Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is better not to hunt the impossible.
—SophoclesI know of no better aim of life than that of perishing … in pursuit of the great and the impossible.
—NietzscheThe king gouged out his eyes for all to see. After killing his father and sleeping with his mother, Oedipus found his future was fated. In thinking he could escape his past, he ended up right where he began: his mother's bedroom. His sons, Polyneices and Eteocles, then fought each other for the throne. In an act of treason, Polyneices raised an Argive army against his native Thebes. The fratricide of civil war ended with both brothers dead. This is the memory that Athenian audiences likely took with them to the festival of Dionysia where they saw Sophocles's Antigone performed.
The play opens. The setting is postconflict Thebes, and its people desperately seek “forgetfulness of these wars” (166). Creon, the city's unproven king, has forbidden the burial of Polyneices—leaving his corpse to rot in flagrant defiance of the city's religious laws. Polyneices's sister Antigone defies the king's order by burying her brother anyway. This outrage sets the stage for a power struggle over whom, what, and how Thebes will remember.
Written around 441 BCE, the drama was staged in democratic Athens as a tragedy. As a public spectacle, tragedy was far more than a means of escapist entertainment; it was civic education.
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- Information
- The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics , pp. 25 - 40Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013