Placing speaking

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Notes

Andrew Benjamin

Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

PO Box 11A

Monash University

Clayton, Vic 3800

Australia

E‐mail: [email protected]

I would like to thank Dimitris Vardoulakis for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the participants of the Seminars on the Antigone that were put on in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University in the first semester of this academic year (March–June 2004).

Part of what marks out the nature of modernity is the presence of a conflict concerning the differing ways of conceiving of the relationship between conceptions of historical time and related conceptions of action. The term “present” is taken as designating this site. I have developed a conception of the present that takes up this particular formulation in my Present Hope (London: Routledge, 1997).

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999) 247.

The first stasimon comprises lines 332–75 of the play. It is spoken by the Chorus after the burial of the body of Polynices by Antigone. References to the play will be to the text and the translation established by Hugh Lloyd‐Jones. His text and translation comprises the Loeb Classical Library Edition of the text. See Antigone in Sophocles II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997).

Kierkegaard presents this position in Either/Or, part 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987). See pages 139–53 for the general discussion of tragedy, and pages 153–64 for the opening up of “our Antigone” as opposed to the Antigone of Greek tragedy.

This is not, of course, to argue for any simple recourse to Ancient Greece as a way of resolving that relationship. Rather, the force of the setting is that it stages concerns that have actuality. In addition, the way in which the relationship between law, justice and wisdom is formulated has a contemporary register, even if the details of history exert a real restriction. For a sustained investigation of these limits – limits in both a positive and negative sense – see Nicole Loraux, Né de la terre: mythe et politique à Athènes (Paris: Seuil, 1996). For an interpretation of the place of law in Ancient Greek society that focuses on the centrality of conflict and thus the use of conflict as a way of thinking through the relationship between law and social coherence, and which emphasizes the place of oratory and therefore a certain rhetoric of law – Antigone and Creon could always have been positioned in these terms – see David Cohen, Law, Violence and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).

Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988) 16: 299.

Heidegger's encounter with Sophocles' Ode occurs in two different places. The first one occurs in the Introduction to Metaphysics. However, perhaps the most important analysis is advanced in the setting of his interpretation of Hölderlin. He also comments on Hölderlin's own translation of elements of the play. See Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” Gesamtsausgabe, vol. 53 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittiorio Klostermann, 1984). For the initial discussion of the translation of τ δϵιν see pages 76–78. For the engagement with Hölderlin see pages 84–86.

Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes (London: Faber, 2004). This is, of course, to do no more than begin an analysis of Heaney's translation of the Ode.

• Leaving aside the obvious range of metaphors within the poem, the clear example here would be Blake's “The Tyger” (in William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972) 214). The questioning of the animal's origin – “did he who made the lamb make thee?” – coupled to the presence of the Tyger as bound up with fear, defines its presence in terms of a relatedness to human being. This presence is stated emphatically in the question that begins the poem and which is then transformed to provide the poem's ending. The questions are:

  • What immortal hand or eye

  • Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  • What immortal hand or eye

  • Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

• If there is a religious determination then it is found in the evocation of the immortality of the “hand” or “eye.” And yet how is the animal's “fearful” nature to be understood? The necessity of the fear – the human's fear in the encounter with this animal – causes a questioning. Why would divine intervention be linked to the creation of fear? The mystery endures. The slide from “Could” to “Dare” reinforces it. Centrality has to be given to a form of sublimity that captures the presence of this animal.

The verb ϕθγγℴμα refers specifically to the human voice, as well as to the sound of animals. See Henry Georges Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Dictionary, revised ed., ed. Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958) 1927.

It is the move from the Δìκη to δìκη, and thus the attempt to draw centrality to justice as connected to wisdom and “well‐being,” that seems to define the position of the Chorus. As such, interpretations that see the play in terms of a strict opposition between the justice of the Gods and the laws of human beings seem to work against the overall force of the play's commitment to justice as a human possibility. Hence Charles Segal (Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986)) is mistaken when he argues that “To live humanely, in Sophocles's terms is to know fully the conditions of man's existence: and this means to accept the Gods who, in their limitless and ageless power (604ff.) are those conditions, the unbending, realities of the universe” (160).

For all its strengths in alerting readers to the contested nature of violence in Ancient Greece, Jacqueline de Romilly's La Grèce antique contre la violence (Paris: Fallois, 2000) remains limited by identifying violence with violent behaviour. Part of the contention here is that violence has to be positioned in terms of its relation to human being.

I have discussed this speech in greater detail in my Philosophy's Literature (Manchester: Clinamen, 2001) 34–37.

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andrew benjamin

Andrew Benjamin Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies PO Box 11A Monash University Clayton, Vic 3800 Australia E‐mail: [email protected]