Antigone's Voice

She cried out bitterly, with a sound like the piercing note of a bird when she sees her empty nest robbed of her young. (Sophocles, Antigone, 1994, 423-424)

For while fish are dumb in their element of water, birds soar freely in theirs, the air; separated from the objective heaviness of the earth, they fill the air with themselves, and utter their self-feeling in their own particular element. (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §351Zβ, pp. 354-355)

The stakes are high in reading Antigone. Oscillating between the figure of a daughter loyal to maternal ancestry and a symbol of disruption, or even the eradication of the meaningfulness of kinship structures, Antigone is read by philosophers and psychoanalysts alike as an image of sexuate identity caught in a web of psychic, familial, political, and social relationships. The stakes are high, of course, even when Antigone is not read, as George Steiner (1984) demonstrates, pointing to Freud's investment in Oedipus Rex, the first in Sophocles's Theban trilogy,1 an investment that leads to concern with vertical lines of kinship instead of the horizontal axis of relationships between siblings that is central to Antigone.2 The stakes are high, and so Luce Irigaray (1994), for instance, urges readers to “abstract Antigone from the seductive, reductive discourses and listen to what she has to say” (p. 70).3

What did she have to say? At least from the 19th century onward, readers of Sophocles's tragedy concentrated on Antigone

the agent, writing and thinking about what she does. Renowned, admired even, for her defiant acts of burying her brother, by which she self-consciously transgressed the ruler's decree, and mourned for her premature, self-inflicted death, Antigone's deeds were understood as dramatizing the possibilities—both the risks and the promises—of human existence. For Hegel, Antigone's actions, meant to protect divine law and familial bonds of love, were crucial