Honig Antigone Interrupted

Journal Prompt

I'm not assigning all of Honig's book; only a small part of it. It's a tough read, but I'm hoping that in it you'll find things to think, write, and talk about. So, what do you think: does this speak to you? Explain. . . .

Text Access

Honig, Bonnie. Antigone, Interrupted. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (Via Proquest Ebook Central, PODS login required. Multiple clicks/taps may be needed to get the link to work)

If you get a "This site can’t be reached" error message, refresh the page until the sign-in comes up.

Read:

Extended blurb with summary of book, p. i
"Preface," pp. ix-xiii
"Introduction," pp. 1-10

Introduction to Text

In what I've assigned, the author mentions a lot of theoretical, philosophical, and political currents, but what she's really after is to "interrupt" past thinking, to get us to rethink what Sophocles' Antigone means to us now.

What's It All Mean?

That's for you to say, not me. But Honig's Antigone Interrupted is a challenging read. I'm willing to share here some of the sense that I make of it. You are not required to buy into any of it, but it might help.

Honig — and I sympathize with this — is impatient with traditional interpretations of the play. This play is big world-wide. It's often performed. It is one of only a few ancient Greek tragedies (Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus the King; Euripides' Medea) frequently assigned to students in high school and university.

A lot of folks find inspiration in Antigone the character, political inspiration, but a lot of that reduces her to one of three things (see pp. 7-8):

A "heroic conscientious objector," she stands up for what she believes, even to the point of dying.
A "humanist lamenter of the dead," she captures something universal, with which we can all sympathize: the grief of loss.
A "monstrous creature of desire," she is politically over-ambitious, too willing to die for her cause, too-unwilling to work within the system. An absolutist.

All three treat her as a martyr. She achieves self-realization in death. Had she not died, she'd be far less special.

But is death, her being ended, really what's so special about her? Honig wants to "interrupt" that view of Antigone. For Honig, Antigone's grief, her lamentation, her burial of her brother — those things are, for our author, actively political. Antigone's language is subtle. Creon can't hear what she's saying, but if we listen right, we can. We can become co-conspirators with her; we can hear the "dog whistles," the biting irony of her words when she debates Creon.

Creon is confused. He thinks that she's jealous of his manhood, of his power: "I am not the man, not now: she is the man / if this victory goes to her and she goes free." But she's not seizing power for herself; she's resisting it when it's exercised arbitrarily. She's talking back.

Or something like that. . . .

Honig's use of the term "interruption" is, I'd say, intriguing. In the play, characters, especially Creon, interrupt Antigone multiple times. But Antigone, in her way, seeks to interrupt patriarchy. Past thinkers have "interrupted" — ignored — messages in the play. Honig wants to interrupt those interruptions.

Notes on Words and Concepts

Certain concepts important to the author's project themselves could use comment here:

Interruption. This is the key concept in Honig, see above.
Lamentation. Do we cry and complain too much? Or better, when we complain, do we complain well? What do you think might constitute a "politics of lamentation"? What (apart from the italics) is the difference between a politics of lamentation and a politics of lamentation? (That'll be something treated more fully in unassigned parts of the book, but we can still think about it)
Sovereignty. That's the question of who rules, who's in charge politically. In a democracy, it's supposed to be the people. Honig wants us to think about what the play has to say about that in terms not just of politics alone but also of, among other things, gender
Conspiracy obviously means "plotting," but Honig has more in mind for Antigone than simply cooking up schemes
Agon, an excellent Greek word for "contest," "struggle." What sorts of struggles does Honig seem have in mind?
Adianoēta. Honig (p. 3) speaks of the "open secret, that conspiratorial form of communication whose ﬁgure is adianoeta." She later explains that adianoeta are statements (the word is plural in number) that can be taken in more than one way: double entendres and the like. Some folks are, some aren't in on the "coded speech," the more subversive meaning, of what's said. We can read Antigone's words and be in on her "conspiracy," not to self-destruct as a kind of protest, but to resist actively. Honig has in mind something like "dog whistles."
Ontologies. "Ontology" here basically means "reality" and theories of reality: How is something real for you?
Dramaturgy. How might a focus on dramaturgy — on questions of performance — have "more to offer political theory than any 'arguments' we may cull from the play" (p. 6)?
Atê. Greek, it means "ruin" or the "madness" that ruins. For Honig, for you, is Antigone simply mad? Simply ruin personified?