Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-15T17:39:52.487Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Antigone Claimed: “I Am a Stranger!” Political Theory and the Figure of the Stranger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical‐political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of textual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty‐first century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not‐legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent ontological status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of speech and action in equality with “others.”

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Crossing Borders Special Issue , Spring 2013 , pp. 307 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful to Nicholas Xenos, Angelica Bernal, Ivan Ascher, Roberto Alejandro, Barbara Cruikshank, Emily Heilker, and Ashley Bohrer for their criticism and feedback. This paper developed from my attendance at Bonnie Honig's seminar on Antigone at the 2010 School of Criticism and Theory Program at Cornell University; to all the members of the seminar and especially to Honig I am greatly indebted. Previous versions of this paper were discussed with the members of the political theory reading group at the University of Massachusetts, whose suggestions and critiques, like those of the two anonymous Hypatia reviewers, I deeply appreciate.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means without end. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 2004. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The claims of culture: Equality and diversity in the global era. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 2004. The rights of others: Aliens, residents, and citizens. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brecht, Bertolt. 1984. Sophocles' Antigone in a version by Bertolt Brecht. New York: Applause Theater & Cinema Books.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone's claim. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Cavarero, Adriana. 2005a. Stately bodies: Literature, philosophy, and the question of gender. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Cavarero, Adriana. 2005b. For more than one voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
FaglesRobert, trans Robert, trans. 1984. The three Theban plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Grene, David trans. 1991. Sophocles I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of spirit. Trans. Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2009. Antigone's laments, Creon's grief: Mourning, membership, and the politics of exception. Political Theory 37 (1): 5–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2010. Antigone's two laws: Greek tragedy and the politics of humanism. New Literary History 41 (1): 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2011. Ismene's forced choice: Sacrifice and sorority in Sophocles' Antigone. Arethusa 44 (1): 29–68.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the other woman. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. 1997. The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Book VII. New York and London: Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Lomonaco, Claudine. 2006. U.S.‐Mexico border: The season of death. http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/blog/2006/06/usmexico_border_1.html (accessed October 10, 2012).Google Scholar
Loraux, Nicole. 2002. The mourning voice: An essay on Greek tragedy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lupton, Julia Reinhard. 2005. Citizen‐Saints: Shakespeare and political theology, Chicago: Chicago University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maia, Suzana. 2012. Transnational desires: Brazilian erotic dancers in New York. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press.Google Scholar
Makdisi, Saree. 2010. The architecture of erasure. Critical Inquiry 36 (3): 519–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phelan, Shane. 2001. Sexual strangers: Gays, lesbians, and dilemmas of citizenship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, N.C.: Duke University press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Dis‐agreement: Politics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Randle, Michael. 1998. Resistencia civil: la ciudadanía ante las arbitrariedades de los gobiernos. Barcelona: Paidós.Google Scholar
Rooney, Caroline. 2000. African literature, animism and politics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Whitehead, David. 1977. The ideology of the Athenian metic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Philological Society.Google Scholar