Binding Violence

Literary Visions of Political Origins

Moira Fradinger

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780804763301
• eBook ISBN: 9780804774659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake.

The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. Fradinger takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times.

PART I

Sophocles’ Antigone or The Invention of Politics: We the City

What shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

—C. P. Cavafy, Alexandria/Greece, 1904

The dead die only when they’ve been forgotten.

—Kóstas Ouránis, Athens 1915

How was the reason of Greece able to bear the contradictions of its tragedy? And substitute, for a moment there—while also thinking of the fear and pity Aristotle speaks of, for instance—“passion” for “reason.”

—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe¹

In the Greece of the fifth century it was tragedy [. . .] that was the democratic institution par excellence.

—Pierre Vidal-Naquet²

Antigone and the Polis

“Do you not realize that the evils of our enemies [ekhthrôn] are coming upon our own people [philous]?”Antigone asks her sister when Ismene first appears on stage (l.10).¹ It is a question she will raise for her spectators and readers for centuries to come. “What worse evil is yet to follow upon evils?” (l. 1282) Creon asks at the end of the play, realizing that his attempt to solve the Theban crisis has only brought “death upon death” (l. 1292). Antigone’s concern hinges upon an embodiment of enmity: she warns that the evils that belong to enemies, or evils that might be wished upon the enemies, are now affecting her own. But Antigone’s words refer not to the foreign invader or enemy in war—polemios. Her words refer to the enemy who previously had been a friend and now is transformed into an enemy within the city—ekhthros.² Might the inquiry into how, why, and by whom this transformation was carried out illuminate not only Creon’s bewilderment but also the mysterious insistence with which this tragedy—and the genre of tragedy—resurfaces time and again and across the globe in modern times? Might we find in that inquiry the tragedy of “an evil” of politics?

Antigone warns Ismene of the “evils” introduced into the city precisely at the moment of its reconstruction. The play’s opening is a drama of bloody political beginnings, framed by the anxiety of civic fragmentation. The war between Thebes and Argos has ended, and the devastated city needs a new order. Antigone’s warring brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, have killed each other in hand-to-hand combat. Their uncle Creon’s first act as the new king is to lessen fears of civic fragmentation with a decree that Polynices be left unburied, as a punishment for having attacked the city, and that Eteocles be buried with all honors for having defended it. The decree threatens with death anyone who dares defy it, and a sequence of deaths ensues. After she decides to bury Polynices, Antigone is condemned to be entombed alive. She hangs from a noose fashioned from her veil. Antigone’s betrothed, Haemon, kills himself at the site of his beloved’s death when he fails to kill his father, Creon. Creon’s wife, Eurydice, commits suicide after hearing the news of her son’s death. The play ends as Creon’s “breathing corpse” (l. 1169) is heard singing unintelligibly.

“Death upon death” paves the roads of Thebes as it plods from one war into another. Although both wars are fratricidal in nature, they differ in one respect: the first war, only remembered on stage, happens outside the city and kills a foreign army; the second one instead belongs in the city and kills members of its own community. At the center of the two wars is one individual, an insider throughout, who first leads the foreign army against the city and is then reintroduced as a “traitor” to Thebes by Creon’s decree. The war has always been an internal conflict: while Polynices’ appeal for help from a foreign army takes the war between brothers outside the gates of Thebes, Creon’s undoing of Polynices’ funeral rite brings the war back home. Polynices, the mythical bearer of the apparent problem in question—equal power between brothers—will be killed twice: his already dead body is symbolically “rekilled” (Tiresias’ words, l. 1030) by Creon’s edict. Not even Creon’s last-minute repentance and attempt to perform Polynices’ funeral rites will undo the deadly contamination. The denial of funeral rites that opens the drama is a repeated scene: it links Polynices and Antigone to the laws of the new city, and symbolically, Creon to the siblings. On the one hand, Antigone, whose spirit “perished long since” (l. 560), will be sent to “dwell not among the living, not among the dead” (l. 850) but to remain unburied in a cave. No character can redress this second denial of burial, which will leave the corpse of Sophocles’ Antigone free to contaminate twenty-five hundred years of Western literary and political imagination. On the other hand, the one who has denied burial, Creon, sees himself as having been killed more than once. After hearing that both his son and his wife are dead, he addresses Hades: “[Y]ou have killed a dead man over again” (l. 1285). Creon’s undoing and redoing of funeral rituals have removed death from the sphere of the oikos (home) to place it at the center of his political reconstruction of the city.

Was Creon’s political use of Polynices’ corpse the “evil” that Antigone was referring to? Why would the transgression of a culturally sanctioned form of burial have such dangerous consequences? What could the lack of burial have meant in Athens, where disposal of corpses changed often over time, reflecting social, political, and structural changes? Was it about the history of Athens’s denials of specific burials, such as that of Themistocles? Or was it about defining the city’s dead and alive?³

The play’s obsession with funeral rites does not, I suggest, just concern Creon’s rule or transgression of rites. It exposes the problem of the city’s imaginary origins, of the first political conflict proper in an autonomous polis—namely, an impossible, though inevitable, struggle over the identity of the city’s dead and, by extension, of its living members. Burial is a passage connecting and limiting the inside and outside of life and, as such, of a community. But how can a community decide peacefully (or contractually, as modernity would express it) on the limits that establish its inside and outside? Is this decision democratically possible? Can we read Creon’s “killing twice”—that is, not just the violence of domination but also the violence of extermination—as a symptom of an unbearable anxiety over the problem of membership?

My questions stem from reading the genre of tragedy as one of the symbolic operations that enabled fifth-century Athenians to represent for themselves the contradictions inherent in the transition from an ancient, nondemocratic regime to their new, revolutionary, democratic invention. Putting Antigone in dialogue with the internal dynamics of the ancient Greek political space shifts the focus away from modern criticism of the tragedy, which is still inflected by the Hegelian program for tragedy as a conflict between two equally ethical systems of law (the prepolitical and the political).⁴ Critics debate which system of law each character represents and whether the opposition between them can be resolved. The answers to these modern concerns lie in the five series of dichotomies that were best summarized by George Steiner as “the dialectics of intimacy and exposure, of the ‘housed’ and the most public” (Antigones: 11):⁵ family and state, young and old, death and life, woman and man, singular and universal, and divine and human laws. Unceasingly, critics encourage us to associate Antigone with “family, the young, the dead, women, singularity and divine law.”⁶

I follow here Karl Reinhardt’s now classic suspicion (in his lectures at Oxford in 1933) that all these oppositions probably say more about nineteenth-century German drama than they do about Greek drama.⁷ Put otherwise, if Aristotle thought that tragedy purged the audience of the emotions aroused by the play, modern criticism purges (perhaps even purifies) the tragedy of the Athenians.⁸ Antigone becomes indeed like Heraclitus’ Delphic oracle, which “neither speaks nor conceals”—to some extent this could be said of the entire corpus of extant Greek tragedies, given how radically “other” the Greek cosmology remains for us still today. To face this otherness, modern criticism domesticates the play by disregarding its war frame and injecting the drama with a certain positivity: critics assume that these dichotomies are identifiable (it would seem that there indeed is a clearly discrete family and state, or that there indeed is a woman and a man, as we understand them in modernity), and that Antigone has always been on one side of the dichotomy (the family, the gods, or justice), while Creon has always been on the other. One would want to recall here that the equation between family (blood relationship) and city (community) dominated antiquity.⁹ Indeed, Creon equates both spheres throughout the play: to foster discipline in the family is tantamount to doing “his duty in the city” (l. 668); just as he will not obey his son (l. 728), he thinks he should not obey the city (l. 734); just as his son should be loyal to him as his father, he should be loyal to him as a king (l. 634). As I hope to show, Antigone and Creon trespass boundaries in a similar way. Likewise, Sophocles’ starting point is the absolute corruption of the royal “family” of Labdacus. The identity of each of the family’s members is undecidable; often gender is uncertain as well: is Antigone’s womanhood defined by the (female) duty to bury a brother, in spite of her manly defiance of authority? Where does the equation between Antigone and womankind leave Ismene, who does not bury her brother and chooses to survive by conforming to Greek ideals of female submission to authority? Most important, when critics read “the family” or “the woman” in the play as having an essential existence that predates, and remains unchanged by, the exceptional political conflict with which the play opens, they miss the point that it is precisely this political conflict that produces the characters, and thus the conflict we need to read. The “positivity” injected into the play by critics makes the ancients speak to specific categories born after the creation of the modern states and the emergence of liberal democracy; Antigone’s society did not have a state, its democracy was not liberal.

The problem Antigone thinks through perhaps is only apparent to those dedicated to conceptualizing radical democracy after Marx—not to those who take for granted the state and its relation to democracy.¹⁰ To revisit some of Antigone’s questions, I want to highlight here the specter of civic dissolution that frames the play—an overlooked scenario of the dismantling of community. In this sense, mine is a gesture more akin to those who align tragedy with ritual, myth, and the city. Consider, for instance, Girard’s insistence that the important aspect of Oedipus the King is the plague rather than Oedipus’ incest and parricide, or Jean-Pierre Vernant’s stressing of the links between tragedy and both the legal language of democratic courts and the rituals of sacrifice, passage, hunting, and scapegoating.¹¹

Antagonistic, rather than agonistic in nature, the tragic conflict in question does not present two different ethics, genders, ages, characters, or personalities but rather two imaginative horizons—and two political logics—for a community at war over the limits of its constituency. Creon’s agency is the cipher of a political question that could only become problematic with the advent of direct democracy, when membership and sovereignty became one and the same issue for the first time in ancient Greek history, making it possible to deliberate publicly about the exclusions and expansions required to constitute a “popular sovereign.” From the very first scene, we are exposed to a kind of making and remaking of the communal sphere that also contains the seeds of its possible destruction. Creon’s exclusionary force aims at defining the constituency of the new city; Antigone’s inclusionary force emerges to show the contingency of this definition, if not to define her version of a “popular sovereign” altogether differently. Polynices’ mythical plea for a limit to Eteocles’ accumulation of power is radicalized by Antigone: if the brothers had equal rights, who established when a brother ceased to be a brother, and how?

To counter the anxiety of fragmentation and seal off the community as an identifiable political entity, Creon’s starting point is to instrumentalize Polynices—in a tactic that can be read as an aspect of what Andrew Brown has called “Creon’s modernity” (210). Antigone’s starting point is instead to recover Polynices’ irreducible difference. In modern terms, their difference lies in their political solution—their tolerance—for the city’s natural lack of unity. Creon’s vision is that of a political community imaginatively instituted as a totality (an abstraction in need of representative authority); Antigone’s vision is that of a community inherently lacking in totality, hers is a consciousness of community division and participation, reaffirmed by the uniqueness of each of its members, the real locus of popular sovereignty, never reducible to any totality. To put it in terms of the modern concept of equality, this is the tension between conceiving of equality as identity (based on sameness) or as equivalence (based on difference).

I thus relocate Antigone within the ancient sphere of democracy, calling upon some of the text’s political conditions of production as well as upon the mysterious success of Antigone’s performance in fifth-century Athens, to open up new dialogues between the tragedy’s political imagination and our own. Like any reconstruction of context, mine is an interpretative gesture like tragedy itself. As a historical form, tragedy also meditates on what is “lost in translation” in its adaptation of ancient myths to the new political experiment of fifth-century Athens. I align my (tragic) interpretation of context with that of the “new democratic school,” which sees continuities between ancient tragedy and ancient, as well as modern, political thought and practice.¹² I suggest that what was at stake and on stage for the ancients is also at stake for us, though we veil it: rather than modern social dichotomies in conflict, the tragedy stages a political paradox, which modernity reformulated as it appropriated for itself the principle of equality. Antigone exposes a constitutive question for the ancient revolutionary invention of democracy, a question that invariably resurfaces regardless of how often it is suppressed: who constituted the body politic, and by which rituals was this determination made? Insofar as our horizon is democratic, this is our question, too—a question that the modern liberal imagination about democracy decides not to resolve by assuming an always already constituted “society of equals.” The liberal restriction on the concept of equality as “equal right to freedom” perpetuates the problem: democracy is always bound to ask who those with equal rights to freedom will be.

What should we remember, then, about the relationship between tragedy and its context, and in particular between Antigone and its context? Democracy and tragedy are contemporaneous Greek inventions, but the relationship between the two is not straigh...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• Literature, Violence, and Politics
• PART I - Sophocles’ Antigone or The Invention of Politics: We the City
• INTERLUDE
• PART II - D. A. F. de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom or The Reinvention of Politics: We the People
• INTERLUDE
• PART III - Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat or Sovereign Politics: We the Nation-State
• EPILOGUE
• Notes
• Index