TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

part of a treatise articulating guidelines to be followed by practitioners of the craft of poetry,
from which modern readers might also glean some insight about how to interpret works of
literature. 57 Yet in the course of elaborating this claim about the priority of action and plot to
character, Aristotle moves, momentarily, into a different register:
Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of
happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action;
the end for which we live is a kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us
qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.
In a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the characters; they
include the characters for the sake of the action (1450a16–22, emphasis added). 58
Aristotle’s claims in the emphasized sentences refer not only to the representation of
action and character on the stage, but to action and character simpliciter. 59 As Martha Nussbaum
has suggested in an important discussion of the relationship between the Poetics and Aristotle’s
ethics, these passages suggest that for Aristotle, tragic drama’s formal characteristics are not
merely formal, but reflect and illuminate features of the wider world. 60 Following this lead, I now
turn to Aristotle’s Poetics in order to work out, in greater detail, the nature and sources of the
“improprieties” that characterize Antigone’s and Creon’s actions, as well as to illuminate the
specific meaning of tragic anagnôrisis or recognition. 61 As I have suggested, Sophocles’ text
implies a critique of the assumptions about the relationship of action to identity that informed
Antigone’s and Creon’s practical postures (and which are more explicitly articulated in the
contemporary normative discourse of recognition). Aristotle’s claim that action has a kind of
priority over character, I claim, can be read as a philosophical distillation of that critique.
Moreover, tying Aristotle’s claims about action and character to his discussion of anagnôrisis
later in the Poetics (and also back to the Antigone) will help show that tragic anagnôrisis consists
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