Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 08:16:45 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Antigone, Anarchy, and Law & Order


Replying to me, Yoshie wrote:

>>With regard to the gods and religious duty, however, both Yoshie and Carrol
>>misinterpret these. Yoshie boldy redefines religion to exclude the gods and
>>fate ("For 'religion' to become a separate sphere set in opposition to the
>>state requires a society different from the polis in _Antigone_. 'Religion'
>>isn't the right word to refer to the Greeks' relationships to gods."). This
>>puts her in a position where religion would never be the right word to
>>refer to *any* people's relationship to gods.
>
>There are gains to be made in making certain words more specific than
>common usage allows, if one's purpose is to explain the mode of ideology
>specific to capitalism.

Specify!


>>But Teiresias (the seer and kingmaker of Thebes) exposes the real situation
>>to Creon towards the end of the play and declares that he will lose his
>>child (Haemon) "in quittance of thy murder" (of Antigone):
>>
>>	For that thou hast entombed a living soul,
>>	And sent below a denizen of earth,
>>	And wronged the nether gods by leaving here
>>	A corpse unlaved, unwept, unsepulchred.
>>	Herein thou hast no part, nor e'en the gods
>>	In heaven; and thou usurp'st a power not thine.
>>	For this the avenging spirits of Heaven and Hell
>>	Who dog the steps of sin are on thy trail;
>>	[Loeb Classics translation by F. Storr]
>>
>>This is the only thing that moves Creon to rethink, and he changes his
>>mind, but it's too late.
>>
>>Regardless of Antigone's own views on the matter, Teiresias has the real
>>explanation, and it's religious. Antigone does what has to be done because
>>it falls on her instead of someone else in the family. It's not an order,
>>but it's an imperative that brings catastrophe if it's ignored. And it's
>>not only *obviously* invoked in Antigone, but it's equally obviously the
>>axle around which the whole plot revolves.
>
>One might attribute Teiresias's worldview to the specific social position
>he occupies instead of using it as a synecdoche for the worldview of
>_Antigone_ the play.

I think the burden of proof here lies with Yoshie's limitation of
Teiresias's significance. Within the world of the play T. gets to the
fundamentals -- after all his words are the only ones able to persuade
Creon to change his mind, and T. has made and unmade Theban rulers before.

The extra dimensions of what the play might mean in the context of Athenian
democracy vs. the historical alternatives of foreign rule, aristocracy or
despotism go beyond Teiresias, and were indicated in my last post.


>>The universal alienated value of the abstract individual that gives
>>Christianity its world-historical power is here prefigured in the system of
>>the commodity-producing democratic Athenians (obscured and limited though
>>it naturally has to be by its slave-owning foundations).
>
>The idea that X prefigures Y tends to make one more of a Hegelian than a
>historical materialist.

Hardly, when the same economic mechanism (commodity production) produces
the same fetishized ideological reflection (aspects of monotheism) in what
is essentially an earlier stage of development in the same society
(Graeco-Roman city states  transforming into hybrid
slave-owning/commodity-producing republics transforming into absolutist
empires -- which in Rome's case is on an economic basis where commodity
relations are so entrenched (evidence -- Roman Law) that they survive the
collapse and death of the empire like metastases in the form of the
mediaeval municipalities, in the same way as the Christian ideological
movement (with the same material foundations) metastasizes into
(culminating) feudal and later (diminishing) bourgeois organizations.

Cheers,

Hugh





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