Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception"
- Publication: Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Thought
- Research area: Legal history
2/1/2009, Bonnie Honig, Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Thought
“Antigone’s Lament, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of Exception,” 37 Political Theory 5 (2009)
In a period of legla and political transition, forms of burial and lament become crucibles of political membership or dissidence. This is the much overlooked context for Sophocles' play Antigone: the shift in legal and political order from an aristocratic to a democratic regime. In the 5th century BC this meant a shift from a focus on the unique irreplaceability of each aristocratic regime member to a democratic faith in the equality and substitutability of any one for any other. In our own time we still wrestle, in part through the politics of burial and lament, with the problem of how to affirm both these values. As we shift from an 18 year ban on exhibiting the bodies or caskets of US military dead to allowing the families of the dead to decide whether or not to publicize their loss, we face again the questions posed so brutally by Sophocles' Antigone.