Occupy Antigone

At that time – as he was writing the Lehrstücke– the thinking of Walter Benjamin, in particular as developed in his essay " Critique of Violence", from 1921, and his book on the Trauerspiel, the German mourning play, from 1928, as well as their close personal contacts were no doubt of great importance. When working on his production of Antigonein 1948, after the Second World War, trying to answer the question what Antigone "can do for us", Brecht’s adaptation of the "Ode to Man" was, I believe, carried out with the hope (or perhaps even conviction) that the monstrosity of human actions can be controlled by the awareness that man has transformed himself into his own enemy, becoming monstrous ( ungeheuer) to himself. 4. Closing reflections In closing, I want to return for a brief look at the documentation of Brecht’s Antigoneproduction, in the Antigonemodell 1948, drawing attention to the short scene as the "Ode to Man" chorus ends, just before the entrance of Antigone together with the guard who claims he caught her while she was trying to bury her brother Polyneices. According to the explanatory text on page 30 in the first edition of Antigonemodell 1948(published in 1949) we can see on the Berlau photos the guard at the edge ( Bankin German) "belting her with the board", while the chorus goes on to say that "it stands before me now like God’s temptation" – in German Götterversuchung– that "I should know and yet shall say / This is not the child, Antigone / O unhappy girl of the unhappy / Father Oedipus”. 1 It seems to me that this can on the one hand be interpreted to mean that Antigone should not be considered as her own enemy. But at the same time – in the following lines – the chorus asks us to consider where Antigone’s disobedience to the state may lead her. This is when she makes her full entry in order to confront the accusations against her, while she is carrying or ’wearing’ something that looks like a door on her back while her hands are shackled through two holes in this board (fig. 2). Fig. 2 Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone(1948) in Chur, Switzerland. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Theaterdoku 318/283, © R. Berlau/Hoffmann. In Neher’s drawing of Antigone for the production she is tied with both head and hands to a board that looks like a pillory or the stocks used for punishment and public humiliation during the Middle Ages that is in front of her. In the performance this board has become much larger and Antigone wears it as a cross, on her back as her hands can be seen in the two holes in the board when seen from behind, like in the photo. When seen from the front in other photos, however, it looks as if her hands are tied behind her back. Antigone is literally wearing the entrance to the house that will never be hers on her back as a sign of her suffering, metaphorically on her way to the cave of death, signifying Golgotha. This is at the same time also a transformation of the door from the first scene through which she has seen her dead brother hanging on the pole that is his cross. It is the same door through which the SS officer has made his entry asking if they know him, pointing at him through the open door with an ecce homogesture. And it is interesting to note that in the photo of the Vorspiel(fig. 1) there is also a board covering the window which has been left lying diagonally on the right. Maybe this is the board which Antigone is wearing as she goes to meet her death in the cave. The door that Antigone is forced to wear on her back after the “The Ode to Man” chorus in Brecht’s production is that liminal space between the security of her home – her Heimat– and the dangers of the outside world. As opposed to Heidegger’s desire to domesticate that outside world, appropriating it by making it homely through violence, Brecht, in the ensuing argument between Creon and Antigone introduces a detailed discussion relating to what in German is a Heimat, which does not appear in Hölderlin’s translation, nor in the original text. Instead, in Brecht’s adaptation, Creon accuses Antigone for slandering the homeland ("schmäh nur die Heimat”) and Antigone answers by defending herself.2 I begin by quoting Antigone’s speech in German: Falsch ist’s. Erde ist Mühsal. Heimat ist nicht nur Erde, noch Haus nur. Nicht, wo einer Schweiß vergoß Nicht das Haus, das hilflos dem Feuer entgegensieht Nicht, wo er den Nacken gebeugt, nicht das heißt er Heimat.3 In Constantine’s translation this passage is translated as: Wrong there. The earth is travail. The homeland is not just Earth, nor the house. Not where a man poured his sweat Not the house that helplessly watches the coming of fire Not where he bowed his neck, he does not call that the homeland.4 In Brecht’s subsequent theatre production, Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder, now in Berlin, in 1949, the house with a door has become a wagon moving through the war, ending after Courage, also famously played by Helene Weigel, has lost all her three children, drawing the carriage into total darkness (fig. 3). In the opening scene – at least in the film-version of this production5 – Courage is seated comfortably on the wagon beside Kattrin while her two sons (instead of horses) are drawing the carriage, singing the song with the following refrain: The spring is come. Christian, revive! The snowdrifts melt. The dead lie dead. And if by chance you’re still alive It’s time to rise and shake a leg.6 Fig. 3 Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder(1949) in Berlin. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Hill 044/045, Hainer Hill. In the final scene of Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder– as the photo clearly shows – she is both carrying a house (on her back), while she holds the cross – the two poles to which the horses are usually harnessed – under her reclining body. With the rope from the carriage (her house) and the weight of the cross under her, the final scene of the performance shows Mutter Courage on her final steps to some form of redemption. Even if the Chur performance was not a success, in terms of the reactions of the spectators and the critics, because it was only performed five times, it needs our attention. At the same time as it is unclear if Brecht and Neher had found the way to make "the play to do something for" audiences of their own time, it paved the way for the much more successful production, which changed the course of modern theatre, about Mutter Courage who has lost her three children in the Thirty Years’ War. It is a play that ends with the burial of a young woman, her daughter, who had proven her courage by trying to prevent further bloodshed, and was killed by it, not by military heroism or stealing the money of the Finish Regiment, as her brothers had been. Kattrin had been the true hero of the war. But Brecht’s Antigoneproduction also needs our attention today as researchers, because of the unique form of documentation, in the form of the first complete Modellbuchit gave rise to (from which the Berlau photos of the production have been reproduced here). It was followed by similar publication projects of the productions of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder(published in 1958), of Aufbau einer Rolle(also published in 1958) where the 1947 Laughton production as well as the 1957 Berliner Ensemble production of Das Leben des Galilei, as well as several other such projects, based on photographs, introductory texts as well as explanatory notes. This documentation project, which I have not dealt at all with in this article, still needs to be more fully investigated, as it gives us important insights into the work of Brecht and his many collaborators during the last years of his life as well as its theoretical and ideological basis.7 "A model", Brecht wrote in his introduction to the Antigonemodell 1948, cannot depend on cadences whose charm is due to particular voices or on gestures and movements whose beauty springs from particular physical characteristics: that sort of thing cannot serve as a model, for it is not exemplary as much as unparalleled. If something is to be usefully copied, it must first be shown. What is actually achieved when the model is put to use can then be a mixture of the exemplary and the unparalleled.8 This "mixture of the exemplary and the unparalleled" – the Beispielhaftenand the Beispiellosenin Brecht’s German – is not only something that the theatre can achieve by learning from and developing its own creative resources, but also what the theatre is about when the characters called Antigone and Creon enter the stage, just two years after the end of the Second World War, and this entrance is no doubt still relevant for us today. Occupying Scenes of Thinking: The Case of Antigone Kati Röttger (University of Amsterdam) Nothing could be worse for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt. One has to knowwho is buried where – and it is necessary(to know – to make certain) that, in what remains of him, remains there. […] The spirit of the spirit is work […], a certain power of transformation. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 9. Sophocles’ Antigone– more than any other tragedy – plays a crucial role in philosophy from the early nineteenth century on. Since the tragic plot of Sophocles’ Antigone‘organizes the scene’ of the speculative dialectics that Hegel developed in Phenomenology of Spirit,1 it resonates in the thinking of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Butler, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou, Stiegler – to name only a few. In other words: Antigoneis haunting philosophy in the long run, generating a genealogy that is based on what I would call a specific and sometimes tragic kinship between theatre and philosophy that is based on poiesis, as I will argue with Heidegger later on. To explore this kinship more extensively, I will outline two scenes in which an encounter between philosophers occurs, both occupied by Antigoneas a specific work of poiesis. I will respectively arrange these scenes as a special type of dialogue. The first dialogue happens between Hölderlin and Hegel and the second between Heidegger and Derrida. My aim in doing so is twofold. Firstly, I will interrogate the relationship between what I call philosophical thinking and theatrical thinking.2 This interrogation is informed by Heidegger’s claim that thinking “is at bottom still a poiesis”.3 What is it in Antigone,the tragedy, that makes it so paradigmatic for philosophy? To answer this question, I will, secondly, start from the presumption that the relationship between theatrical thinking and philosophical thinking in Antigoneis closely connected to the question of law. While this question of law keeps surfacing throughout the history of the Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigoneexposes it in a specific tragic way. This applies in the first instance to the tragic plot. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, feels obliged to bury her brother Polyneices, regardless of Creon’s law. Antigone is convinced she acts justly, expounding the superiority of divine law over the law made by man. In the history of philosophy, this tragic conflict was often interpreted as unfolding between private/individual law and public/state law, causing a deep crisis for the governmental order. Antigone was therefore regarded as a representative of the family in collision with the state (Hegel), as a figure that absolves of the sphere of law and orders that govern the access to speech and speakability (Lacan), or as an allegory of politics that points to the limits of kinship and representation (Butler). But whichever way Antigoneis interpreted, the point that I want to make is that law does not only define the subject of the tragedy but also its composition. This leads to the question to which extendthe tragedy of law relates to the law of tragedy (the poetic norms of composition) and how this relation connects philosophy to the dramaturgy of tragedy. In general terms, the consideration of the strong connection between antique tragedy and the institution of procedural law is no new idea. Walter Benjamin, for example, referred to Jacob Burckhardt when he stated in his seminal study on the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspielsthat: “Athletic contests, law, and tragedy constitute the great agonal trinity of Greek life – in his Griechische KulturgeschichteJacob Burckhardt refers to the agonas a scheme – and they are bound together under the sign of this contract”.4 According to Benjamin, transcending the regular perimeters of this agon, together with transcending the procedural trail of opposed factions by the Dionysian power of the living speech, created the ultimate affinity between trial and tragedy in Athens. The hero’s word, on those isolated occasions when it breaks through the rigid amour of the self, becomes a cry of protest. Tragedy is assimilated in this image of the trial; here too a process of conciliation [ Sühneverhandlung] takes place. So is it that in Sophocles and Euripides the heroes learn; not to speak … only to debate.5 Like the trial in antiquity, dialogue is the medium of the debate, “because it is based on the twin roles of prosecutor and accused, without official procedure. It has its chorus”.6 While Benjamin traces here a cautious line between trial, living speech and tragedy in antiquity, hinting to the similarity of the dramatic form of dialogue and choir in both procedures, Christoph Menke, in a recent study, makes the connections between tragedy and law more explicit. He relies on Benjamin’s notion of fateful violence of the law worked out in Critique on Violenceto trace the specific tragic experience of law.7 Benjamin makes clear to which extend the violence ( Gewalt) of the law means a humiliation and violation of justice. According to Menke this is a paradox in law expressed in the relationship between vengeance and law. Vengeance creates an equal relationship, because the revenging act always reacts on a previous revenging act. The justice of revenge is thus a never ending repetition of bloody violence. Law, on the contrary, means the instalment of a juridical-procedural order of justice that interrupts the bloody circle of vengeance. Tragedy starts exactly at that point where the transition from vengeance to law creates a difference in the order of justice. With Benjamin this difference might be called the mythical and violent foundation of law in the Greek world, because it exposes the paradox of law asbeing violent. Menke is elucidating his point with Oresteiaand Oedipus the King. In both tragedies, the installed juridical-procedural order puts an end to the endless repetition of revenge, establishing judgment. Judgment entails a recognition that two parties are involved, or on the scene. This recognition creates a new form of justice. It is grounded in the acceptation of the equality of the citizens through the instalment of a juridical-procedural order that takes into account the interests of both parties. In the Oresteiait is Athena who establishes a trial as a legal procedure against Orestes, who is punished by it. In Oedipus the King, Oedipus, in his double role of governor and accused, judges himself and executes self-punishment. But it is the very principle (the law) of tragedy to bring forth the law as a form of justice ( Gerechtigkeitsform) that is, in its essence, a form of violence.8 The tragic in tragedy happens at the turning point or reversal (peripety)9 that defines the tragic conflict without a just solution that applies to all. The legal break withfateful violence means at the same time a legal peripety, a transformation intoanother violence that is the violence buried inside the law. To conclude with, we can state that tragedy and law are closely linked in subject andform. While tragedy can be described as a genre of the law, and therefore the form of representation ( Darstellungsform) of law, the law is in turn inscribed in the justice of tragedy. To put it more precisely: law is not just the formof justice ( Gerechtigkeitsform) of tragedy, but also – and even more so – the form of justice that is brought forth by tragedy as inherentlytragic,10 namely in the situation in which the condemned produces violence. This specific interrelation between the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law will lead in the course of my argument to the following question: how does this specific connection between law and tragedy help us to understand the interrelatedness between philosophical and theatrical thinking apparent in the case of Antigone? The plot yet bears some evidence. Antigone certainly executes justice with her demand to bury her brother. But with her deed she refuses to accept the king’s law. In doing so, she incorporates myth and therefore the order of revenge: to do what has to be done.11 Antigone is literally doing what she says: “I say that I did it and I do not deny it”.12 Therefore, she is punished by the law of Creon and sentenced to be buried alive. Confronted with this, she takes responsibility and decides to end her own life. She executes self-punishment. But does she execute the procedural law, like Oedipus did? The problem is that this tragedy neither knows a third position that recognizes the two parties, nor does Antigone act in the double role of governor and accused like her father Oedipus. She is accused by the governmental law of Creon, and therefore declared guilty. In spite of acting according to the mythical realm, she does not carry out an act of revenge; she does not repeat the bloody circle of killing to create justice. On the contrary, she goes for another kind of justice, out of philia. She cares for the work of mourning that has to be done by making certain that what remains of her brother, remains there, buried. So what is the tragic plot here? Antigone breaks with the violence of the law and she breaks with the violence of revenge. This is why she has to execute herself.13 Antigone incorporates the mythical order of the legal break withfateful violence andthe violence of law at the same time. She tends towards another form of law. Following Hölderlin, it can be called a modern form that opens up a space for the work of mourning, as I will explain in a more detailed way later in this article. It encompasses a transformation that happens on a threshold where an old order loses ground while a new one is not yet fully created: a time out of joint. And this might be the reason for Antigone’s prominent inscription in the philosophy of history. Consequently, it can be interpreted as an instruction of that historical-philosophical consideration of the law, which Walter Benjamin summarized in the sentence: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history”.14 Therefore, it might be no coincidence that Antigoneprominently appears in those historical moments of transition or rupture when a demand for a different law is imminent, which claims to bring with it another form of (legal) justice. In the following, I will pick up two historical moments when Antigoneinfiltrated scenes of philosophical thinking, as mentioned at the beginning. One of these moments coincided with the genesis of a philosophy of history in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was the moment when Hegel conducted the construction of speculative dialectics after the model of tragedy, and most prominently after Antigone. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, he had dramatized the experience and exposition of abstract thought according to the law of tragedy, to implement a law executed by the spirit. Hegel’s counterpart in this scene is Hölderlin, who shared his speculative adventure, but who pleaded for a transgression and deconstruction of the law of tragedy. The second scene is located two hundred years later, after 1989. It stages Jacques Derrida who reacts to the “totalitarian terror” of the twentieth century.15 In Specters of Marx, he locates his project of deconstruction at this historical moment, because the eschatological themes of the ‘end of history’ […] were […] our daily bread. It […] was, on the other hand and indissociably, what we had known or what some of us for quite a time no longer hid from concerning totalitarian terror in all Eastern countries […] Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed.16 I will argue that next to the spectre of Marx and the spectre of Hamlet’s father, the spectre of Antigone plays a crucial role in this project of deconstruction. It is haunted by Heidegger’s comment on Antigone,which was part of his lectures on the Introduction to Metaphysicsin 1935. More precisely, I propose to stage a spectral dia-loguenot only between Derrida and Heidegger, and between Hamlet and Antigone, but, foremost, between the spectres of Hamlet’s father and Oedipus’ daughter/sister Antigone. I will demonstrate in the following to which extend this spectral dialogue might help to transgresswhat I call the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law. While Hegel still encloses Antigone in her tomb and while Heidegger invites us to listen to the voice of tragic poiesis, Derrida opens the tomb for the return of the dead Antigone. While Heidegger still runs the risk to enclose justice in the laws of tragedy, Derrida tries to give justice a chance through the deconstruction of the tragedy of law. In short, I propose with Derrida a transgression that embraces hauntology instead of ontology,17 following up Heidegger’s Philo-Logics of Listening. 1. Dialogues performed by ‘thinkers’: a question of dramaturgy? What does Antigonecontribute to an understanding of the connection between theatrical and philosophical thinking? According to Jean-Luc Nancy, there is a remarkable kinship between theatre and philosophy that is founded on dialogue.1 Since the beginning of its history with the Platonic dialogue, it constitutes a certain relation. It is a relatedness that is brought forth between people and between humans and gods. Yet, the difference between philosophy and tragedy appears in two different ways to manifestthat relatedness. Plato’s philosophy sets logosas dialogue, because insight and knowledge have to be gained by a dialogical activity that departs from logos and arrives at logos. Tragedy’s dialogue is informed by myth. Myth is the name that is given by Aristotle to plot.2 It is mediated by the spoken word and directed towards listeners. While Platonic dialogue claims progression to allow the argument to develop, myth does not have any progressive dimension. Taken as a story of origination or origin, myth tells what has already happened and arrives there where we are now. It does not tell anything new, it tells what is given. It tells a story whose end is given from the beginning on. It is especially striking that Nancy at this point explicitly mentions Antigoneas the most exemplary tragedy.3 Taken as a story of kinship, the conflict in this tragedy is indeed already given from the beginning, because Antigone and her brother Polyneices are children andsiblings of Oedipus. As this oedipal conflict of backward genealogy lies at its origin, the tragedy cannot have any progressive dimension. It is telling a story whose development is given in the same origin, and therefore also in Antigone herself. Consequently, Antigone, who is incorporating myth, is doing what she says(“I say that I did it and I do not deny it”). Embodying her saying in her acting, she is acting out poiesis. Platonic dialogue, on the contrary, is considered to be the starting point of a long, progressive history of speculative philosophy, especially in the history of Hegelian philosophy, locating the dia-logue in the realm of noein. Therefore, the Presocratic origin of the kinship between the notions of noeinand poiesisbecame no longer accessible.4 Nancy is not the only one who situates Antigonein an exemplary way right at the threshold where the form of dialogue splits into two directions: philosophy and tragedy, logos and myth, thinking and poetizing. As we will see later in this article, Heidegger chooses Antigoneto explore his considerations on the divorce of philosophy and tragedy as well, to overcome this split. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on his part is asking: “what has tragedy to do with the birth of speculative thinking and Onto-Logic?”5 We have now arrived at the first scene. 2. First scene: Hegel and Hölderlin. Theory of dramaturgy and dramaturgy of theory In his comprehensive critical study on Antigone, George Steiner dedicates a short passage to the encounter between Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling in the theological seminar in Tübingen between 1789 and 1793.1 They shared a passion for Sophocles and especially for Antigone.For Hölderlin, this tragedy was the most Greek one and incorporated therefore the very essence of tragedy, “the strongest of all poetical forms”.2 For Hegel, it was the most consummate form of art human effort had ever brought forth.3 In addition, they recognized in that play, amid the devastating terror following the French Revolution, the violent and unresolved conflict between private and public law that was at stake at that time. Following Steiner, Antigoneknitted a close tie between the three friends, but it was also the starting point for a keen polemics. That applied especially to Hegel and Hölderlin. Only one year after the publication of Hölderlin’s Anmerkungen zur Antigone(1804), Hegel on his part wrote the crucial pages of his Phenomenology of Spiritdedicated to Antigoneand these, from then on, deeply influenced the whole modern interpretation of tragedy until at least Heidegger. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hegel’s intention then was not just to correctHölderlin’s analysis,4 it was also of a dramaturgical order: Hegel resisted Hölderlin’s dramaturgical approach to antique tragedy to defend the dominance of philosophy. While the tragic form and plot of Antigoneorganized the theoretical scene of Hegel’s phenomenology,5 Hölderlin took Antigoneas a point of departure to develop a modern theory of tragedy. How should this be understood? Let us follow Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument further. Hegel adapted antique drama as a model for philosophy, Hölderlin combined both dramaturgy and philosophy. In a close “dialogue with Sophocles”, Hölderlin theorized tragedy on the one hand and experimented with translations of tragedies on the other hand.6 In doing so, he opened up a way towards a specific theory and practice of modern tragedy that goes beyond the concept of antiquity. Hegel’s Antigoneinterpretation, on the contrary, conjures up the antique concept of tragedy. Antigoneresonates in his Phenomenology of Spirit,because Hegel is adapting the conflict between the political law of the state and the private law of kinship to speculative thinking. He is creating a dialectical scene that is structured by the dissymmetrical opposition between the law of the particular and the law of the general; an opposition that entails a whole series of further pairs of oppositions, like divine law and human law, family and state, man and woman, life and death, all antithetically arranged according to the plot of the tragedy. This conflict, consequently, is translated into a dialectical procedure that leads to an abstraction in the realm of ideas: this abstraction is moral justice,more precisely: moral justice as a concept. The formal law of tragedy (aspects of conflict, crisis, peripety, and catharsis) thus illustrates the dynamics of collision and synthetical dissolution Hegel’s dialectics stands for. But more than this, Hegel offers a solution to the conflict through sublation, a good end (that is the end of history) to achieve higher conciliation. ‘Good infinity’ means the dissolution of the historical collision in the concept of spirit, thus in philosophy! According to Lacoue-Labarthe, this dissolution is identical with the “philosophical exploitation of the Aristotelian concept of catharsis” – in the name of idealism.7 While Hegel adapted Antigoneto foresee the course of history through philosophy, the opposite was true for Hölderlin.8 The latter conceived the uniqueness, the Greekness of tragedy as a work ( organon) that is not identically repeatable and not transferable, neither to the realm of ideas, neither to his actual time. This was the reason for him to think that antique tragedy was only able to survive by a transformation into a modern tragedy, and modern meant for him: different, resistant, a disorganized model of tragedy,9 a tragedy out of joint. The way to do so was for Hölderlin the work of translationas a disarticulation of tragedy. Hölderlin introduced the notion of caesura to define this means of disarticulation. With caesura he meant those parts in tragedy that resist the totality of its form. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hölderlin’s modern approach to a theory of tragedy results from a dramaturgical interest in deconstruction. For Hölderlin “modern tragedy only exists in the form of deconstructionof antique tragedy. Similarly a theory of the tragic and tragedy was only possible in the deconstruction of classical poetics and her speculative reinterpretation”.10 This form of deconstruction has to be understood as an adaption of the violence of tragic catastrophe. Hölderlin proposed to comply with the law of tragedy only so far as the catastrophe of its original meaning would be turned into the catastrophe of occupancy or appropriation ( Aneignung) through the dramaturgical processing. The catastrophic transgression of the classical form of tragedy creates at the same time “the paradox of the dramaturge”.11 The clue of Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s dramaturgical intervention is that this catastrophe of occupancy occurs in terms of mimesis, and notcatharsis like in Hegel’s view. And here it is important to know that mimesis in English inclusively means occupancy or appropriation. Dramaturgical processing is understood thus as a mimetic act of translation asthe catastrophe of translating the catastrophic plot of tragedy into modernity. In that sense, the dramaturgical process comes close to the work of mourning ( Trauerarbeit), a notion that recalls Trauerspiel. In dramaturgical terms, it results in the need to “de-organize [tragedy], to de-systematize it, to get it out of joint”, concludes Lacoue-Labarthe.12 Hölderlin had proposed a way to occupy Antigonethat leads through logosto poiesiesthat is a combined ergon(work) and algos(pain).13 This turn to poiesiesdeliberately haunts Heidegger’s thinking and hence, Derrida’s. Therefore, Hölderlin is the forerunner of the next scene of encounter that is occupied by Antigone. It is a scene defined by dramaturgy in the literal sense of the word: namely in the combination of the words drama(to act) and ergon(work), meaning ‘to bring drama to work’. Bringing drama to work involves, as we will see, a transgression of the law of tragedy, and with this also of the tragedy of law, towards a work of mourning. It is a work of mourning, as I will demonstrate, that turns out to be a crucial concern for justice, in Derrida’s Specters of Marx. But to understand this, we first need to understand how Heidegger’s Antigonecomment, and especially his translation of diké(justice) with the German term Fug(fitting, joint) as well as his understanding of logosas listening, has influenced Derrida’s project of deconstruction, which achieves a performative approach to Antigone. 3. Second scene: Heidegger and Derrida. The transgression of the law of tragedy and the tragedy of law through the gift of justice Heidegger’s Antigonecomment is part of his lectures on the Introduction to Metaphysicsthat he held in 1935 in Freiburg. In these lectures, Heidegger develops the rehabilitation of poiesisfor the matter of thinking in great detail. His retrieval of an original Presocratic concept of poiesisfurnished 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 workof art. This question is motivated by the “attack” against the dominance of the dividebetween 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 logosas 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 phusisprevented a deeper understanding of poiesis”.4 Heidegger calls on two Presocratic thinkers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, claiming that the originof 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 connectsto phusisas an eventof Being. One might ask now: why is Antigoneso 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 wastragedy, “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 humanbeing in its interrelation with noein, phusis, poiesisand 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, Antigoneeven performs “the authentic Greekdefinition of humanity”.8 To prove this, he invites to listento 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 Antigonein his endeavour to overcome the divide between Being and thinking through the work of art. While deinonis the central topicalnotion in Antigonethat he uses to prove his argument, logosis the central poeticalnotion. I will begin with the latter one. It is certainly no coincidence that Heidegger invites us to listento the choralode, because Heidegger brings the fundamental meaning of logostogether with the act of listening. Heidegger asks: “What do logosand legeinmean, if they do not mean thinking?” To answer, he goes back to the etymology of the term that includes various meanings: Logosmeans the word, discourse (speech), and legeinmeans 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 logosis 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 logosdirectly to the notion of phusisas emerging sway, because logosand 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 logosas 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 logoscertainly 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 logosis and therefore follows (and does not define) the gatheredness of Beings themselves. So, because human beings are not able to grasp this kind of logosand therefore “are absently present; in the midst of the things […] and yet away”, defining humanity has to be a question, a questioningof 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 logosand phusis, but also between noeinand 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 noeinas listening and apprehension ( Vernehmung) as a specific humanquality. 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 standin the Being of the beings”.16 To bring Daseinto 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 Antigonedealing 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 logosrefers 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 deinonhas 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 stasimonin English, next to a classical English translation: Heidegger’s translation:Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing uncannierthan 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 Classicstranslation:Many the forms of life, Fearfuland strangeto see.But man supremestands 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 Unheimlicheresragend 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 stasimonthat 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 andthe 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 deinonin 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 deinonmost precisely. It is exactly what the human being sets out in struggle ( polemos). It is a struggle, at the same time, between technéand diké. It defines the essence of the tragic conflict that the human being confronts and that is at stake in Antigone. How are technéand dikérelated? Heidegger links technédirectly to doing violence, while he links dikéto the overwhelming. According to Heidegger, technémeans more than skills: it means knowing; dikésignifies more than justice and also means Fug.27 Correspondingly, he translates dikéin Antigonewith the same word. In German, Fugcontains 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 Deinoncomprises dikéand technéas a reciprocal over-against. This over-against isinsofar as “the uncanniest, namely human being, happens. Insofar as humanity unfolds in history[my emphasis, KR]”.29 Unfolding in history needs technéto break out against diké, which at the same time has technéto its disposal. At this point, art comes in. For techné(knowledge) is closely connected to art: “The Greeks call […] art technéin 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 asBeing. 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 shatteredby 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 logosand noein– through techné(art) – are always an act of violence againstthe overwhelming ( phusis), but at the same time always and only forit. In fact, the human being is therefore torn between Fugand 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-Seincannot achieve complete mastery, because its violence shatters against one thing: death. It has to be asked how Heidegger’s interpretation of Antigonerelates 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 andas 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 logosas logicsand on poiesisas poeticsreduced to formalized laws, pleading instead for the transgression of the law by a poetic thinking that translates logosinto 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 logosand poetics. But does this inclusively lead to a transgression of the tragedy of law? Here, Derrida has to be brought in dia loguewith Heidegger. Derrida’s interest in Antigoneis mainly known through his interpretation in GLAS, which is clearly dedicated to the deconstruction of the Hegelian Antigoneinterpretation. 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 Antigoneand 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 Antigonethat Derrida carries out in his later works, especially in Specters of Marxand Politics of Friendship,echoing Heidegger’s Antigonecomment.32 While Hegel’s announcement of her death had to ring inthe absolute end of history in the name of the spirit, Derrida opens in Specters of Marxthe 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 itselfin the course of history, be it a history of theatre or of politics between Oedipus Rexand 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 Antigonemeans ‘diké’. Derrida directs the following question to Heidegger: what if one translates dikéstill 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 Antigonefor 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 possibilityof justice is playedout 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 thinkingof 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 phusisas event: mimesis = occupancy = event ( Aneignung= Ereignung= Ereignis). According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger ignored the event of mimesiswhen he placed the work of art in the midst of the agonbetween dikéand techné, in order to reveal phusis. If one had at least listened to Aristotle, who claimed that mimesis is able to do what phusisis not: “to bring into work”.44 This – I would say – can happen in the workof drama that performs the thinking of dramaturgy as a work of mourning. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.Читать дальше