TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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hand, Polyneices is a native of Thebes, a member of the ruling family, the brother of Antigone and Ismene, and the nephew of Creon himself—all relations that throw his affiliation with Eteocles into relief. Under this description, Polyneices unquestionably ought to be buried, for it was not only a right but an obligation to give the proper funeral rites to one’s kin. 21 On the other hand, Polyneices is a traitor who has just raised an army against Thebes out of jealousy and vindictiveness toward his brother. 22 This perspective makes the difference between Polyneices and Eteocles more salient than the fact of their affiliation, and demands that they be treated differently in death. 23 Here, then, as in the contemporary politics of recognition, cognition and respect are brought together in a distinctive constellation. The distribution of respect is supposed to be grounded in knowledge of identity; thus, the disagreement about whether Polyneices is a kinsman or a traitor engenders a further conflict about whether he ought to be granted a funeral, or left to rot. Indeed, the theme of burial illustrates the close relationship between these two components of recognition—cognition and respect—with exceptional clarity. Funeral rites are an expression of respect: they affirm the membership of the deceased in a cross-generational community, and they create monuments to the dead that help to preserve traces of this community within the world of the living. Moreover, funeral rites confer honor and affirmation precisely through the articulation of the identity of the deceased. The spontaneous lament, the public funeral oration and the carefully composed elegy all recollect the dead person’s character and actions, and the epitaph carved on the funeral monument helps to “secure a degree of personal immortality” for the deceased by delivering at least his name, and sometimes a record of his deeds and virtues, to posterity. 24 In burial, as in the contemporary politics of recognition, the public visibility of identity becomes an instrument for securing respect. 7
Yet the Antigone’s struggle is not only about recognizing and respecting Polyneices. Although his death is the immediate occasion for the conflict between Antigone and Creon, the significance of their confrontation quickly widens, for both ground their obligations toward the corpse not only in their descriptions of Polyneices but also in accounts of their own identities. If we attend again to the significance of the themes of burial and lament in the Antigone, it should come as no surprise that the identities of Antigone and Creon are drawn into the controversy over Polyneices, for funeral ritual is at least as much about the living as about the dead. As psychological studies of mourning emphasize, the same rites of burial and lament that serve to memorialize the dead also help to reconstitute the agency of the mourner in the face of loss. 25 The linguistic and physical artifacts produced as a part of funeral ritual—laments, eulogies, grave markers—cannot really replace the lost person. 26 But in the production of such artifacts, and through participation in the symbolic systems that govern funeral procedure, mourners try to reconstruct the agency that the intrusive facticity of death had seemed to undermine. 27 Of course, that agency is never experienced immediately and abstractly, but only by occupying particular roles and identities in the social world; and since the roles and identities through which different people experience agency may make incompatible demands in a single case, an instance of mourning can quickly become the occasion for broader social conflict. In this way, the struggle over Polyneices turns into a struggle for recognition between Antigone and Creon, as they try unsuccessfully to compel each other to acknowledge not just some facets of Polyneices’ identity, but the legitimacy of their own identities—of the locations in the ethical world from which Antigone and Creon try to address the personal and civic losses Polyneices’ body represents. Antigone and Creon introduce themselves, and articulate the identities in which they ground their acts, in the first two episodes of the play: Antigone’s exchange with Ismene, and 8
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: At first glance, the Antigone doesn
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 and 32: This is not altogether wrong, but i
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

TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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