laws) and the logic of ethical gestures toward mortals (both deceased persons and living beings). It will show how Antigone’s sacred duty was to preserve the equilibrium of the cosmic order (with its sexual and generational genealogies), and how this equilibrium has been lost in our times, in fact, how it has been subjugated to various forms of power since Creon’s political act. According to Luce Irigaray2—whose teachings have been my inspiration for years—this was possible only with the Greek substitution of ancient law and cosmic justice with an inauguration of new political laws, as defended by Creon, who finds ancient unwritten laws obsolete. We know that even Hegel—by fully acknowledging this shift and by highly praising Antigone for her acts—was still not willing to support Antigone’s adherence to those ancient laws, representing a sacred order of femininity. New ethical gestures and a new view of justice are thus needed in our times; gestures that are more closely related to the human body, deceased (as in Polyneices), but also gestures for the living corpse (Agamben), any child, or a (wo)man on the very edge between life and death, or any other living body in pain. Universally then, no duty and no justice can be more important than our adherence to the deepest cosmico-ethical layers of both our faith and our knowledge, an awareness rooted in our bodily sensibilities and interiority.

Antigone

From Hegel to Irigaray, Sophocles’s Antigone has provoked major thinkers and raised key ethical questions: from divine law to human law, from ethics to morality, from cosmic awareness to modern political life, in all these contexts, interpreters and authors such as Hegel, Lacan, Butler, Irigaray, and Žižek have searched for the proper measure, delineating the most sensitive space of all—the space of proximity between the sexuate subjects, between kin members (even hinting at incestuous relationships between them), or, as in more politically invested readings—among the members of a political community. The languages of psychoanalysis, ethics, theology, and law were used and merged in the many and varied readings of this ancient drama. But originally, Antigone is a tragedy about cosmic laws and hospitality toward others as members of a kin, but also others as strangers.

According to Irigaray, unveiling the meaning of Antigone is not an easy task in our culture.3 It is a task requiring from us a descent into entirely different modes of our intersubjective thinking as we inhabited them from our predecessors. Clearly, this also is an intercultural task, since Western man cannot find the way by himself. Irigaray’s awakening through Yoga testifies to this. And there are only few contemporary philosophers that are sensitive to this task in its entirety. We would dare to (in this sense) only add Jean-Luc Nancy (perhaps Agamben) to Irigaray. Now, at the very beginning of his Being Singular Plural, Nancy cites Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Like me, guide the virtue that has flown away back to the earth—yes, back to the body and life: so that it may give the earth its meaning, a human meaning! … Let your spirit and your virtue serve the meaning of the earth. … Human being and human earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered.4

Nancy is right in his diagnosis: this earth—now at this moment—“is anything but sharing community of humanity.”5 There is no compassion on this earth, no sense of an être-à-plusiers, as he states. Moreover, in his Corpus, first by enumerating the atrocities committed in the last century against the humanity, Nancy—by reflecting the jurisdiction of bodies—rightly observes that we’d need a corpus, namely “the areality of corpses: of bodies indeed, including the dead body.”6 What Nancy is aiming at is to delineate spaces, places, topics, perhaps new grounds for bodies, being able to go beyond mere “dialectical respiration from the ‘same’ to the ‘other.’ ”7 Here we can already sense another justice, coming from this sense (or sensitivity) for the bodies and their places. But we will stop here and return to Antigone.

What kind of love and justice is then revealed to us in this play of Sophocles? Authors of an excellent study on Antigone—namely, Max Statkievicz and Valerie Reed, state that Antigone is “ ‘the turning point in the ethical thinking of our time’ and ‘an embodiment of the ethical value of the community,’ ”8 in a sense of Agamben’s coming community (communità che viene). Is it not that out of the Hegelian claim on the collision between two equally valid claims (Creon versus Antigone) there comes our uncertainty regarding justice: “familial love, the holy, the inward, intimate feelings—hence known also as the law of the nether gods—collides with the right of the state.”9 To be able, then, to view justice or Gerechtigkeit not as one-sided, but as an integral ethical law, we have to admit the inner logic of this collision. But this is impossible. Antigone’s faith and her radical ethical care for the other, the brother-as-corpse, is deeper than any one-sided view as proposed by Hegel, Lacan, Butler, Žižek, or many others. Antigone’s ethics is best understood when confronted with Heidegger’s and Irigaray’s ontologies on one side, and Levinas’s and Derrida’s views of justice on the other. These are all thinkers, being in the close vicinity of an ancient Greek and Indian (Presocratic: as Heidegger and Irigaray with her relation to pre-Vedic cults and sources and Yoga) or divine (as in Levinas and Derrida) justice: this is the realm of divine law and agrapta nomima.10

According to Rémi Brague, we can understand the divinity of Greek law only beginning with Sophocles. For Brague, these divine laws (and accompanying justice, of course) are so old that “they really did not appear, since they are so obvious, that there is no beginning in them”11 (qu’elles n’ont pas de point d’émergence). For the double setting of an ethical archeology and ethical anatomy12—or relation between morality (with justice) and ethical gestures toward the other in her body, the other in pain, and equally the deceased and dead bodies—this simple but pregnant observation by Brague is indeed of key importance. Agrapta nomima can only be inscribed in our hearts and our bodies. We all are the inheritors of this sacred message, being inaugurated by Antigone’s act and—as we shall see later—having also important intercultural consequences. Divine laws and our bodies as sacred stelas, furthermore, the logic of a sacrificial body, the body as a tabernacle (M. Douglas);13 this also is an inauguration of a plane where Derrida and Levinas meet with their interventions into the very logic of justice. In this tradition (Ancient Near East and Old Testament), washing the body—a living body—is “an enactment that replicates atonement for restoring the sanctity of the tabernacle.”14 The same holds for Antigone’s now ancient Greek ancestral care for Polyneices’s corpse: it is an act, necessary in order to regain the lost cosmic order, to remove, or to wash out the impurity brought into this world by Creon’s political act. This is why there is no antagonism between two different ethical worlds (according to Hegel and his followers, eine sittliche Macht gegen die andere) in Antigone: her act rests in divine law and divine justice; it is an act inscribed in the feminine body and as such it is an-archic. In the body as a microcosm a “shared background knowledge”15 is stored. According to Levinas, these ancient rights of the other person, and their justice, are apriori: they have an ineluctable authority and demand from us an inexhaustible responsibility, one compared to Antigone’s claim.16 Phenomenologically, they lead us toward radical proximity in intersubjectivity, toward the event of meeting, goodness, and peace.

In the pre-Homeric Greek world, the guardians of these ancient cosmic laws were Erinyes (and along them Gaia, Hades, Persephone/Demeter, Kore, etc.). In the pre-Vedic, and later in the Vedic world, this place had been secured by deities from the Proto-Shakta-Tantric cults on one side, and later from the Adityas—Varuna, Mitra, and Aryaman—on the other. But let us hold off for a moment with the intercultural aspects and first reflect upon the world of pre-Homeric deities and Irigaray’s interpretation of the tragedy. According to Walter F. Otto,17 pre-Homeric and pre-Olympic deities of the ancient chthonic religion testify for the close proximity of the Greek (wo)man to the elements of nature. These elements appear philosophically in the world of both pre-Socratic and Upanishadic philosophers, but later they reappear only in Schelling, Feuerbach, Heidegger (via Hölderlin), Irigaray, and Caputo. Caputo, for example, pleads for greater respect for intuitions, based on the ancient mythic elements, forgotten all the way in our philosophies and theologies, and in our view of justice—human and divine. Invoking Irigaray, Caputo mentions “sun and eye, air and breath, wind and spirit, sea and life, rock and god”; we may add, for the sake of our reading of Antigone—earth and the netherworld.18 Now, to return to the Greek world: it seems that Antigone is a guardian of this sacred cosmic order, as represented within this elemental world. Otto mentions in this sense ancient laws, or, better, ancient justice, as an interruption into this world. The gods that belong to the Earth, argues Otto, all belong to the principles of femininity (perhaps matriarchy)19 and stand against the later masculine orders of the Olympic gods. This ancient earthly order is a place where also Antigone’s act is rooted. This is a magical world: with the corpse of Polyneices lying there on the earth, unburied as prey for dogs, and any corpse or living dead (Agamben) in our world not being cared for, or being deserted, betrayed, forgotten, the sacred equilibrium of the cosmic order is broken. This intrusion of an injustice into the cosmic order means that sexual and generational orders, and of course also natural orders of fertility (food, grain), are unsettled and broken. The basic principles of a life are endangered, including death as its part. Twins (as Indian Yama and Yami), brothers and sisters, sharing the same womb, as in the case of Antigone and Polyneices; mother and child … This now is not yet a world of morality (or, not any more), nor any form of “justice”; we may add that it is this cosmic order that is the meaning of apriori in the above-mentioned Levinasian sense, including the phenomenological consequences.

But before we approach Irigaray’s understanding of Antigone, we need to delineate the tragic paradox of Sophocles as understood by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel positions Antigone in the spiritual world of the pagan (Greek, therefore not yet Christian) morality in which the family (as represented by Antigone) and the polis (as represented by Creon) are mutually exclu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude: The Matrix of Love / Ettingerian Matrixial Web
• Part I: Cosmology / Theology of Love
• Part II: Philosophy / Ontology of Love
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Cover