TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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possibility of his political authority as such. In response, Creon’s gendering of the polis becomes more explicit, insistent, even hysterical: he repeats in different ways and to various people that he will never let himself be conquered, ruled, defeated by a woman. 39 In one remarkable passage Creon ties together his renunciation of the ties of kinship as grounds of philia and the preservation of his own masculinity: I am no man and she the man instead if she can have this conquest without pain. She is my sister’s [adelphês] child, but were she child of closer kin than any at my hearth, she and her sister should not so escape their death and doom (484–89). These, then, are Antigone’s and Creon’s representations of their own identities (and Polyneices’) which they deploy in their efforts to guide their own actions and to influence or control the actions of others. Their confident self-descriptions fit well with the common view that Antigone represents the family, the chthonian, and the female, while Creon represents the city, the human, and the male. 40 Yet by focusing on what Antigone and Creon properly represent, we would ignore the movement and action of the play. For when Antigone and Creon try to fulfill or enact their identities in their deeds, they find that their actions do not flow smoothly from their identities: as we shall see, they commit what I shall call “improprieties” with respect to the identities they claim to bear, and these improprieties place them at odds with their own deepest commitments. The fact that Antigone and Creon’s deeds cannot easily be reconciled with (what they take to be) their identities is not evidence of a failure in Sophocles’ characterization; rather, it is a comment about the nature of identity, and about the limits of our capacity to deploy identity to predict and govern the meanings and consequences of our actions. 3. The improprieties of action. 13
What happens when Antigone and Creon attempt to ground their actions in their identities? Consider Antigone first. Her action exceeds and frustrates her identifications in two related ways: first, Antigone does more than she intends. Antigone frames her action as an expression of the pious devotion of sister to brother, and she underscores this identification through her refusal of the vocabulary of politics. Whenever Antigone is confronted with a claim about the city, she replies exclusively in the vocabulary of the family, refusing the possibility of any distinction between her brothers, even one more attenuated than Creon’s. As Martha Nussbaum puts it, “if one listened only to Antigone, one would not know that a war had taken place or that anything called ‘city’ was ever in danger.” 41 Despite her refusal of the vocabulary of politics, however, her expression of family piety turns out also to be an act of political subversion. However, Antigone does not merely turn out to have done more than she had intended, for her act places her into conflict not only with what she disavows but also with her own deepest commitments. Antigone’s relationship with Ismene is a telling example of this second kind of impropriety. Although Antigone is willing to suffer death out of loyalty to a blood- relative, in the pursuit of her goal she behaves toward her sister—her adelphê, born of the same womb just like Polyneices—with cold, vindictive hostility. When Ismene tries to warn Antigone that it is foolish to pursue her goal against the irresistible force of the polis, Antigone responds: “If that’s your saying, I shall hate you first, and next the dead will hate you in all justice” (93–94). And when Ismene shows her belated support for her sister by falsely declaring to Creon that she had been an accessory to the deed, Antigone declines the offer of solidarity, insisting that she “cannot love a friend whose love is words” (543)—and this comes mere 14
Page 1 and 2: TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDEN
Page 3 and 4: Of course, the tradition of dramati
Page 5 and 6: one with itself by virtue of its tr
Page 7 and 8: At first glance, the Antigone doesn
Page 9 and 10: Yet the Antigone’s struggle is no
Page 11 and 12: commanders but also to Polyneices,
Page 13: Creon’s first speech sharply cont
Page 17 and 18: (844). Given the function of the la
Page 19 and 20: Worse still, Creon’s acts, like A
Page 21 and 22: preceding events; she leaves the ro
Page 23 and 24: not in the agency-enhancing recogni
Page 25 and 26: those relating to thought or intell
Page 27 and 28: argument that is consistent with, t
Page 29 and 30: causal order of the world, the will
Page 31 and 32: This is not altogether wrong, but i
Page 33 and 34: the paradigmatic recognition scene
Page 35 and 36: 6. This ambivalence is registered i
Page 37 and 38: 19. See for instance Lysias 2.7-10
Page 39 and 40: thus either to love [philian] or ha
Page 41 and 42: etween (and therefore the inseparab
Page 43 and 44: 61. This use of Aristotle’s Poeti
Page 45 and 46: arbitrary, see Marion Smiley, Moral

TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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