Tina Chanter 
Whose Antigone? [EPUB ebook] 
The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery

In this groundbreaking book, Tina Chanter challenges the philosophical and psychoanalytic reception of Sophocles’ Antigone, which has largely ignored the issue of slavery. Drawing on textual and contextual evidence, including historical sources, she argues that slavery is a structuring theme of the Oedipal cycle, but one that has been written out of the record.



Chanter focuses in particular on two appropriations of Antigone: The Island, set in apartheid South Africa, and Tègònni, set in nineteenth-century Nigeria. Both plays are inspired by the figure of Antigone, and yet they rework her significance in important ways that require us to return to Sophocles’ ‘original’ play and attend to some of the motifs that have been marginalized. Chanter explores the complex set of relations that define citizens as opposed to noncitizens, free men versus slaves, men versus women, and Greeks versus barbarians. Whose Antigone? moves beyond the narrow confines critics have inherited from German idealism to reinvigorate debates over the meaning and significance of Antigone, situating it within a wider argument that establishes the salience of slavery as a structuring theme.

Tabella dei contenuti

Preface



Acknowledgments



List of Abbreviated Titles



1. Introduction: The Shadowy Others of
Antigone’s Legacy



2. Antigone’s Liminality: Hegel’s Racial Purification of Tragedy and the Naturalization of Slavery



Hegel’s Prohibition of Slavery as a Tragic Topic

Sculpting Antigone’s Ethics from the Gods of “Nature”

The Simplicity, Solidity, and Plasticity of Tragic Heroes in a Pre-Legal Era

Art Must Be Purer than Life



3. The Performative Politics and Rebirth of
Antigone in Ancient Greece and Modern South Africa:
The Island



The Incessant Renaissance of Antigone

Performative and Political Reflections on Greek Tragedy

Intervening in Fetishistic Readings of
Antigone

Antigone’s “False Titties”:
The Island

Concluding Remarks



4. Exempting Antigone from Ancient Greece: Multiplying and Racializing Genealogies in
Tègònni: An African Antigone



Butler and Mader: Making Polynices Only a Brother

Citizens, Substitutes, and Slaves

A Story to Pass On? Antigone’s Mythological African Sister, Tègònni



5. Agamben, Antigone, Irigaray: The Fetishistic Ruses of Sovereignty in Contemporary Politics



6. Concluding Reflections: What If Oedipus or Polynices Had Been Slaves?



Synopses of
The Island and
Tègònni

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Circa l’autore

Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy at De Paul University. She is author of
The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference;
Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy;
Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger; and
Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. She is also the coeditor (with Pleshette De Armitt) of
Sarah Kofman’s Corpus and (with Ewa Płonowska Ziarek) of
Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, both also published by SUNY Press, and the editor of
Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas.