19 From Ancient Greek Drama to Argentina's ‘Dirty War’; Antígona Furiosa: On Bodies and the State

Abstract Griselda Gambaro's play Antígona Furiosa was written and staged after Gambaro's exile as a consequence of Argentina's so‐called ‘Dirty War’ in the mid‐1970s. This chapter discusses Gambaro's play, taking into account some of Giorgio Agamben's thoughts in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and The State of Exception (2005). Concepts such as ‘state of exception’, ‘inclusion of the exclusion’, ‘threshold’, and ‘living dead man’, as well as the figure of the camp are approached, illustrated, and fully explored by Antígona Furiosa in so far as they are at the heart of the structure of all major modern totalitarian states, of which the Argentinean ‘Proceso’ with its thousands of desaparecidos is just a new example. This chapter seeks to examine those notions not only as they are represented in the script of the play but essentially as they are reflected in the design of the performance space.