Chanter is just not concerned to show the invalidity of Irigaray’s or Butler’s readings of the Sophoclean text, blowjob but to indicate how these readings are nonetheless complicit with another kind of oppression – and remain blind to problems with slavery and of race. Chanter convincingly exhibits that the language of slavery – doulos (a household slave) and douleuma (a ‘slave thing’) – is there in Sophocles’ text, regardless of its notable absence from many fashionable translations, adaptations and commentaries. Given that these themes have been translated out of most contemporary variations and adaptations of the play, Irigaray and Butler can hardly be blamed for this failure of their interpretations.
Chapters 3 and four embody interpretations of two necessary recent African plays that take up and rework Sophocles’ Antigone: Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni: An African Antigone (1999), which relocates the mythology of Antigone to colonial Nigeria, and The Island (1974), collectively authored and staged by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. If Chanter just isn’t the primary to take up these two ‘African Antigones’, what’s distinctive about her strategy is the way by which she units the 2 plays in conversation with these traditions of Hegelian, continental and feminist philosophy which have a lot contemporary purchase.
Mandela talks about how essential it was to him to take on the part of Creon, for whom ‘obligations to the individuals take priority over loyalty to an individual’. Much of Chanter’s argument in the first chapters (and lengthy footnotes all through the textual content) is concerned with establishing that when Antigone insists on performing the proper burial rites for the body of Polynices (son of Oedipus and brother to Antigone), in defiance of the orders of Creon (the king, and brother to her lifeless mom, Jocasta), ebony sex part of what’s at stake is the slave/citizen dichotomy.
She also exhibits how the origins of Oedipus – exposed as a baby on the hills close to Corinth, and introduced up by a shepherd outside the city walls of Thebes, the place the entire motion of the play is about – would have been rendered problematic for an Athenian audience, given the circumstances surrounding the primary efficiency of Sophocles’ play (roughly ten years after endogamy was made a requirement for citizenship, and exogamous marriages outlawed by Pericles’ regulation). The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery has relevance also for actors and dramatists considering how finest to stage, interpret, modernize or completely rework Sophocles’ drama and, indeed, the entire Oedipus cycle of performs.
Chanter argues that Hegel unduly narrows the notion of the political – and, certainly, that of the tragic – by ignoring the thematics of slavery which are present in Sophocles’ play. Arguing that chattel slavery gives one of many linchpins of the historic Greek polis, and hence additionally for the ideals of freedom, the household and the state that Hegel himself advocates, Chanter suggests that Hegel’s emphasis on the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) ‘domesticates and tames the ugliness of slavery’, and needs to be understood within the context of the slave revolt in Haiti of 1803-05. A critique of Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler and other feminist theorists who read Antigone in counter-Hegelian ways – however who nonetheless still neglect the thematics of race and hardcore sex slavery – can be key to the argument of the e-book as a whole.
On this framework it seems perfectly natural that freedom, as a objective of political motion, is privileged above equality, even when equality is understood, in Rancièrean phrases, mother fucker as a presupposition and not as an objective and quantifiable aim to be achieved. Once once more, plurality must itself, as a concept, be split between the different, however equal standing positions in an egalitarian political scene (i.e., completely different positions that depart from a typical presupposition of the equal capacity of all) and a pluralism that’s merely transitive to the hierarchical order of different interests – pursuits that necessarily persist after that event which inaugurates an emancipatory political sequence.
Such resistance is rooted in Breaugh’s unconditional defence of pluralism and his mistrust of any type of unity as a horizon for politics. In historic situations where the goal of political unity comes into battle with the existence of political plurality, as for instance in the French Revolution, the menace to plebeian politics comes, for Breaugh, from the attempt to type a united subject who then constitutes a risk to the mandatory recognition of the divided character of the social. The lump sum of five thousand dollars was one factor, a miserable little twenty or twenty-5 a month was fairly another; after which someone else had the cash.
But that drawback only arises after we consider the likelihood of changing from a social order resting on rising inequalities and oppression, to a different hopefully extra just one. Lefort’s thought looms giant here, since for him the division of the social is an authentic ontological situation, whose acceptance is essentially constitutive of every democratic politics, and not merely a sociological counting of the elements. The problem here could also be that Breaugh takes the plurality of pursuits at face value, disregarding the way in which such a plurality of political positions may in itself be grounded in the unjust division of the social.