Let Them Rot

The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all the numerous readings and rewritings of the play keep emerging? To what kind of (always) contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to re-read and re-imagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular questions have driven this research. First, the issue of violence—this term is not meant simply pejoratively. The violence in Antigone is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted an investigation into the relationship between language, sexuality (sexual reproduction), death, and “second death.” The third issue, which also constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. How does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, accord with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power?