TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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an “ontological” discovery, a shift from ignorance to knowledge about the real conditions of one’s own existence and activity, and especially about the very relationship between êthos or identity and action. On this account of tragic anagnôrisis, to be sure, recognition may indeed take place through the discovery of something about one’s own or someone else’s “identity,” at least in the ordinary sense that we have in mind when we say that Oedipus discovered the identity of his father’s killer. But what differentiates this account of recognition from the contemporary normative discourse of recognition (and from recognition as Antigone and Creon pursued it) is that this sort of recognition does not satisfyingly consolidate and strengthen a practical identity, or an identity in the thick sense we have been using here—that is, a coherent set of commitments and values that enable an agent to know what to do. To the contrary, tragic recognition comes after action, exposing the limits of practical identity, and shattering without yet reconstituting the coherence of the identificatory scheme with which the agent has tried to govern his activity. Tragic recognition, we might say, is the acknowledgment of finitude under the weight of a (failed) effort to become sovereign through the recognition of identity. This understanding of tragic anagnôrisis is borne out by the text of the Antigone, for while the Antigone’s struggles for recognition do indeed fail, the play nevertheless contains moments of “successful” (though unhappy) recognition in this second sense. The Antigone’s tragic recognitions are not satisfying recognitions of authentic identities; instead, they are mournful acknowledgments of human finitude, prompted by first-hand experience with the risks and dangers that accompany the pursuit of satisfaction through recognition. We might at first expect such moments of tragic recognition to consist in straightforward acknowledgments of guilt, as for instance when Creon, frightened by Teiresias’s prophecies, accepts the chorus’s counsel and rushes off to bury Polyneices and free Antigone. But if Creon’s reversal of his decision were 31
the paradigmatic recognition scene in the Antigone, we would look in vain for a corresponding moment of recognition involving Antigone herself. The only parallel episode comes near the end of Antigone’s self-lament, and is more equivocal than Creon’s plain reversal: “Should the gods think that this [i.e., her punishment] is righteousness, in suffering I’ll see my error clear,” she says. “But if it is the others who are wrong, I wish them no greater punishment than mine” (926–29). To say that she confesses her guilt here would be to overstate the case, for she only professes uncertainty about whether the gods will find her righteous or culpable. 89 Yet to suppose on these grounds that only Creon experiences a moment of recognition is both to overlook something important about Antigone’s words and to misunderstand what this moment of tragic recognition involves. In the first place, we must be careful to avoid a false choice between an Antigone who straightforwardly confesses her guilt and an Antigone who remains as resolute as ever to the end. In fact, both are untrue to the text. Both Antigone’s self- lament and her admission of the possibility that the gods will judge her guilty represent real transformations of Antigone’s earlier rigidity. In her opening speeches, Antigone had defiantly welcomed the prospect of death (70–72), but now she mourns her fate, and in so doing, explicitly acknowledges that her act has deprived her of the very goods she pursued, including philia and motherhood (878–81, 918). And, in fact, by acknowledging that the question of the real significance of her act is out of her hands and rests instead with the gods, Antigone expresses a more sophisticated recognition of human finitude, of the gap between identity and action, than a simple avowal of guilt would have indicated. After all, even after Creon changes his tune, he is no more master of his fate than he had been earlier; in fact, his worst suffering is still to come. Creon’s real moment of recognition comes after the deaths of his son and wife. As he laments his fate and prays for a quick death, Creon’s own words reflect his belated awareness not of his 32
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 and 30: causal order of the world, the will
Page 31: This is not altogether wrong, but i
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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