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This essay assesses the influence of recent scholarship in classics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory on the reception of Sophocles's Antigone, and suggests that the fields of dramatic criticism, theatre history, and performance studies offer promising resources for future work on Antigone.
Antigone Studies is a field with a distinguished history, and one that is flourishing again thanks to the emergence of a new community of voices. Interest in Antigone extends far beyond the discipline of classics, inhabiting political thought and feminist literature, German Romanticism and its legacies, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory and performance.1 Hegel's reading is, of course, the most influential: in the Phenomenology of Spirit, he uses Sophocles's play to dramatize the transition from one ethical order to another, from the "natural ethical community" (268) of the family to the "community, the superior law whose validity is openly apparent" (272). Antigone also turns up in Thomas de Quincey's celebration of the "Holy Heathen" heroine (315); in Matthew Arnold's infamous verdict that a drama about dying to bury a brother "is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest" (12); and in Virginia Woolf 's completely antithetical impulse: "Antigone could be transformed [. . .] into Mrs. Pankhurst, who broke a window and was imprisoned in Holloway" (302). Attention to Antigone has long formed an undercurrent to academe's Oedipal obsession, but we can credit the appearance of Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death with this century's resurgence of interest.2 Butler assesses anthropological discourses of kinship to posit a performative interpretation of Antigone's gesture of mourning, and to advance a queer critique of the presumptions of psychoanalysis regarding the family in the symbolic order. Redefining Antigone, not as a representative of any particular sphere (household, state), but as a figure for relational identities in crisis, Butler asks, "which social arrangements can be recognized as legitimate love, and which human losses can be explicitly grieved as real and consequential loss?" (24). Her reading shows how the prohibition on Antigone's mourning parallels a situation that "those with publicly ungrievable losses-from AIDS, for instance-know too well" (24).
Since the publication of Antigone's Claim, the political implications of kinship and mourning have animated inquiry on Antigone, but recent work...