TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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distinctions and oppositions that it remains tied to that from which it seeks to distinguish itself. The practical possibilities and ways of being we disavow in the course of ordering ourselves into the bearers of coherent “identities” do not, simply by virtue of that disavowal, cease to bear on what we do: hence Antigone’s action takes on political significance at the very moment that she attempts to fix its meaning firmly within the sphere of kinship. Antigone’s and Creon’s blindness to parts of the meanings of their acts is no accident; it is a structural ignorance, imposed by the nature of identification itself. It is the distinctive form of misrecognition (Aristotle might have called it a hamartia) that afflicts the pursuit of recognition. 83 * * * We are now in a position to return to the theme of tragic anagnôrisis. Aristotle first defines the concept in chapter 11 of the Poetics, in the course of elaborating the nature and components of the tragic plot: “A recognition is, as the very word implies, a change from ignorance [agnoias] to knowledge [gnosin], and thus to either love or hate, in the personages marked for good or evil fortune.” 84 Aristotle proceeds (both in this chapter and later) to list some examples of recognition, including the recognition of Odysseus by his scar (1454b25–8); Electra’s recognition of Orestes by “reasoning” in Aeschylus’s Choephori (1455a4–6); and Oedipus’s recognition that he himself is his father’s killer (1452a32–3). It is tempting to conclude on the basis of these examples that “recognition” in the Poetics has the same sense that it did in the preceding account of the Antigone as a “struggle for recognition” (and hence the same sense that it has in the contemporary normative discourse of recognition). After all, the examples all seem to suggest that recognition is the recognition of an identity, either one’s own or another’s. 85 29
This is not altogether wrong, but it is misleading. A somewhat different view emerges if we situate the concept of recognition within Aristotle’s larger account of the structure of tragedy, and tie it back to the account of êthos and action we have been developing. 86 First, it is important to acknowledge that for Aristotle, recognition is closely linked to another component of what he calls “complex” tragic plots, peripeteia or “reversal”; indeed, Aristotle says that the “finest form” of recognition is that accompanied by reversal (1452a32–33). And reversal, in turn, is a particular form of change (metabolê) in the fortune or circumstances of an actor; specifically, it is a change that takes place through a relatively abrupt shift in the apparent trajectory of the action. 87 The presence of such abrupt shifts or reversals in the action, in turn, can be understood as Aristotle’s way of spelling out what it means for the events that make up a tragic plot to occur “unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another” (para tên doxan di’ allêla, 1452a4), which is a feature that he says characterizes the most effective tragic plots. 88 And this, finally, bring us back to êthos and action, for it is precisely the gap between who we are and what we do—what Halliwell calls the “disparity between the knowledge or intentions of the dramatic characters and the underlying nature of their actions”—that drives this sort of plot, thick with surprise but not merely accidental. Aristotle’s original claim about the order of priority of action and êthos, and our parallel understanding of the impropriety of action with respect to identity, thus turn out to be intimately connected to recognition: action’s impropriety is the one of the central occasions for tragic anagnôrisis. This way of situating recognition suggests a different account of its meaning. If the priority of action over êthos and identity is the occasion for reversal and thus for recognition, then perhaps we can understand recognition’s “shift from ignorance to knowledge” not only as the discovery of someone’s true identity, but also and more fundamentally as what I would call 30
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 and 14: Creon’s first speech sharply cont
Page 15 and 16: What happens when Antigone and Creo
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: causal order of the world, the will
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

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