Chanter is not concerned to demonstrate the invalidity of Irigaray’s or Butler’s readings of the Sophoclean textual content, however to point out how these readings are nonetheless complicit with another kind of oppression – and stay blind to issues of slavery and of race. Chanter convincingly exhibits that the language of slavery – doulos (a household slave) and ebony sex douleuma (a ‘slave thing’) – is there in Sophocles’ textual content, despite its notable absence from many modern translations, adaptations and commentaries. Given that these themes have been translated out of most contemporary versions and adaptations of the play, Irigaray and Butler can hardly be blamed for this failure of their interpretations.
Chapters three and 4 include interpretations of two vital latest 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 is just not the first to take up these two ‘African Antigones’, what is distinctive about her method is the style during which she sets the two plays in conversation with those traditions of Hegelian, continental and feminist philosophy which have so much contemporary buy.
Mandela talks about how important it was to him to take on the part of Creon, for whom ‘obligations to the people take precedence over loyalty to an individual’. A lot of Chanter’s argument in the primary chapters (and prolonged footnotes all through the text) is worried with establishing that when Antigone insists on performing the correct burial rites for the physique of Polynices (son of Oedipus and brother to Antigone), in defiance of the orders of Creon (the king, and brother to her useless mother, ebony sex Jocasta), part of what’s at stake is the slave/citizen dichotomy.
She also exhibits how the origins of Oedipus – exposed as a child on the hills close to Corinth, and introduced up by a shepherd outside the town partitions of Thebes, where the entire motion of the play is ready – 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 ebony sex exogamous marriages outlawed by Pericles’ regulation). The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery has relevance additionally for actors and dramatists contemplating how greatest to stage, interpret, modernize or utterly rework Sophocles’ drama and, indeed, the whole Oedipus cycle of plays.
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 provides one of many linchpins of the ancient Greek polis, and therefore 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 methods – however who nevertheless still neglect the thematics of race and mother fucker slavery – can be key to the argument of the book as a whole.
On this framework it appears perfectly pure that freedom, as a purpose of political action, is privileged above equality, even when equality is understood, in Rancièrean phrases, as a presupposition and not as an goal and quantifiable goal to be achieved. Once once more, plurality must itself, as a concept, be cut up between the completely different, but equal standing positions in an egalitarian political scene (i.e., totally different positions that depart from a standard presupposition of the equal capability of all) and a pluralism that is merely transitive to the hierarchical order of different interests – interests that essentially persist after that occasion 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 historical conditions where the objective of political unity comes into conflict with the existence of political plurality, as for instance in the French Revolution, the menace to plebeian politics comes, for Breaugh, from the try and kind a united subject who then constitutes a menace to the necessary recognition of the divided character of the social. The lump sum of 5 thousand dollars was one thing, a miserable little twenty or twenty-5 a month was fairly another; after which another person had the cash.
But that problem solely arises when we consider the chance of fixing from a social order resting on rising inequalities and oppression, to a different hopefully extra just one. Lefort’s thought looms massive right here, since for him the division of the social is an unique ontological situation, whose acceptance is essentially constitutive of every democratic politics, and not merely a sociological counting of the elements. The problem right here may be that Breaugh takes the plurality of pursuits at face worth, disregarding the way in which such a plurality of political positions may in itself be grounded within the unjust division of the social.