Antigone rewritten, three alternate scenarios
example · Hegel ·
retold in 14 talks
Žižek describes his book rewriting Antigone in three alternate-history versions: (1) Sophocles' original; (2) Antigone wins the argument with Creon but this triggers revolt and ruin; (3) the Chorus executes both Antigone and Creon as traitors establishing Jacobin terror. He uses this to explore the logic of revolutionary action and its unintended consequences.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 15
“the third version... while creon and antigone are fighting, the chorus steps over, said you are both traitors ruining the city, you should both be liquidated and they establish a kind of jacobin terror”
“Her decision to risk everything for the proper funeral of her brother cannot be fully grounded in the universal immemorial rules she evokes.”
“she she always repeats how: what is she faithful in? Polynices. Not his unique but his name, his name.”1:09:08 Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 9 (Q & A)pub. 2018-11-29 · 1:59:32
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Antigone4Sophocles4John Milton3Italo Calvino2Tom Tykwer2Krzysztof Kieślowski4Julian Jaynes2Anthoni Schoonjans2
alongside works
Every retelling 15
Žižek describes his book rewriting Antigone in three alternate-history versions: (1) Sophocles' original; (2) Antigone wins the argument with Creon but this triggers revolt and ruin; (3) the Chorus executes both Antigone and Creon as traitors establishing Jacobin terror. He uses this to explore the logic of revolutionary action and its unintended consequences., illustrating revolutionary logic,Jacobin terror,alternate history,voluntarism
Antigone's decision to bury her brother cannot be grounded in universal rules (all deserve funerals) but is a particular, political act unsupported by the big Other., illustrating political suspension of the ethical,big Other
1:09:08 Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 9 (Q & A)pub. 2018-11-29 · 1:59:32
Antigone is cited as faithful not to her brother Polynices’ unique body, but to his name (the signifier), illustrating the 'pure symbolic ethics of desire' in Lacan’s Ethics seminar., illustrating pure symbolic ethics of desire
52:23 Apocalyptic & Post Apocalyptic – pandemic, dystopia, horror, climate change, & so on2021-10-14 · 1:35:56
The overlooked lines in which Antigone explicitly says that for a husband or child she would let the corpse rot and not defy the city's law, only for her irreplaceable brother does she act. Žižek reads this not as scandal but as the key to her ethics: her 'universal rule' is to let bodies rot, with only one exception., illustrating the law of exception,Antigone's 'aber',particular exception vs. liberal universalism
Antigone believes she acts from universal principle (bury the dead), but after the act she reveals she would only have done it for her brother. Goethe and Judith Butler tried to dismiss this as a later interpolation; Žižek insists with Hegel it is the whole point., illustrating retroactivity of meaning,immediate ethical substance,the limitation of naive ethics
Hegel notices that Antigone, while suffering, compares herself to mythic figures, she is already staging her image for posterity, a comic move within tragedy: the tragic actor checking if they are convincing., illustrating post-tragic comedy,end of art,comedy vs. tragedy