Bonnie Honig: Antigone, Interrupted

Bonnie Honig. Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge, New York, etc: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 321. Hardcover. £55.00. (ISBN 9781107036970) Paperback . £18,99 (ISBN 9781107668157) An edited version of this review was published in Strife Journal Issue 3 in May 2014 Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Žižek, Butler: there is a long list of politically-minded modern and postmodern thinkers – by no means limited to these – who have turned to Greek tragedy, and specifically Sophocles’ Antigone, in order to inform or illustrate their own ideas. Whilst Bonnie Honig’s Antigone, Interrupted is therefore striding into crowded and contested ground, it does so not without an attempt at self-justification. Honig follows Jacques Lacan’s suggestion as to why the play might continue to excite our curiosity two-and-a-half thousand years after its first performance: ‘even if [we] are not aware of it, the latent fundamental image of Antigone forms part of [our] morality’. Jacques Lacan (1992), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 (New York: Norton), p. 284. If this is so, she argues, then ‘Sophocles’ heroine forms latently part of our politics as well… abandoning Antigone is not something we are simply free to do’ (pp. 36-37). We are, then, bound to this story, and in ways we cannot ignore. It is therefore no surprise that Honig begins by stressing her method as a ‘dramaturgical approach’: if Antigone is as important as Honig claims it is, then it must come first; we must look from the play to politics, not the other way round. This does not immediately promise to open up the discursive space that Honig requires – how much can have been left unsaid about this two-and-a-half thousand year-old text, after all? – but Honig develops a radical re-reading that enables her to reach unapologetically different conclusions to those offered by many of her predecessors. Starting with a critique of Judith Butler’s reading of the play, Honig emphasises the importance of what Butler describes as ‘precariousness’ to her own understanding of Sophocles’ heroine. Judith Butler (2000), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press) For all Antigone’s fragility, however, Honig insists that this does not preclude her from aiming at that most unfashionable of values in critical thought: sovereignty. Following Butler – and J. Peter Euben J. Peter Euben (2007): ‘The Tragedy of Tragedy’, International Relations 21.1 pp. 15-22 – Honig notes that in her rhetoric against Creon, Antigone adopts his register. She is therefore not directly opposed to Creon in a struggle between two incommensurable and absolute conceptions of right, as Hegel claimed. Nor, however, is she bound to him as the agent that can fulfil her pre-existing death wish, pace Jacques Lacan. She is, rather, ‘a figure of both sovereignty and precariousness’ (p. 54). This seems a dissonant combination, but Honig argues that such an analysis can help in the task of formulating what she terms ‘agonistic humanism’: a notion ‘that sees in mortality, suffering, sound, and vulnerability resources for some form of enacted if contestable universality, while also recognising these resources are variable and opaque in their significances, just like language’ (p. 19). Though Honig does not reference his work, agonistic humanism chimes with Michael Dillon’s insistence, following William Connolly, that the ontologically tragic nature of our social being requires the incorporation of agonism into our conception of democracy. See Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996). The ‘Interrupted’ of Honig’s title therefore not only refers to the interruptions central to the text as she sees it, but also describes the book’s purpose: to disrupt conventional, dominant readings of the play, to draw attention to the contrary possibilities it presents, and to enact a discursive and practical agonism that can participate in some interruption of its own. It is here that Honig’s reading takes a turn for the left-field. Moving away from Butler, who, Honig says, ‘sees Antigone as an isolated, lone, suffering heroine, opposed to her sister and seeking glory for herself’ (p. 55), Honig instead focuses on Antigone in a situated, social sense. Her Antigone is characterised not by solitary heroism, intransigence or inward psychological turmoil, but by solidarity, expressed in part by her paradoxical insistence on both the equality of all as well as the singularity of Polynices, her unburied dead brother (p. 123). In a neat rhetorical twist, Honig argues that an analysis of an independent Antigone, mourning alone and plotting transgressive burial – a ‘politics of lamentation’ – in fact has the potential to become ‘a lamentation of politics’. Solitary mourning rejects sovereignty; it withdraws, and in so doing cannot enact the ‘agonistic humanism’ Honig sees at the core of her project. Antigone must therefore be embedded within a broader social context, and Honig demonstrates this tragic solidarity with reference to Antigone’s relationship with her sister, Ismene (p. 154). This is brave. Antigone and Ismene are not obviously in concert – indeed, Ismene outwardly refuses to help Antigone in her quest to bury her brother Polynices. Solidarity between the two sisters is a hidden thread of the text, and there is a reason why Hegel, Lacan and Butler all see Antigone as going it alone. However, Honig goes further than simply arguing on behalf of sororal camaraderie; she speculates that, despite her avowal not to help, Polynices’ first ‘burial’ might actually have been performed by Ismene in an expression of solidarity with her sister. This is a wildly ambitious reading of the text that has a number of pertinent and intriguing political implications, and Honig’s subsequent discussion of forced choice and ethical agency is amongst the strongest sections of her book (pp. 177-181). However, for all this, it is not a hugely convincing piece of literary interpretation: it requires not only a speculative reading between the lines but also a fairly swift skim over some of the lines themselves (one thinks here of Ismene’s expression of horror at the thought of flouting Creon’s edict, for example). Although Honig does address these apparent dissonances, this serves to make her reading appear rather convoluted and wilful. It is here that Honig’s ‘dramaturgical approach’ begins to unravel slightly. Reading Antigone, Interrupted one gets a sense that Honig is reinterpreting Sophocles in order to bear upon her own pre-formed political project as much as she is attempting to draw lessons from the play; that she is hammering Antigone into a shape of her own choosing. Despite these suspicions, however, Antigone, Interrupted remains representative of an ambitious and persuasive political project and an important addition to the growing body of political theory that uses Greek tragedy as a platform. Alister Wedderburn King’s College London