Feminist Readings of Antigone

Fanny Soderback

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438432809
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Feminist Readings of Antigone collects the most interesting and provocative feminist work on the figure of Antigone, in particular looking at how she can figure into contemporary debates on the role of women in society. Contributors focus on female subjectivity and sexuality, feminist ethics and politics, questions of race and gender, psychoanalytic theory, kinship, embodiment, and tensions between the private and the public. This collection seeks to explore and spark debate about why Antigone has become such an important figure for feminist thinkers of our time, what we can learn from her, whether a feminist politics turning to this ancient heroine can be progressive or is bound to idealize the past, and why Antigone keeps entering the stage in times of political crisis and struggle in all corners of the world. Fanny Söderbäck has gathered classic work in this field alongside newly written pieces by some of the most important voices in contemporary feminist philosophy. The volume includes essays by Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Tina Chanter, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.

Part I

Between Past and Future

Feminist Politics in the Private and Public Realms

1


After Antigone

Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought

Catherine A. Holland

“The task of the theoretical imagination,” as Sheldon Wolin wrote nearly thirty years ago, “is to restate new possibilities.”¹ Wolin's formulation is especially apt for the concerns that prompt this chapter because it captures the sense in which political theorists revisit the thought of former eras and seemingly distant problems, only to turn that thought and those problems toward more current affairs. Such an activity is not without its complications, of course. As Wolin also observed, whenever we mine past texts as resources for evaluating contemporary concerns, the danger is that the “persistent and contemporaneous influence” of those texts can limit our political vision and thus narrow our political horizons, a danger that the past will overfill the present, shrinking rather than expanding the space of political possibility.²

The ambiguity of past texts, their ability both to enable and to foreclose political vision, is of particular concern to feminist political theorists, who are committed at minimum to the belief that women matter politically because within the Western theoretical tradition the figure of Woman appears not to open up political possibility, but on the contrary to preclude it. This is especially true in the modern tradition, where women hold the paradoxical place of representing both the necessary condition of politics and its prepolitical, even antipolitical, other.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing up until the present day, Antigone has served as the theoretical stage for reflection on a variety of conflicts and ambivalences seen as endemic to the modern condition: between the old and the new, family and state, conviction and obedience, sentiment and reason, women and men. And ironically enough, feminists have turned to Antigone in their efforts to engage and contest the marginal place assigned to women in the Western political tradition as an occasion to reflect on both the perils and the promise of trying to speak as feminists from within a tradition that does not easily accommodate feminist thought.

This chapter examines three readings of Antigone by feminist political theorists Jean Bethke Elshtain, Mary Dietz, and Linda Zerilli, each of whom sees in Antigone's acts a model for very different kinds of feminist politics. Interpreting Antigone as, in turn, the representative of an antiauthoritarian social feminism, a radical democracy with a feminist face, and a feminism of irreducible discursive otherness, their debate dramatizes both the generative power of Sophocles’ tragedy and the rich and multivalent nature of feminist political speech. However, in deploying Antigone as the model for contemporary feminist politics, an archetypal figure from the distant past who can be transported into the present as the enabling ground of feminism, I argue that all three readings ultimately normalize the past, attenuating our distance from it by overlooking the profound degree to which Antigone is, in fact, unlike us. And Antigone's difference from us, her very strangeness to our present, is, on my reading, of greatest critical value to feminist thinkers of today.

This emphasis on Antigone's difference from us is what allows me to raise a series of questions about the symbolic significance of the past within contemporary feminist political theory. To what extent is feminist political thought dependent on securing an ontological ground from which we may speak? How might the project of identifying that ground in the past limit and constrain feminist political vision at least as much as it enables it? Finally, how can feminist political theorists “restate new possibilities” without reinstating the past? The remainder of the chapter seeks to answer these questions by reading Antigone in yet another way. Central to my reinterpretation of the play are two linked claims. First, the significance of Antigone's actions should be read against the place that her city, Thebes, occupied in Athenian tragedy. Thebes’ role as the symbolic other of Athens throws new light on the nature of Antigone's dispute with Creon, and it also clarifies what is at stake in that dispute. Second, precisely because of the way in which Antigone speaks—without authority, in the vernacular of her city—her words and actions have the effect of opening up the space of the political in Thebes. I argue that it is to Antigone's “unwomanly” acts that contemporary feminist thinkers might turn in their own attempts to articulate a specifically feminist political vision.

Three Feminisms, Three Antigones, Three Pasts

Jean Bethke Elshtain opened the feminist debate about the meaning of Antigone for contemporary feminism in 1982, hoping to “advance a note of caution” against the feminist embrace of the state as exemplified by the National Organization of Women's initiative to have women included in the military draft.³ The allure of inclusion, she suggests, is itself the consequence of an ancient defeat, namely, of the usurpation of power from “older, less universal forms of authority” like the family that value women as full “participant[s] in social life” (55). To embrace the public order without simultaneously contesting its terms, Elshtain insists, is to ignore the ancient wisdom of Antigone, “the woman who [threw] sand into the machinery of arrogant public power” (55). Antigone's defiance of her king marks a final, fatal attempt to defend the prerogatives of family and household against the “imperious demands and overweening claims of state power [that] run roughshod over deeply rooted values” (56). For Elshtain, Antigone chronicles the “final suppression of traditional female social worlds” (46); and in her view, a feminism that pursues assimilation not only bolsters state power but also violates a “primordial family morality” that “precedes and overrides the laws of the state” (53).

The task Elshtain proposes for modern feminists is “to see ourselves as Antigone's daughters” (59), as “maternal thinkers” (58–59) who reject amoral statecraft by working to preserve “the arena of the social world where life is nurtured and protected from day to day” (55). She counsels contemporary feminists to heed Antigone's challenge to her sister, Ismene: “And now you can prove what you are: A true sister, or a traitor to your family” (53). For Elshtain, Antigone's actions exemplify a social feminist defiance of the “impersonal, abstract, and rational standards” of statesmen, a feminism that tempers and chastens arrogant state power by humanizing and repersonalizing social life (51). Drawing on a tradition of activism that runs from Jane Addams through the Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Elshtain urges feminists to “break out of the rigidities into which current feminist discourse has fallen” (57), and to act in public on behalf of the concerns of household and family, of “human good and civic necessity.”⁴

While Elshtain shows how the perspectives engendered by the concerns of the private sphere may be marshaled by feminists to campaign for limits on the power of the state, Mary Dietz questions the wisdom of Elshtain's renegotiation of the public-private divide. In failing to recognize the primacy of the political, Dietz argues, Elshtain ends up reinforcing and gendering an already exaggerated and “abstract split between the public and private realms.”⁵ Dietz shares Elshtain's criticism of the hierarchy and depersonalized bureaucracy of a centralized state that has exchanged participation for administrative efficiency. However for Dietz, politics, not the family, is “primary to all other human activities, be they public or private” (27); feminists who reject the public realm to embrace the family forget that it is an engaged citizenry that “collectively and perpetually determine[s] the forever shifting boundaries of what is private and public” (28). Elshtain's designation of the household as the privileged space of feminist action misses, indeed, dismisses the very venue of public politics that, Dietz argues, holds out the promise of feminist freedom and women's equality. In doing so, Elshtain inadvertently reduces politics to the activity of the state and thus reconfines women within the family and the household, idealizing those spaces as locations of women's power only by ignoring the myriad inegalitarian relationships that have historically prevailed within them. Oppressive political institutions such as the administrative state, Dietz insists, are best challenged not by “the language of love and compassion, but only [by] the language of freedom and equality” (34).

It follows, then, that Dietz's interpretation of Antigone sees in the heroine's actions a model for a more public and participatory “citizenship with a feminist face” (as in the title of her essay). In Dietz's reading, Creon has launched a concerted assault on Thebes’ ancient democratic order, and Antigone acts not so much to defend the prerogatives of the family as to preserve “the customs and traditions of a collective civil life” (28–29). Read this way, Antigone “emerges not simply as a ‘sister’ whose familial loyalties pit her against a King, but as a citizen of Thebes whose defense of her brother is rooted in a devotion to the gods and to the ways and laws of her city” (29). The challenge, therefore, for contemporary feminists is to politicize rather than maternalize women's consciousness, and for Dietz this means that feminism must be guided by overtly public commitments.

The seemingly irremediable opposition between Elshtain's social feminism and Dietz's “citizenship with a feminist face,” Linda Zerilli maintains in her own contribution to the debate, is not so much a split within feminism as it is a function of Elshtain's and Dietz's too ready adoption of the existing vocabulary of political thought. For Zerilli, their undertaking is an object lesson in the risks involved with feminist attempts to speak from within an established canon that forces them to “translate … the foreign, dissonant voice of Antigone into the more familiar, reassuring voice of mothers and/or citizens.”⁶ Both positions represent what Zerilli calls “counterfeit utterances” (257), problematic for their overdetermination in or by the discourse of the “political theory fathers” and thus for their bland inability to transmit the “more radical tones of feminist discourse” (258). Elshtain's turn to family and household, Zerilli maintains, embraces rather than challenges a patriarchal vision of female domesticity, and in the name of social feminism it contents itself with a mere shadow of the power women once held. Dietz's devotion to an Aristotelian language of civic friendship requires her to subsume all concern for the specificity of the feminine within sexual difference in order to argue for a model of citizenship that can be at best only occasionally and incidentally feminist. In the end, neither Elshtain's maternalist social feminism nor Dietz's finally sexually undifferentiated model of civic friendship manages to escape from the received categories of the Western theoretical tradition.

How, then, can feminists speak simultaneously within and against the traditions in which they work? What alternative modes of speaking does the tradition offer those who seek not to maintain it but to transform it? Such questions, Zerilli suggests, may be partially answered by rereading Sophocles’ tragedy in yet another way. Drawing heavily on the work of Luce Irigaray, Zerilli reads the conflict between Antigone and Creon as “more tragic, more mutually exclusive” (256) than either Elshtain or Dietz can allow because Antigone preserves and deploys the last vestiges of a prepatriarchal past. Her actions memorialize an ancient matricide, a matricide most powerfully depicted by Aeschylus in his Oresteia trilogy. For Zerilli, the tale of the murder of Clytemnestra by her son, Orestes, recounts the final suppression of a matrilineal world, once secured by the “visible bond of blood,” by an emerging patriarchy that reorganizes “family and state … around the invisible: the legal fiction of paternity” (256). In light of the events of the Oresteia, Zerilli concludes, Antigone's “discourse is not only criminal but suicidal in a political city which recognizes only the masculine voice” (256).

Central to Zerilli's argument is the conviction that while the language of the fathers of political theory obscures and suppresses its roots in this ancient matricide, it can never finally extinguish the violent terms of its own founding. Insofar as feminist political thinkers must speak in the terms made available by a tradition of discourse, they can never speak simply within those terms because feminist speech maintains other commitments. For Zerilli, feminists speak specifically as feminists only insofar as their speech, like that of Antigone, remembers and memorializes their “material beginnings in the original home of the mother” (262). Zerilli suggests a variety of discursive strategies that maintain this complex relation to a lost past: from the use of masks that demonstrate and exploit the ambiguities of political speech; to a mimesis that converts the terms of female subordination into feminist affirmation; and, finally, an evocative and provocative heteroglossia by which feminist speech resonates with multiple levels and strategies of meaning. Feminist politics thus conceived would both bring to light the original injury women have suffered at the hands of patriarchal power and demand redress through the revaluation of a once-suppressed feminine symbolic.

Although I agree with Zerilli that feminists “cannot reclaim but must transform a political conversation that inscribes their absence” (270) and that the positions promoted by Elshtain and Dietz fall too easily into the received categories of the Western canon, there is a sense in which Zerilli's project also moves in a reclamationist rather than a transformative direction. And it does so, curiously enough, in ways not so very different from Elshtain and Dietz. Without minimizing the substantial differences among them, I want to suggest that a common critical strategy nonetheless runs throughout their readings: In distinct ways and to different degrees, each identifies in Antigone's actions the remnant of a lost past, a past that may serve as the ontological ground of feminist politics and thus inform and invigorate contemporary feminist practice. In each case, what is valued in Antigone's action is its ability to help us recall an almost prelapsarian moment of resistance unsullied by statist, antidemocratic, or patriarchal power. Put differently, Antigone's stance is understood to contain and command a prior moment, a past that feminist action in the present might to some degree reinstate. For these three feminists, the act of reading becomes an attempt to recapture what has been lost with Antigone in the past, and to return it to us in the present as a feminist politics. For Elshtain, Antigone draws on a “primordial family morality [that] precedes and overrides the laws of the state” in ways that contemporary feminists, too, may take up as “an affirmation of the dignity of the human person,” and a reminder that “public policy has an impact on real human beings” (53, 59). For Dietz, the polis (not the family) has been eclipsed, and here Antigone represents and defends the “customs and traditions of a collective civil life” (53). Accordingly, Dietz urges modern feminists to look to a tradition of civic friendship “for a model of the kind of bond we might expect from, or hope to nurture in, democratic citizens” (32).⁷ Finally, for Zerilli, Antigone “refuses to forget … a repressed matricide which haunts the terms of discourse in Creon's patrilineal and patriarchal state” (256), and Zerilli invites contemporary thinkers to reconsider their vocation “from the position of the woman who speaks but who refuses to forget or deny her material origins in the house” (254).

Of course, these three thinkers are not unique in taking recourse to an imagined past because such a device is a frequent strategy of radical feminism as well as a whole variety of nationalism.⁸ However, while feminists have long debated the character of some prepatriarchal, pretyrannical past, little attention has been devoted to examining the consequences of such a strategy for feminist vision, for our ability, that is, to act to reshape the present and the future in explicitly feminist terms. This strategic reinstatement of the past does not serve feminism well because it overcommits feminists to a backward-looking and reclamationist rather than a transformative imagination. In their various attempts to resurrect Antigone as a model for contemporary feminism, neither Elshtain, nor Dietz, nor even Zerilli allow her disruptive course of action to remain disruptive. On the contrary, each discovers in Antigone's acts a register of order that echoes the past, and each embraces that past as a counterprinciple of order, seeking to reinstate it as the ground of a feminist politics that might redeem our present.

The allure of ancient texts for contemporary thinkers is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, their untimeliness, their capacity for “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”⁹ The figure of Antigone is a powerful one because it provides contemporary feminists with a set of possibilities now foreclosed, a language of politics no longer in use, although importantly, not yet completely forgotten. Yet, however much this strategy of mining the past for critical resources enables Elshtain, Dietz, and Zerilli to think outside the limits of the present, I am concerned that they do so in ways that unnecessarily—and paradoxically—normalize the past, eliding what is mos...

Table of contents

• Series Page
• Introduction: Why Antigone Today?
• Prologue: Nomadic Antigone
• I. Between Past and Future …
• II. Incestuous Desire …
• Bibliography
• Contributors