“Even if you are not aware of it, the latent fundamental image of Antigone forms part of your morality,” says Jacques Lacan and so, Lacan suggests, working through the trope (if not the play) of Antigone is necessary to establish a critical relationship to morality (1992: 284). Sophocles’ heroine forms latently part of our politics as well. It is now a mainstay of political and cultural theory to diagnose certain political problems as “Oedipal” and to recommend a solution that is, somehow, “Antigonean.” What is meant by Oedipal and Antigonean varies, however, so much so that it sometimes seems as if these terms might be empty signifiers. I argue here, however, that the “Antigone versus Oedipus” frame is itself generative, it resists instrumentalization, and its unintended political-cultural effects are not always positive.

As we saw in Chapter 1, those who turn to Antigone now do so in the hope she might break the spell of the father’s legacy of rationalism (Oedipus, the puzzle solver), rule, or governmentality (Oedipus, the king), or hierarchical, naturalized patriarchal power (Oedipus, the incest and parricide). Against these, political and feminist theorists have variously embraced Antigone as a bearer of true feeling possessed of a true ethical compass, powerful disobedient to tyrannical, tone-deaf, or impositional law, anti-patriarchal devotee of the natal over conjugal family form, or great lamenter and lover of the equal brother whom she grieves and buries at no small risk to herself.