Chanter is not involved to reveal the invalidity of Irigaray’s or Butler’s readings of the Sophoclean textual content, however to indicate how these readings are nonetheless complicit with another form of oppression – and stay blind to issues of slavery and of race. Chanter convincingly shows 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 versions and adaptations of the play, Irigaray and Butler can hardly be blamed for ebony sex this failure in their interpretations.
Chapters 3 and 4 embrace interpretations of two important 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 not the first to take up these two ‘African Antigones’, what is distinctive about her strategy is the style wherein she units the 2 performs in conversation with these traditions of Hegelian, continental and feminist philosophy which have a lot contemporary buy.
Mandela talks about how important it was to him to take on the part of Creon, for whom ‘obligations to the individuals take priority over loyalty to an individual’. A lot of Chanter’s argument in the primary chapters (and prolonged footnotes throughout 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, ebony sex and brother to her useless mother, Jocasta), half of what is at stake is the slave/citizen dichotomy.
She additionally exhibits how the origins of Oedipus – exposed as a child on the hills close to Corinth, and brought up by a shepherd exterior the town partitions of Thebes, where the whole motion of the play is ready – would have been rendered problematic for an Athenian viewers, given the circumstances surrounding the first efficiency of Sophocles’ play (roughly ten years after endogamy was made a requirement for ebony sex citizenship, and exogamous marriages outlawed by Pericles’ law). The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery has relevance also for actors and dramatists contemplating how best to stage, interpret, modernize or completely rework Sophocles’ drama and, indeed, the entire 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 current in Sophocles’ play. Arguing that chattel slavery offers one of the linchpins of the historical Greek polis, and therefore additionally for the ideals of freedom, the household and the state that Hegel himself advocates, Chanter means 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 however nonetheless neglect the thematics of race and slavery – is also key to the argument of the e book as an entire.
On this framework it appears completely natural that freedom, as a objective of political action, is privileged above equality, even when equality is understood, in Rancièrean phrases, as a presupposition and never as an goal and quantifiable aim to be achieved. As soon as again, plurality must itself, as a concept, be split between the different, however equal standing positions in an egalitarian political scene (i.e., different positions that depart from a standard presupposition of the equal capacity of all) and a pluralism that is merely transitive to the hierarchical order of different pursuits – interests that necessarily 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 aim of political unity comes into battle with the existence of political plurality, as for instance in the French Revolution, the threat to plebeian politics comes, big cock for Breaugh, from the try to kind a united topic who then constitutes a menace to the required recognition of the divided character of the social. The lump sum of 5 thousand dollars was one factor, a miserable little twenty or twenty-five a month was quite one other; and then someone else had the cash.
But that downside only arises when we consider the possibility of adjusting from a social order resting on growing inequalities and oppression, to another hopefully extra only one. Lefort’s thought looms large here, since for him the division of the social is an original ontological condition, whose acceptance is necessarily constitutive of each democratic politics, and never merely a sociological counting of the elements. The issue right here may be that Breaugh takes the plurality of pursuits at face value, disregarding the best way such a plurality of political positions may in itself be grounded within the unjust division of the social.