TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

6. This ambivalence is registered in Aristotle’s definition of anagnôrisis, which he says is a
“change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, in the personages marked
for good or evil fortune” (Poet. 1452a29–32). It is also nicely reflected in Jocasta’s next-to-last
words to Oedipus, “May you never know who you are!” (Soph. Oed. Tyr. 1068). Our tendency
to regard recognition as an unequivocal good makes it impossible to grasp this exclamation as an
expression of concern and goodwill, as it seems to be.
7. For analogous uses of “ontological” see Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The
Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
and the discussion of “ontopolitical interpretation” in Connolly, “Nothing is Fundamental,”
chap. 1 in The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
8. In Aristotle’s terms, tragedy is an “imitation of an action”: Poet. 1450a16.
9. Cf. J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 56.
10. Both Axel Honneth (The Fragmented World of the Social [Albany: SUNY Press, 1995], 250)
and Taylor (“The Politics of Recognition,” 26) say that misrecognition can “cripple” its victims.
For the unmediated connection between identity and agency, see Avishai Margalit and Moshe
Halbertal, “Liberalism and the Right to Culture,” Social Research 61, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 491–510;
498); for the mediated connection, see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory
of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), chap. 5 (though I believe Kymlicka is pushed
further toward Margalit’s and Halbertal’s position than he acknowledges in his effort to justify
not only a right to culture in general but a right to “one’s own” culture: since what the latter idea
adds is the notion of cultures as plural and to at least some degree mutually exclusive, it demands
a shift in focus away from the choices culture contains (which it might well share with others)
and toward the options it excludes (which are what marks it off as unique).
11. Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982).
12. Of course, not only the Poetics is implicated here: the Nicomachean Ethics (especially the
discussion of virtue, misfortune, and eudaimonia in book 1, ch. 10); the Metaphysics (esp. book
9); and the Politics are also all important, as are (for me) Arendt’s uses of some of these
Aristotelian texts in her account of action in The Human Condition, I intend to expand the
discussion of these other texts in a future version of this paper.
13. Parenthetical citations to the Antigone refer to line numbers, and unless otherwise noted,
quotations from the play follow Elizabeth Wyckoff’s translation, in the first edition (only) of
David Grene and Richard Lattimore, eds., The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. II, Sophocles
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
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