Status Updates From Antigones

"We are, proclaim psychoanalysis and structural anthropology, les enfants d'Edipe. Thus the modern dramaturgy of consciousness and symbolic identifications bids us recognize in Oedipus and Narcissus, in Prometheus and Odysseus, mon semblable, mon frère. More and more, we can come to understand in the modernist movements in the West a hunger for 'beginnings', for a return to archaic, essentially Greek, sources."

"Absolute tragedy is so exceedingly rare a form precisely because it negates the up-beat, the pendulum-swing towards hope which seems to be ingrained in human sensibility. (...) Tragedy perceives the world as does Ivan Karamazov when he sends back to God his 'ticket of admission'." HHHHHHHHSHSH

"Creon is on stage during Antigone's monologue. But her words are directed neither at him nor at the chorus. Antigone addresses those who cannot or will not hear her-the guests of Persephone in the night-world. She speaks to herself and to her dead."

Antigone's lament and farewell can best be understood as a desperate endeavour to come home to her own sole truth of being (...) If Antigone does not wholly succeed, it is precisely because the vehemence of her dissociations, of her cumulative exits from the compromising fabric of erotic, social, and civic life, have finally made her something of a stranger even to the initial certitudes and firmness of her own ego.

"Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides experienced, were in some measure able to articulate, a primordial equation between the 'being of Being'. They apprehended, they were possessed by, language in its original state of truthful nomination and concealment. Thus they could both 'say the world' and perceive that which speech guarded inviolate within its own autonomous strengths."

"The renown, the very survival, in the spiritual sense, of the house of Oedipus lies in the hands of her silence. She is wedded to that silence; 'she knows not any man and yet she is a bride'." okay this is it for today

"Kierkegaard's relation to the child of Oedipus is one of possessive irony, of a Donjuanism of the soul such as he himself has described in his analysis of Mozart. 'She is my creation, her thoughts are my thoughts, and yet it is as if I had rested with her in a night of love, as if she had entrusted me with her deep secret, breathing out this secret and her soul in my embrace.'"

"Innocence is irreconcilable with human action; but only in action is there moral identity." i can’t finish this book because every other sentence i need to stop and take a walk. what if we all just died

"Inside the family, continues Hegel, one relationship is privileged above all others by virtue of the immediacy and purity of its ethical substance." i have so many jokes about what comes next

"The torment of Narcissus is stilled: the image is substance, it is the integral self in the twin presence of another. Thus sisterliness is ontologically privileged beyond any other human stance. In it, the homecomings of Idealism and Romanticism are given vital form. This form receives supreme, everlasting expression in Sophocles' Antigone." okay. yay :)

"As Hegel insists, the roots of exile, of self-division, are internal. They are a fatal constant of self-consciousness. It is to ourselves that we are strangers. However absolute the empathy which knits friend to friend, however symbiotic and self-sacrificial the uses of amity there can be no true homecoming to the self through another."

"No literalism, no psychoanalytic labelling, will elucidate the utter seriousness, the period-magic of Baudelaire's call to 'mon enfant, rna sceur' ('my child, my sister'). But it is just this magic and this seriousness, irrelevant as they may be to Sophocles' meaning, which must be grasped if we are to make sense of the special lustre of Antigone in nineteenth-century feeling."

"Moreover, only one born of the union of brother and sister can bring on the twilight of the gods which is also the morning of man (only he can, in Hegelian terms, close history)." i need to speak with George Steiner. i need to speak with George Steiner

"Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie." Shelley is the only mf around here who ever understood me