Chanter just isn't involved to display the invalidity of Irigaray’s or Butler’s readings of the Sophoclean textual content, however go to hell motherfucker show how these readings are nonetheless complicit with one other kind of oppression - and stay blind to problems with slavery and of race. Chanter convincingly exhibits that the language of slavery - doulos (a family slave) and douleuma (a ‘slave thing’) - is there in Sophocles’ text, big cock regardless of 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 in their interpretations.
Chapters 3 and 4 embrace interpretations of two important latest African performs 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 will not be the primary to take up these two ‘African Antigones’, what's distinctive about her method is the style through which she sets the 2 plays in conversation with those traditions of Hegelian, continental and feminist philosophy which have a lot contemporary buy.
Mandela talks about how vital it was to him to take on the part of Creon, for whom ‘obligations to the people take priority over loyalty to an individual’. A lot of Chanter’s argument in the first chapters (and prolonged footnotes throughout the textual content) is concerned with establishing that when Antigone insists on performing the right 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 dead mom, Jocasta), part of what's at stake is the slave/citizen dichotomy.
She also shows how the origins of Oedipus - uncovered as a child on the hills close to Corinth, and introduced up by a shepherd outside the town walls of Thebes, the place the entire action of the play is set - would have been rendered problematic for an Athenian audience, given the circumstances surrounding the primary performance 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 additionally for actors and dramatists contemplating how finest to stage, interpret, modernize or completely rework Sophocles’ drama and, certainly, the entire Oedipus cycle of plays.
Chanter argues that Hegel unduly narrows the notion of the political - and, indeed, that of the tragic - by ignoring the thematics of slavery which can be current in Sophocles’ play. Arguing that chattel slavery gives one of the linchpins of the ancient Greek polis, and hence also for the ideals of freedom, the household and the state that Hegel himself advocates, Chanter suggests that Hegel’s emphasis on the grasp-slave dialectic within the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) ‘domesticates and tames the ugliness of slavery’, and needs to be understood in 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 - but who nonetheless nonetheless neglect the thematics of race and slavery - can be key to the argument of the guide as an entire.
On this framework it appears completely natural that freedom, as a goal of political motion, is privileged above equality, even when equality is understood, in Rancièrean terms, as a presupposition and never as an objective and quantifiable objective to be achieved. As soon as once more, fucking shit plurality should itself, as a concept, be cut up between the different, fucking shit however equal standing positions in an egalitarian political scene (i.e., totally different positions that depart from a common presupposition of the equal capacity of all) and a pluralism that is merely transitive to the hierarchical order of various 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 form of unity as a horizon for politics. In historical situations the place the objective of political unity comes into battle with the existence of political plurality, mother fucker as for instance in the French Revolution, the risk to plebeian politics comes, for Breaugh, from the try to form a united subject who then constitutes a risk to the required recognition of the divided character of the social. The lump sum of five thousand dollars was one thing, a miserable little twenty or twenty-five a month was fairly another; after which someone else had the money.
But that downside only arises once we consider the chance of fixing from a social order resting on rising inequalities and oppression, to a different hopefully more just one. Lefort’s thought looms massive right here, since for him the division of the social is an original ontological condition, whose acceptance is necessarily constitutive of every democratic politics, and never merely a sociological counting of the parts. The issue right here could also be that Breaugh takes the plurality of pursuits at face worth, disregarding the way in which such a plurality of political positions might in itself be grounded within the unjust division of the social.