Sophocles’s tragedyAntigonerepresents an immense effort to imagine the origins and limits of the political state. Law sets against law in the play, while a tenuous new order is won at huge sacrifice from their confrontation. For whom the city and by what right authority over it? the chorus ponders as the protagonists struggle to impose their image of the social order, create its very fabric, and explain its legitimacy. One can think of the action as a savage, blood-soaked version of a courtroom drama, similar in that respect to the other Attic tragedies, which centered overwhelmingly on judgments,...

Fifth-century Greek tragedies were not merely entertainments. For the playwrights and their audiences, these dramas were important civic events. Christian Meier has gone so far as to argue that Greek democracy was dependent on these plays, in part because they filled the role of a state apparatus that was otherwise missing in classical Athens and other cities.¹ His claim is not as extravagant as it might seem. Tragedy’s political function is evidenced by the organization of the festival of Dionysos itself, which mixed displays ofimperium, such as the delivery of tribute money from subjugated states, with the dramatic contests...

The tragedies, then, mark the rise of a new sort of person, one defined not by his or her place within a familial structure but in relation to a larger notion of civic justice. Abstract as it may seem, this shift echoed changes in the legal system that accompanied the rise of the polis. In the Homeric period, or around the ninth century, it was the head of a household, oroikos, who enjoyed absolute authority over those in his extended family, including the right to punish them with death.¹ By many indicators, theoikosprevailed during this time as...

InAntigone, different modes of individuation confront each other through a dispute over the treatment of a corpse, and the choice of this particular object does not seem to have been pure happenstance. Of the seven plays by Sophocles that remain, three revolve around the disposition and burial of the dead:Ajax, Oedipus at Colonus, andAntigone. Euripides’sSuppliant Womenreturns to the same theme, again in relation to the war on Thebes.¹ InAntigone, Polyneices’s remains are the disputed matter of theagōn logōn, and as such they form the terrain on which the various agencies struggle for dominance,...

A strange fantasy, as we have seen, weaves its way through Hegel’s interpretation ofAntigone, and this is not just some stray thread, but a crucial, if hidden, filament that holds his whole argument together. In this fantasy, the corpse retains some dim remnant of sentience, a pathetic neediness that is ready, when confronted by an unbearable injustice, to degenerate into rancor, violence, and pollution. By the logic of Hegel’s argument, moreover, this thread must remain secret even to the mourners who project their own imaginings onto the dead, for otherwise the individuation they were supposed to effect would short-circuit,...

In a sustained analysis ofphiliain Aristotle’s works, Martha Nussbaum has argued that the philosopher theorized a love that treats the beloved as an end in himself, valuing him because of his irreplaceable uniqueness. By emphasizing the importance of such friends’ “living together,” Aristotle seems, moreover, to have premised his notion of friendship on that of life, so thatphiliawould establish the value of a specific andlivingindividual.¹ But it is a long and difficult passage from the texts that I discussed in the last chapter to that loving and living individual. By examining—and to some...

Hegel’s powerful and idiosyncratic reading ofAntigonedescribes an intimate relation between the treatment of the dead and the meaning of the city. It also establishes the grounds for a sustained analysis of gender’s role in that meaning. But his interpretation is also marked by blind spots, curious and identifiable features of his argument that reveal themselves only in absentia, through lapses or contradictions in his reasoning or as necessary but missing elements. It is an indication of the force of Hegel’s reading that these blind spots should be so richly productive and should bear sustained scrutiny. The principal one...

Everything that I have written so far, and indeed a huge body of work spanning centuries and disciplines, argues thatAntigoneis important. That Sophocles’s tragedy continues to generate scholarly debate in philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary studies, and feminist theory indicates that it is still timely. And ifAntigoneis so important, even now, that must be because it raises some crucial and unresolved questions. By arguing, as I do, that the interest of the play extends beyond mere literary appreciation or historical interest, that it reaches beyond fact to concerns about meaning and meaningfulness, I place myself under the obligation...