TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

At first glance, the Antigone doesn’t seem to contain anything like the archetypal
“recognition scenes” of Greek literature: Odysseus gradually revealing himself after returning to
Ithaca in disguise; Oedipus discovering that he himself is the murderer whose identity he has
sworn to discover; Electra finding traces of and finally recognizing Orestes at Agamemnon’s
tomb. 16 Yet even without telltale scars and familiar locks of hair, the Antigone is full of
recognitions. The conflict with which the play begins is essentially a controversy about how to
recognize Polyneices; moreover, that controversy involves two adversaries who ground their
actions in confident claims about who Polyneices is, and also, as we shall see, in claims about
their own identities. In this way, the opening of the Antigone models the theoretical
underpinnings of the contemporary politics of recognition: the antagonists attempt to ground
their own actions in their knowledge of identities, and, on the basis of these properly cognized
identities, to secure respect from others. 17
The question of recognition first arises with respect to the dead Polyneices, whose body
is the principal object of controversy in the Antigone. The idea of a conflict over the burial of
bodies was probably not original with Sophocles. Attic funeral orators often recalled the story of
Thebes’ refusal to allow the burial of the corpses of the invading Argive army, which supposedly
provoked a heroic Athenian expedition to recover the bodies. 18 But these were simple, self-
congratulatory stories of Athenian virtue in the face of sheer impiety, and not the stuff of deep
ethical conflict. 19 Sophocles’ version of the story focuses our attention on problems of identity
and recognition by zeroing in on the disparate treatment of Eteocles and Polyneices. 20 The case
of Polyneices and Eteocles is distinctive, because the question of how to deal with Polyneices’
body seems to hangs on who he is—and he can be recognized under two incompatible
descriptions, each of which highlights one aspect of his relationship to Eteocles. On the one
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