Journal Prompt
I'm not assigning all of Honig's book; only a small part of it. I don't expect you to grasp its argument in detail. Rather, I'm hoping that in this reading you'll find things to think, write, and talk about. To get you started, I'm asking you to address these three questions:
- What earlier ways of thinking about Antigone does Honig seem to be responding to?
- What ways of thinking about Antigone does she seem to want you to consider?
- What do you think: does this speak to you or not? 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:
- Description, p. i
- Preface, pp. ix-xiii
- Introduction, pp. 1-10
Introduction to Text
For an excellent introduction to the reading and to the author, see the publisher's blurb with which the assigned reading begins.
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.
Certain concepts important to the author's project themselves could use comment here:
- Interruption. This is the key concept in Honig. Who interrupts whom in the play? Whom, or what, does Honig seems to want to interrupt? Why?
- 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?
- Ontologies. "Ontology" here basically means "reality"
- 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?