Antigone, Anger, Agonism

As Bonnie Honig has argued, our contemporary political imagination has been irrevocably shaped and disciplined by the image of Antigone, and this assertion is especially true when the subject of analysis is the political relevance of grief or mourning.⁹ Antigone has come to represent a politics of mourning in which the bereaved mobilize on the basis of shared grief in order to press their claims into the public sphere. Sophocles’s heroine also captures the penchant for mourning to edge into militancy and for the grief associated with injustice and trauma to be focused into a political rage that challenges the prevailing order of things. In Antigone, the eponymous protagonist violates the political order’s norms of propriety through both her actions and her inflammatory rhetoric. Antigone’s resistance has been alternately coded as a defense of the prerogatives of the private household, an articulation of aristocratic codes of honor, an antihumanist refusal of the symbolic order, and a complex form of immanent critique.¹⁰ Although the meaning of Antigone’s resistance is contested, the fact of her resistance seems relatively clear, and Sophocles’s play marks how grief over injustice can morph into a political weapon with deadly consequences.

Antigone remains a generative interlocutor for political theory and practice in part because her situation, broadly understood, is incessantly repeated within political communities.¹¹ Across the political spectrum, across cultural traditions, and across centuries, grief has mobilized public actions in ways that invoke the conflagration between Antigone and Creon. From the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) activists during the height of the AIDS crisis, to the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan during the Iraq war (2003–2011), grief over unrecognized losses has galvanized struggles to challenge the status quo. These struggles seem to operate—and are often narrated—beneath the long shadow cast by Sophocles’s conflicted character. As if repeating the trauma of Antigone’s and Creon’s agon, these eruptions of public grieving are typified by a confrontational style of protest that fashions alternative political spaces from which to gather supporters and criticize the actions of the state.

In these moments, mourning and mobilization collapse together. Political expressions of grief overturn the assumption behind the labor activist Joe Hill’s famous last words (“Don’t mourn, organize!”) because mourning, far from being a narcissistic absorption with injury, becomes a powerful means of organizing resistance. Whereas the AIDS activist Larry Kramer echoed Hill when he chastised gay men in the 1980s for an indulgent focus on grief at the expense of radical action, Douglas Crimp responded that, for many gay men, political activism was not supplanted by mourning but grew from it.¹² Militancy and mourning were synced together for Crimp because the legitimacy of homosexual grief was disavowed by the broader culture. Cultural refusals of acknowledgment intensified suffering and provided additional fuel for militant political action, just as Creon’s refusal to acknowledge Antigone’s responsibilities to Polyneices sparked the conflagration at Thebes.

With his discussion of how social stigma “savaged” homosexuals during their most intense “hour[s] of loss,” Crimp provides keen insight into the connection between grief and public acts of resistant protest. The traumas surrounding the AIDS crisis—ranging from a proliferating infection rate, rapid declines in health and the disturbing deaths of friends and loved ones, and the deep uncertainty and fear surrounding the causes of infection and means of protection—were impoverishing and devastating. Yet these losses were intensified by what Crimp describes as American society’s “ruthless interference with our bereavement.” The cold indifference of those unaffected by AIDS, the cruel persecutions of state and national administrations, and the prevailing sense of stigma attached to homosexual desire added up to a felt sense that homosexuals were robbed of social standing through a “violence of silence and omission” that was “almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder.” The wounding or heavy silence of social non- or misrecognition, Crimp argued, “desecrates the memories of our dead,” and as a result “we rise in anger to vindicate them.”¹³ Nonrecognition, then, provides an important motivational link between grief and activist mourning. It also places Crimp’s reflections on mourning beneath the long shadow cast by Antigone.¹⁴ For Antigone, the pain of her loss was intensified by Creon’s proclamation to leave Polyneices’s body unburied. Creon’s savage interference with Antigone’s bereavement is what seems to have triggered her resistance, because “to leave the dead man, my mother’s son, dead and unburied, that would have been real pain.” (468). Crimp echoes Antigone, then, when he argues that the violence of social erasure or desecration doubles the pain of loss and, in turn, inspires acts of vindication.

Crimp’s essay provides another clue to understanding why grief can morph into political grievance and activism. Strong identification with the suffering and the departed can cultivate a powerful sense of guilt among the healthy and the surviving, and this guilt—both expressed or unconscious—in turn feeds activist anger. As Crimp puts it, the painful feelings associated with socially nonrecognized losses are “exacerbated” by “secret wishes, during our lovers’ and friends’ protracted illnesses, that they would just die and let us get on with our lives.” Survivors’ guilt is then faced down, Crimp argues, through the commitment to publicly “uphold … the memories of our lost friends and lovers.” Yet this commitment takes the same form as the reaction to desecration; it “impose[s] the same demand: resist!”¹⁵ Militancy arises not only from social interference with mourning but “from conscious conflicts within mourning itself”—namely, the struggle to work through the Janus-faced obligations to the dead and to those who survive (including the self). For ACT UP activists such as Crimp, then, militancy springs from the painful erasures of social stigma and from what we could call a survivors’ commitment (triggered by intense feelings of guilt) to honor the dead through the agency of the living. In these ways, guilt at having survived helps turn felt grief into an angry, activist politics of mourning. If the ambivalent feelings of sadness and relief, terror and triumph, cannot be consciously experienced or worked through, then the lost object is internalized alongside an overwhelming sense of guilt, which intensifies militant resistance in that object’s name.

At a different point of the political spectrum—but within a similar register of grief qua grievance—many pro-life activists have described their form of direct action as a process of mourning and coping with death.¹⁶ In such cases, the mourning is both retrospective and prospective—aborted fetuses are often given names, “baptisms,” and “funerals,” and the threat of imminent death galvanizes protests at abortion clinics and family planning centers. For many of these activists, “rescue” provides “a format for trying to fight against death.”¹⁷ Similar in style, if not substance, AIDS and pro-life activists have each sought to mobilize supporters through a shared sense of vulnerability and outrage, fueled by insistent claims that the larger culture was both indifferent toward their suffering and hostile toward their cause. Each, then, trades on themes of desecration and survivor guilt in order to turn grief into political action. Similarly, for Antigone, the compulsion to act was driven by a commitment to the dead, internalized object of Polyneices, reinforced by the public denial of her loss. Above all else, she claims, “I will not be false to him” (47), despite Theban indifference or hostility.

Feelings of nonrecognition and the Janus-faced nature of survivors’ guilt, some argue, are intensified through connections to the liminal experience of death and grief. For Gail Holst-Warhaft, grief offers a “unique opportunity for social mobilization and political action” because “grief is probably the most powerful emotion we ever feel.”¹⁸ While anthropologists have challenged the universality of grief as a deeply emotional experience, the eruptive and urgent power of grief has been noted across a variety of cultural traditions.¹⁹ Grief’s passion, according to Holst-Warhaft, is excessive and ecstatic; it carries us “to the edge of madness.”²⁰ At this edge, grief and anger collapse together in ways that spark powerful resistance. The power of mourning, whether stemming from named violations or from a sense of survivor’s commitment, rests on the energy created by what Holst-Warhaft calls the “unity of shared rage.”²¹ The unity of shared rage fashions solidarity out of sorrow and channels mutual grief into public grievance. It is what allowed the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina to form an effective grassroots organization despite threats and intimidation. Transforming their “anguish into action,” the Madres fashioned an organization that gathered together their individual sufferings into a potent political force.²² They overcame the enforced silence over the disappearances and “forged a space in political vocabulary and hence in political consciousness.”²³ Shared grief and rage amplified individual suffering into an effective and affectively charged public voice that disrupted and challenged the Argentine junta’s ability to act with impunity.

Nicole Loraux has also noted the penchant for grief to turn into political grievance—and for mourning to manifest itself as political mobilization. Similar to Holst-Warhaft, Loraux argues that grief can be transformed into a form of “defiance” and “memory-wrath” because grief “does not forget and feeds on itself.”²⁴ Comparing the wrath of aggrieved mothers to the anger of Achilles, Loraux notes how the Greeks of classical Athens were both fascinated by and wary of the strange power of grief. As she puts it, excessive mourning was “a threat to be contained, but also to be fantasized about.”²⁵ This ambivalence shines forth in the portrayal not only of Antigone but also of Electra, who embodies the power of a grief that feeds on itself until it can only be expressed as wrath and fury. Endlessly repeating her lament, Electra’s grief/rage is “unmanageable” in its excess—an eruptive and urgent passion that insists on remembrance of Clytemnestra’s deed over and against any efforts at forgiving or moving on.

Loraux contextualizes her reading of tragedy within the struggle over mourning rites and rituals in the ancient polis. In Athens of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, there was an ongoing struggle to discipline and disrupt archaic forms of public mourning, which were typified by passionate and violent actions that often contributed to ongoing blood feuds between warring clans.²⁶ In the sixth century, the Athenian lawgiver Solon famously prohibited certain traditional lamentation practices such as the laceration of the face and body; he also decreased the number of mourners who could be present for the funeral and its procession and forbade the performance of lamentations in any place outside of the household or the cemetery.²⁷ Despite these prohibitions, however, for Loraux the portrayal of the dangerous passion of grief within Greek tragedy betrayed a persistent anxiety about grief’s power that Solon’s edicts had clearly failed to assuage. Portrayals of excessive grief such as Antigone’s and Electra’s demonstrated that the conflict over mourning was never fully settled in the Athenian polis.²⁸

Between Holst-Warhaft and Loraux, we can detect two varieties of agonistic mourning: agonism as response and agonism as ground. For Holst-Warhaft, the unity of shared rage stems from experiences of disrespect or desecration. Feeding off the intense power of grief, activists cultivate solidarity and mobilize in ways that challenge or disrupt the circuitry of violence or nonrecognition that intensifies social trauma.²⁹ The angry, activist reply—pitched in the discourse and often the iconography of mourning—is a response to the conditions of misrecognition or trauma within which the bereaved find themselves. For Loraux, on the other hand, the excessive passion of grief provides testimony to the perpetual conflict and discord at the root of common life. Grief’s unmanageable excess reflects a deep source of conflict that is in constant tension with the polis’s desire for order. Tragedy, as a “genre in conflict,” exemplified this tension because, while it took place within the context of a civic festival that aimed in part at reinforcing the boundaries of political membership, it also gave voice to the “noncivic” passion of excessive grief. The mourning represented in tragedy indexes not merely a temporary unity of rage that can challenge the political status quo but also an endless agonistic conflict where, pace Heraclitus, “struggle (eris) is inseparable from justice (dikê) and discord is the rule.”³⁰

Loraux, then, locates “another politics” at the crossroads of the passionate “forever” of grief and the organizing force of the polis. This other form of politics is “no longer based on consensus and living together” but on what Loraux calls the “bond of division.”³¹ The bond of division indexes a foundational antagonism at the root of all political orders. As Loraux puts it, the “civil war” that is “congenital to the city” is the only thing truly “held in common.”³² The mourning represented in tragedy, on Loraux’s reading, reveals an internal division that no performed act—from passionate lament to civic rites to tragic festival—can eliminate.

The agonism of Antigone-style mourning, then, persists on two levels. Crimp (along with pro-life advocates) sees an occasion for militant political activism within the conflict between felt grief and an indifferent or hostile culture that surrounds and intensifies this grief. In their responses to named instances of misrecognition or desecration, these actors challenge hegemonic norms that disavow their lives and losses. Similarly, Holst-Warhaft sees grief as an easily manipulable resource for agonistic politics, as a potent “cue for passion.”³³ Mourning is reliably political because the doubled grief of loss and misrecognition inspires rage that can be effectively channeled into action.

Loraux acknowledges this level of mourning’s agonism but goes further. She locates within tragedy a portrayal of (atemporal) grief that reveals an irresolvable internal conflict within every community. For Loraux, Electra’s passionate mourning—which claims eternity as its temporality—restages a bond of division that cannot be the source of a consensus because it is every agreement’s hidden scandal. For Loraux, the ancient polis—in fact, every political order—is founded in conflict, which remains “an innate force” despite occasional fantasies of unity.³⁴

How should we approach this suturing between an affectively charged, activist politics of mourning and the two levels of agonism—as response and as ground? On the one hand, it is important to note that the activist anger associated with shared grief or rage often threatens to re-create, rather than to interrupt, the circuitry of violence or nonrecognition that it aims to challenge. The justifiable need to register pain and loss can quickly morph into the need to punish persecutors, leading to possibility that, in Mahmoud Mamdani’s words, victims become killers.³⁵ Mamdani refers to this connection between a sense of loss and a resentful need to punish others within the context of pregenocide Rwanda, yet similar cases abound from diverse contexts such as Northern Ireland to Palestine/Israel. Each of these cases shows the dangerous edge of agonism as response—the tendency, as it were, for agonism to slide into violent antagonism, via the resentful search for scapegoats on which one’s suffering can be discharged. As Holst-Warhaft puts it, “it is a fine line between channeling grief for the benefit of the oppressed and unleashing the violent anger of suffering.”³⁶

On the other hand, to deny or to discipline the rage associated with social nonrecognition or violent trauma is also not without problems. As many have argued, activist anger has often been unjustly pathologized or stigmatized by cultural norms (such as “civility”) that serve to reinforce oppression or practices of marginalization. Hence for bell hooks, “it is humanizing” to rage against oppression.³⁷ If we understand or approach rage from the perspective of the powerless, rather from the perspective of the social order that is being called to account, then we can see anger as an essential strategy for the achievement of social voice and presence. What hooks refers to as “killing rage” is a form of psychic “ammunition” for the colonized or oppressed; it nurtures the possibility of an active politics of refusal and provides space for social hope.³⁸ The killing rage drawn from shared experiences of social humiliation or stigma can open up new political horizons that have been foreclosed on by the status quo. Without these expressions of rage, the circuitry of social misrecognition can go unchallenged and undisturbed. Rage, in short, is a necessary precondition for the expression of political subjectivity for those who have been socially erased or marginalized. As Honneth has argued, subjects are ultimately incapable of indifference to the violation of respect insofar as it compromises needs for basic self-esteem and a sense of social standing. James Baldwin referred to this lack of indifference to experiences of disrespect as the “rage of the disesteemed,” which according to Baldwin is “absolutely inevitable” in contexts of social nonrecognition and is “one of the things that makes history.”³⁹

Nevertheless, the dangers surrounding “killing rage” of the disesteemed, including the possibilities that justified anger will turn into the resentful search for scapegoats, or that rage will slip into a cycle of retribution, require sensitivity to the complex demands attendant to the political expression of grief. On this point, Klein’s account proves essential because Klein gives us a vantage point onto the interactions between social experiences of, and psychic defenses against, grief.

As described in chapter 1, Klein argues that experiences of loss give rise to divergent responses. In the paranoid-schizoid position, mourning is forestalled as internal and external stresses and strains are projected out and sutured onto a one-sided persecutory other. Through mechanisms of splitting, idealization, and demonization, the ego defends itself against the pain of loss or nonrecognition. Rage directed at the persecutory other, then, can take the place of mourning. This was one of Crimp’s insights, who warned fellow activists that the justified rage against an indifferent or hostile culture could also function as a form of defense or “disavowal,” which by “making all violence external” fails to “acknowledge our ambivalence.”⁴⁰ For Crimp, angry, passionate activism was warranted, but it also was a potential “means of dangerous denial.”⁴¹ In this respect Crimp echoed the insights of Klein, who noted how the “intensely moral and exacting” nature of paranoid-schizoid defenses resulted in a split perceptual-affective experience of the world, which is subsequently divided into “extremely bad and extremely perfect objects.”⁴² These defenses protect the ego against the dislocating force of loss, but only at the expense of the “relentless” and “extremely cruel demands” of the idealized, internalized object.⁴³

Eve Sedgwick provides an explicit bridge from the theory of Klein to agonistic activism. As Sedgwick puts it, the “propulsive energy of activist justification … tends to be structured very much in a paranoid-schizoid fashion,” including tendencies toward “scapegoating, purism, and schism.”⁴⁴ Political struggles are often rhetorically and affectively framed in ways that activate what Klein saw as the defenses against mourning, which serve to freeze self and other into one-sided caricatures engaged in a melodramatic struggle of good versus evil. An agonistic politics of mourning, then, fulfills its own prophecy about the intimate connection between conflict and political communities. It incessantly repeats the conflict while citing discord as its ground. Yet an agonistic politics of mourning is self-defeating insofar as it presumes a structurally hostile audience that can only be engaged through a confrontational and militant form of direct action because its dominant normative practices contribute to the suffering that inspires resistance. In this way, activist anger risks sliding from a struggle to acknowledge wounds into a form of “wounded identity” that only mimics what it struggles against.⁴⁵ Agonistic mourning challenges the boundaries and coherence of the political order, but it can also reify and mimic this (fantasy-imbued) order through the performance of its own dogmatic claims. Every Antigone seemingly requires, if he or she does not actively morph into, a Creon. At its most extreme edge (Loraux’s “bond of division”), agonism’s claims actually dissolve as claims and persist only as reminders of perpetual discord, strife, and grief. At this level, mourning as agonism fulfills the literal meaning (or curse?) of Antigone, whose name translates as “in the place of birth or generation.” Agonism cannot generate anything beyond stale repetitions of negation or resistance. The absolute, guilt-ridden commitment to the internalized object collapses together eris and dikê—strife and justice.

With the idea of the depressive position, however, Klein describes a form of mourning that avoids the pathologies attendant to a purely agonistic politics of grief. The defenses against mourning testified to by Crimp and Sedgwick—the tendencies toward splitting, idealization, and demonization, the “baleful circuit” of resentment,⁴⁶ and the projection or expulsion of the stresses and strains of loss or trauma—are each mitigated by the work of mourning that takes place within the depressive position. The depressive position is the space from which the individual can repair their (internal and external) connections with others. For Klein, loss or trauma disrupts not only the individual’s experience with the external world (which, following Freud, feels cold and barren following a loss) but also the internal “assembly” of objects and affects that constitute the inner side of experience. Mourning involves a doubled labor of repairing the world—reanimating the internal space populated by multiple, whole internal objects while renewing links to the external world. Essential to this labor is recognition of the “wholeness” or multisidedness of our objects of attachment. In other words, not until the ambivalence of self and other is faced down and acknowledged can the defenses of the paranoid-schizoid position—and the “intensely moral” and persecutory guilt attendant to that position—be mitigated or overcome.⁴⁷

Klein’s theory is a subtle but ultimately significant revision of Freud’s account of mourning, which focused on the conflict between an ego that is reluctant to forsake its libidinal investments in the lost object and the harsh, cold truth bespoken by the reality principle, which serves as a perpetual reminder of the object’s absence and the need for reattachment. Unlike Freud, Klein does not lay strong emphasis on the process of detachment. Instead she focuses on the different ways in which a relationship to the internal object is maintained—either through the intense, persecutory circuitry of the paranoid-schizoid position, under which the object assumes an outsized and cruel presence within the psyche (akin to Freud’s account of melancholia, in which the “shadow of the object falls upon the ego”), or through the depressive position, in which the demands of the internalized object are intermixed with the demands of other, whole objects of attachment—both living and departed. The depressive position bridges the stark “cleavage between idealized and persecutory objects” in ways such that the “fantastic objects lose in strength.”⁴⁸ The depressive position acts as a perceptual-affective filter that processes internal and external relationships through an awareness of ambivalence and wholeness.

How does the depressive position interact with the affects of rage or anger? For Klein, the depressive position does not defeat or transcend these affects—any more than it defeats or transcends grief—but it marks the filtering of anger through the sieve of whole object relations. Anger is no longer manically focused on the caricatured objects of the paranoid-schizoid position; instead it is refracted through the prism of depressive awareness by which the conflicts within and between selves can be more accurately perceived and worked through. The depressive position, then, represents less the defeat of rage than the integration of rage with what Winnicott called the “capacity to become depressed.” By contrast, in the words of Crimp, a failure of integration is to “make … all violence external” and to fail to comprehend how rage can function as a dangerous and self-defeating “mechanism of our disavowal.”⁴⁹

For Klein, the depressive position is the basis for an affirmative and constructive response to loss or trauma, though these responses will also always be marked by an essential tragedy. By acknowledging the complexity and ambivalence of our objects of attachment and by facing down our aggression and vulnerability—rather than anxiously projecting out unsafe affects into idealized or demonized others—desecration can be challenged outside the consoling defenses of the paranoid-schizoid position. By these means, survivor’s guilt can be acknowledged and worked through, without succumbing to the overwhelming cruelty of persecutory forms of guilt. This marks the achievement of what Sedgwick calls the “agency” of the depressive position, which comes from the acknowledgment that one “can be relatively empowered or disempowered without annihilating someone else or being annihilated.”⁵⁰ The agency of the depressive position can be contrasted to the agency of the paranoid-schizoid position, which, through defenses of omnipotence and denial, sees agency in zero-sum terms of absolute triumph or utter annihilation.

Klein does not say the last word on the connection between anger, activism, and mourning—if only because she was not sensitive to the ways in which the external stresses and strains of trauma are unevenly distributed across social space.⁵¹ Because violent trauma and social nonrecognition have historically tracked along racial, class, and gender markers, a political or social theory of mourning must not only understand the psychic vicissitudes of activism qua defense but also appreciate the social defensibility of activist anger as a response to the experiences of exclusion or oppression. hooks’s argument is compelling—rage in response to desecration can be liberating and humanizing because this “killing rage” might be the only means of breaking through layers of social indifference or active oppression in ways that allow subjects to assert their claims for standing and recognition. What is missing from an agonistic defense of rage, however, is an appreciation of how anger and rage, because they can take the place of mourning, can repeat, rather than disrupt or challenge, patterns of social erasure or misrecognition. In other words, a social theory of mourning that is missing an account of the psychic positions of grief—and the defenses against mourning—is as inadequate as a purely psychological approach that reduces all public manifestations of activist rage to defenses against internal turmoil.

Although Klein stopped short of a political theory of mourning, her claims about the positions have immanent social and political content. For Klein, the achievement (always unsteady and fragile) of the depressive position depends on the experience of “mutual sorrow and sympathy” within external relationships.⁵² Correspondingly, the baleful circuits of resentment, punishment, and cruelty of the paranoid-schizoid position reflect and are reinforced by social experiences of marginalization or misrecognition. In other words, the individual labor of mourning and the social work of recognition are deeply dependent on one another; in fact, it is impossible to even speak of one in isolation from the other.⁵³ If Crimp, Sedgwick, and Klein are correct, then the angry work of political activism and the work of mourning are not diametrically opposed but are in desperate need of one another. What remains to be sketched, however, is an argument that connects the agency of the depressive position with an effective activist politics. In the next two sections of this chapter, I create some space for this argument through a return to the haunting, mournful figure of Antigone.

Antigone and Agonist Political Theory

The connections between anger, grief, and an agonistic mode of politics can be further teased out through a reading of recent appropriations of Antigone within political theory. Judith Butler, for instance, has repeatedly turned to Antigone in order to theorize the connection between mourning and a critical, left politics. In these writings, Butler has reflected both levels of mourning’s agonism. Namely, Butler has used Antigone to describe a disruptive mode of political resistance that is sparked by the struggle between disavowed desire and cultural forces of prohibition; yet Butler, like Loraux, also sees the conflict between Antigone and Creon as an instantiation of the inherently contested and conflicted nature of politics itself. Butler, then, oscillates between different levels of agonism: she invokes Antigone to describe a concrete politics of resistance, but Antigone’s claims also point beyond a politics of recognition toward “the limits of representation and representability.”⁵⁴

Butler’s interest in mourning and melancholia traces back to her influential theory of gender constructivism.⁵⁵ In this work, Butler wrote about “aborted” or “foreclosed” mourning surrounding homosexual desire.⁵⁶ Because this desire faced social stigma, homosexual losses could not be registered or acknowledged. The “absence of cultural conventions for avowing the loss of homosexual love” amounted to a “preemption of grief.”⁵⁷ Drawing on Freud’s account of character formation through gender consolidation, Butler argued that a foundational repudiation of same-sex desire inaugurated the gendered subject. In this way, the child internalizes, as “an interior moral directive,” a prohibition resulting from social taboo.⁵⁸ By accepting this directive, the heretofore loose or anarchic desire of the young child is channeled according to the dictates of cultural prejudice, and the loss that occurs at this moment cannot thereafter be consciously acknowledged or mourned. The loss, denied as such, becomes unspeakable.

In her later work, Butler generalized from the melancholia of gender norms to describe a series of concrete political and cultural prohibitions that have shaped which losses can be properly mourned and which, on the other hand, are passed over in silence. These cultural refusals of mourning included, for instance, the losses due to AIDS, the deaths caused by the prosecution of the so-called war on terror, and the inability to recognize or mourn for those caught up in U.S. practices of indefinite detention and torture.⁵⁹ In all of this work, Butler has drawn attention to the paucity of available means for the public expression of certain losses and the inability of the marginalized to make their grief visible because their losses are prohibited by social stigma. As Butler argued, the losses from AIDS could not rise above the stigma attached to homosexual desire, just as the deaths of foreign civilians caught up in the global war on terror had difficulty breaking through the dominant frames of the conflict. In these instances, melancholia is less a psychological pathology than a political and cultural phenomenon. As Butler put it, “where there is no public recognition or discourse through which such [losses] might be named and mourned, then melancholia takes on cultural dimensions.”⁶⁰ The prohibition of public mourning doubles the trauma of loss.

To confront these cultural prohibitions, Butler focuses on the discursive frames by which experience is organized in mediated culture. As she puts it, “a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that frame works … to preclude certain kinds of questions.”⁶¹ For instance, in describing the dominant response to September 11, Butler laments the delegitimization of efforts to contextualize the terrorists’ actions in a history of U.S. foreign intervention, or in global patterns of poverty and religiosity, as rationalizations for the attacks or blaming the victim. Instead, media coverage focused on the attackers’ personal histories and on shadowy Al Qaeda “masterminds” like Osama bin Laden. On Butler’s understanding, this was largely an effort to make sense of the events by situating them within a recognizable frame of subjective agency and charismatic leadership. As she puts it, “isolating the individuals involved absolves us of the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for events.”⁶² Moreover, public commemorations of these events are typified by a “monumental” style of mourning that short-circuits critical reflection on these losses.⁶³ At these moments, critical modes of questioning are drowned out and overwhelmed by rituals of “spectacular public grief.”⁶⁴

Recognition of the limited framing of loss and the monumental performances of mourning that perpetuate denials inspired Butler to assert a disruptive politics of grief as the means of resignifying the “conditions of grievability.”⁶⁵ It is here that Butler turns to Antigone. Antigone represents the possibility of refusing the hegemonic orders of intelligibility by which grief is apportioned out. She does so by revealing what Butler calls the “aberrant temporality of the norm,” or its dependence on sustained performances that are never guaranteed.⁶⁶ Creon’s edict outlawing mourning rites for Polyneices functions only insofar as it is taken up and repeated by the Theban subjects. Antigone’s insistent refusal to recognize Creon’s law gives momentum to growing doubts within the city, first voiced in the play by Haemon and later echoed by the chorus of Theban elders. Ultimately, Antigone sparks a political conflagration by refusing the frame that organizes the city’s grief.

For Butler, Antigone’s predicament offers an allegory about similar crises in our time. As she puts it, “Antigone refuses to obey any law that refuses public recognition of her loss, and in this way prefigures the situation that those with publicly ungrievable losses—from AIDS, for instance—know too well.”⁶⁷ By her actions Antigone hints at the possibility that subjects might resist and reconfigure the discursive norms that bind them. Antigone’s particular claims over the body of her fallen brother ultimately force a polis-wide recognition of the law’s inherent instability. Antigone troubles the distinctions over who can speak in public and over which losses could or should be mourned.

Antigone’s agonism, for Butler, is one both of response and of ground. On the one hand, Antigone’s claim is concrete and political. She insists on a proper burial for Polyneices against the dictates of Creon. In this respect, she “speaks in the name of politics and the law,” and her resistance is made from within that language and as a reaction to an abuse of power.⁶⁸ However, for Butler, Antigone’s claims also point beyond the “question of representation” to “somewhere else … to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed.”⁶⁹ Antigone gives voice to a limit that is “internal to normative construction itself.”⁷⁰ The power of Antigone’s claim is that it demonstrates an inherent instability within discursive subjugation.⁷¹ The norm or prohibition that structures subjectivity never fully determines the subject because “the ‘subject’ created is not for that reason fixed in place: it becomes the occasion for a further making … a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence.”⁷²

Hence, for Butler, Antigone’s grief is not exemplary because it attempts to create more public space for the working through of traumatic loss or to slowly bend the norms and codes of speech. Instead, Antigone is exemplary because she signals the “scandal” by “which the unspeakable … makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence.”⁷³ Antigone’s speech acts are, as literal claims, irrelevant; instead what is significant is the way in which her speech leads to a “fatality [that] exceeds her life and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising fatality, the social form of its aberrant, unprecedented future.”⁷⁴

However, Butler’s attempt to link the praxis of disruption with more comprehensive agonistic claims is not without costs. In the particular case of Antigone, it serves to push her concrete claims, and her acts of mourning, outside of the polis (a replication, in effect, of Creon’s prohibition). Butler elevates Antigone’s acts of grieving into a paradigmatic politics of disruption, yet in this elevation Antigone’s recorded laments seem to lose the texture and ambivalence that comes from their location within codes of speech and public interaction. That these norms sought to exclude the rights of the claimant to speak is surely relevant to any reading of the play, but also relevant is Sophocles’ inversion of these norms and Antigone’s discursive success in undermining Creon’s claims for legitimacy and, even, in altering the Theban codes of speech surrounding grief. It is worth recalling that Antigone’s first actual laments in the play are not directed at her brother but at the polis and her fellow Thebans: “My City! Rich citizens of my city! … I would still have you as my witnesses” (line 842). Even more important and remarkable is the effect that Antigone’s efforts have on how the citizens of Thebes view the traditional codes surrounding lamentation and speech. Toward the end of the drama, when Eurydice learns of the death of her son Haemon, she retreats into the home in order—we soon discover—to commit suicide. In the wake of her departure, the leader of the chorus and the messenger begin to question the wisdom of domestic “repression” surrounding grief (1250). As the chorus leader puts it, “a silence so extreme is as dangerous as a flood of silly tears” (1248). The messenger concurs, “You are right: in an excess of silence, too, there may be trouble” (1256). The agon between Antigone and Creon is hardly an ideal speech situation, but it does appear to have yielded public reflection on the norms by which life at Thebes was organized.

Butler’s reading of Antigone obscures this ambiguity. Despite Butler’s acknowledgment that Antigone is “trying to grieve, to grieve publicly,” she avers that these “loud proclamations of grief presuppose a domain of the ungrievable.”⁷⁵ Unsatisfied with a diagnosis of Thebes’ political melancholia, manifested by Creon’s dictatorial prohibition of discursive contestation surrounding the death of Polyneices, Butler insists on a register of unknowable conflict perpetually beyond our discursive grasp. As a result, Butler interprets Antigone’s public mourning less as a representable claim within a concrete community than as an irruptive force that reveals the limits of representation, sovereignty, and the law.⁷⁶ Butler’s insistence on reading Antigone’s claim as an “impossible” form of mourning, then, ultimately obscures the complex texture of Antigone’s claims and their partial success. As a result, mourning as a political practice becomes abstracted from the social contexts within which losses are described, contested, and redescribed.⁷⁷ Anger becomes detached from desecration, nonrecognition, and survivors’ commitment, and it becomes, pace Loraux, a reminder of endless discord at the root of political and interpersonal life. Anger feeds on itself, losing touch with the broader world and the complex, ambivalent objects within that world.

These points against Butler’s reading of Antigone are reinforced by Bonnie Honig’s interpretation of Butler in the context of Honig’s own agonist reappropriation of Antigone. For Honig, it is important not to abstract Antigone’s claims—as Butler does—such that they become elevated into paradigmatic expressions of vulnerability or performativity. Rather, interpreters of Antigone should embed her laments within their original context of articulation before using this (resituated) Antigone to reflect on one’s own political situation. Like Butler, Honig wants to reflect on contemporary politics through the story of Antigone; in fact, as previously mentioned, she argues that doing without Antigone “is not something we are free to do,” any more than Oedipus could flee his fate by leaving Corinth.⁷⁸ But without an effort to situate Antigone’s claims within the politics of ancient Athens, Honig argues that Antigone’s story is reduced to free-floating ethical abstractions about filial duty or postpolitical exhortations about universal vulnerability. As a side effect of this abstraction, Antigone becomes a merely reactive figure whose actions are framed as disobedience, dissidence, or refusal. Yet to identify Antigone’s political choices in terms of disobedience is to fall for “hegemony’s tactic,” by describing actions from the vantage point of the established order. If we focus on what Antigone says “no” to, we obscure the alternative political order to which she wants to say “yes.” Honig’s interpretive efforts seek to rescue Antigone from sentimentalist discourses that see her as a loving sister forced into disobedience by an unjust political order, or critical discourses that focus on Antigone’s strangeness or lack of fit, and to focus on Antigone as a vibrant political actor, representing a viable alternative from within the given order of things.

To better see Antigone as a yes-saying figure of action, Honig revivifies the ancient Athenian struggle over competing political orders that formed the background within which Sophocles wrote his play. For Honig, Antigone stages a struggle between different “economies” of mourning, relating to classical Athens’ struggle over burial procedures and mourning rites. Sophocles’s play involves a struggle between a displaced Homeric style of individualized grief (represented by Antigone) and a democratic style of mourning that seeks to tightly regulate funerary practices in order to glorify the polis itself (represented by Creon).⁷⁹ Creon’s edict forbidding the burial of Polyneices demonstrates how an aristocratic style of lamentation focusing on individual achievement and suffering was being supplanted by the city’s anonymization of the dead—which was given its classical form, a decade after the play’s first performance, in Pericles’s oration.

By resituating Antigone’s story, Honig hopes to resituate the politics of grief within a more encompassing, agonistic “politics of enmity.” For Honig, the fight over grievable life is merely a “synecdoche” of the broader political struggle by which plural and contending wills perpetually clash.⁸⁰ The body of Polyneices, then, is less the sole cause of the conflict and more of a pretext for a broader power struggle in Thebes (itself a thinly veiled representation for ongoing power struggles in Athens). For Honig, by focusing less on Antigone’s natal politics, and more on her reactive laments, political theorists and actors risk advancing either an apolitical humanism (what Honig calls “mortalist humanism”) or a constrained politics of lamentation that freezes actors within a “bad script” of the woeful, grieving sister/mother.⁸¹ Political action is reduced and misplaced by the frame of grievability, so despite the “grief that in our politics we … do so much to generate,”⁸² political theorists and activists have to exceed the lamentation of power and its excesses and search for ways to claim power. For Honig, Antigone can be a model for this form of politics, if we rescue her from the framework of the model mourner as offered by Butler and others.

As noted by Honig, Butler’s appropriations of Antigone have shifted over time, from a focus on the Sophoclean heroine’s resistance to the state toward an ethical universalism that focuses on humans’ “equal grievability.” According to Honig, however, with this second move Butler risks joining those—such as Jean Elshtain—who sentimentalize Antigone and the political actors who invoke her (such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo). By sentimentalizing Antigone as a model mourner, Butler betrays her earlier (agonistic) argument, which emphasized how Antigone’s irreducible impropriety serves to throw gender and familial norms into crisis. Moreover, Butler and other mortalist humanists, in order to fit Antigone in the straitjacket of universal lamentation, divest her of her “politicality—sometimes ugly, violent, difficult.”⁸³ Yet the projection of politicality and sovereignty onto another space is to supplant political struggle over power with an ethical lamentation of power’s excesses.⁸⁴ If mourning is reified as a pre- or postpolitical exercise by which claims for universal vulnerability are addressed to power, rather than being seen as an intervention within the clash of wills by which power is claimed, then perhaps, Honig argues, we ought to resist the framework of lamentation and its depoliticizing traps. Both the rhetoric and the practices of mourning might be inappropriate for political actors insofar as the former are compromised by apolitical overtones.

In a second attempt to resituate Antigone’s claims within their broader political context, Honig sketches out what it might mean to resist the seduction of a lamentation framework.⁸⁵ In this essay, Honig describes what she refers to as Antigone’s “complex politicality,” which has been obscured by readings such as Butler’s that see Antigone as the model mourner while abstracting her claims from their original context of enunciation. Honig bases this reading on a subtle interpretation of Antigone’s final speech, in which she claims that it was only a brother—not a husband or a child or a parent—that could have inspired her acts of resistance. The speech has been interpreted, both sympathetically and critically, as revealing Antigone’s horrifying excess.⁸⁶ Yet for Honig, this speech, read in its original context, “makes political sense.”⁸⁷ Within the speech, Antigone makes a complex political argument through “parody, mimicry, and citation,” which puts “Creon on trial.”⁸⁸ Antigone parodies Athenian funeral oratory by focusing on the irreplaceability of her lost brother; she mimics Creon by implying that it is she—and not Haemon—who has the ability to find other lovers; and she cites Herodotus’s story about Darius and Intraphrenes’s wife in order to (implicitly) chastise Creon for a failure to govern properly. For Honig, Antigone’s layered claims are obscured when interpreters focus only on her laments; her laments are excessive but they also exceed lament to claim a political “place from which to be heard.”⁸⁹ By putting the speech into its political context, Honig shows that Antigone’s story is one not only of lamentation but also of natality and pleasure—not only the “mere life” of mourning but also the “more life” of action.⁹⁰

Antigone’s layered political claims, with their mixture of lament, parody, mimicry, resistance, pain, and pleasure can offer “a still powerful solicitation to contemporary audiences to see grief and lamentation in political not ethical terms.”⁹¹ To claim Antigone, then, is to reclaim her politics and her anger, while deprivileging or, rather, contextualizing her grief within the more encompassing clash of wills that is agonistic politics. If Antigone is restored as a political actor—rather than being reduced to a model mourner—then we can see the task of politics more clearly as the contestation for power rather than the lamentation over power’s excesses. Moving out from the example of Antigone, Honig counsels a similar move with regard to the contemporary politics of mourning—to see struggles over the recognition of grief and loss as instances of the larger, endless struggle over power that constitutes political life, that is, to put lamentations of “mere life” into conversation with activist struggles for “more life.” Because grief—while generative of solidarity and energy for action—can drain or absorb the “more life” of politics, Honig argues that we must counterbalance the politics of mourning with practices that celebrate natality and agency.

Honig turns to the figure of Crimp in order to locate a natal praxis of struggle that, while acknowledging the importance of mourning, also does more than mourn. Unlike Butler and other ethical antistatists, Crimp and ACT UP had an ambivalent relationship to the state that went beyond pure opposition. Honig refers to this as Crimp’s and ACT UP’s “demanding, agonistic enlistment of the state,” which combined a protest politics that could “shout out or make visible emotions and actions cast as transgressive” with a civic demand that the state fulfill its responsibilities.⁹² As such, it worked at the intervals not only between the state, the scientific community, and the gay community but also within these communities—looking for irregularities and leverage points rather than assuming uniformity and absolute coherence. For example, Honig describes how activists undertook their own detailed research into the virus in order to be more conversant with the scientific community, which in turn allowed for a combination of insider and outsider tactics that “worked one model of good research against another.”⁹³ This complex, intersectional work combined mourning’s “mere life” and militancy’s “more life” in ways that were “adamantly life-affirming: mobilizing, militant, passionate, and erotic—natal, angry, and funny.”⁹⁴

Ultimately, however, if Crimp and ACT UP represent a complex political practice, then for Honig the most important signpost for this practice seems to be the “rage and righteous anger” that drives and feeds “political protest, activism, self-organization, and communal self-care.”⁹⁵ It is Crimp’s refusal to relinquish the power of shared grief/rage, or to subsume it entirely within a sentimentalist discourse of mourning, that makes his natal, erotic, and mortalist politics so appealing for Honig. However, as we have previously discussed, Crimp was also sensitive, in ways that Honig does not dwell on, to how rage and righteous anger can act as defenses and modes of disavowal that prevent activists from acknowledging their own imperfections and ambivalence.⁹⁶ As Crimp puts it in “Mourning and Militancy,” the tendency to make “all violence external” is to “fail to confront ourselves, to acknowledge our ambivalence.”⁹⁷ While careful not to fall into a pathologizing discourse that he ultimately hopes to unravel, Crimp argues that AIDS activists also have to “comprehend that our misery is also self-inflicted … it is not only New York City’s collapsing healthcare system and its sinister health commissioner that affect our fate.”⁹⁸ When Crimp advocates for a fraught interaction between mourning and militancy, it is this acceptance of ambivalence and self-inflicted wounds that seems foremost in his mind, and this is a possible articulation of the politics of mourning that Honig has not yet seriously entertained.

Crimp’s approach to mourning is layered in ways similar to Antigone’s dirge. Within “Mourning and Militancy,” there are two distinct conceptions of mourning and the intimation of a third. The first explains the “internal opposition of activism and mourning” by reflecting on the “absorbing” or privatizing nature of grief. The second conception of mourning reconnects grief to activism because the “violence of silence and omission” interferes with the ability to grieve and give rise to a militant response. Crimp derives both of these approaches from Freud’s account of mourning in “Mourning and Melancholia,” where the work of mourning proceeds through hypercathection and substitution of the lost object (an “absorbing” process) unless it is “inadvisably” interfered with or aborted (desecration). From within these terms, grief and mourning offer either a retreat from the life of political action or instigation to militant resistance born from social melancholia and disavowal.⁹⁹

Yet within this essay Crimp moves toward a different articulation of grief that we could fairly call Kleinian. In doing so, he ties mourning explicitly to the acknowledgment of constitutive ambivalence along with “our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness.” Mourning is not reducible to either an absorbing or privatizing process of working through, or to a resistance born of social misrecognition. Mourning must also be seen as an ongoing challenge of acknowledging ambivalence within the self and within the broader social world and of working through the losses (of absolute moral certainty, of convenient scapegoats, of an omnipotent “killing rage”) that accompany such acts of recognition. I would argue that it is this idea of mourning that, when crossed with militancy born of disavowal, produces the complex agonistic statism of ACT UP.

Instead of finding Loraux’s bond of division or Honig’s complex (but ultimately agonistic) politicality at this crossroads of militancy and mourning, we encounter a vision of politics as a complex mixture of consensus and disruption, community and difference, bonds of attachment and aggressive acts of separation. Instead of rejecting either the search for coherence and meaning or the task of disruption, Crimp turns the ambivalent crossroads between agonism and consensualism into a productive resource for interpersonal and political life. In doing so, he acknowledges not only the crossroads of political action that require a flexible and open strategy but also an internal crossroads. Using Freud’s idea of the death drive, Crimps calls for a confrontation with our native aggression and negativity. He argues that only by making this negativity conscious and avoiding the temptation to project it onto easily hated external sources can activists combine their rage with their (often unacknowledged) “terror … guilt, and … profound sadness” in order to generate a politics that avoids replicating the violence they are resisting.

In staking a claim to the natalist politics of ACT UP, Honig overplays Crimp’s rage and downplays his calls for ambivalence and guilt. Honig accepts Crimp’s accents on mourning mainly because they are tied to an angry and natal activism; on the whole, she seems increasingly leery of conceptualizing politics in terms of mourning. Yet Crimp seems to imply that mourning is not merely a mortalist supplement to activist militancy but that which makes militancy effective. This hints at an approach to mourning that goes beyond antipolitical humanism, passive apolitical withdrawal, or defensive and melancholic resistance. It resembles nothing so much as the image of agency offered by the depressive position, with the understanding of collaborative power sharing.

In this light, Crimp’s appreciation of the complex work of mourning—and its interdependency with militant anger—offers an alternative trajectory for the politics of mourning. In the next section of this chapter, I will describe this trajectory from within the action of Antigone, where we can detect—despite all the interpretive layers that may block our view—the agency of Klein’s depressive position and what I will refer to as “democratic anger.” Antigone may yet be a model mourner, but less in the way that her angry resistance writes the script for contemporary agonistic politics and more for the way that her (momentary) obtainment of depressive agency can help us to rewrite this script in ways that erode habits of nonrecognition and cultivate civic relationships in the wake of social traumas.

Antigone’s Claims Reclaimed: Democratic Anger and Depressive Agency

How we tell the story of Antigone matters because, as Honig reminds us, we tell our own stories partly in her shadow. I have argued that the agonistic framing for Antigone’s actions is inadequate, insofar as it privileges either Antigone’s outsider status as opposed to her embeddedness (Butler) or her anger at the expense of her mourning (Honig). It is better, I will argue, to see Antigone in transition—to see her in-between the competing logics of an endless agonistic clash of wills and consensualist humanism. If we see Antigone as herself unsettled or in process, we can revivify the ongoing and endless democratic work of mourning that Klein and Crimp—each in their own way—help us to imagine.

However, given the dense layers of interpretation and appropriation that cover Antigone’s tomb, is it even possible to see Antigone as an unsettled figure? Honig argues that Antigone has become so sanctified and sentimentalized that she is unavailable as a resource for a political actor like Crimp, who frames his own combination of mourning and militancy in different terms. In part for this reason, Honig advises political theorists and actors to resist the lamentation frame, by desanctifying Antigone and recontextualizing her laments within a broader political struggle. Once this rescue mission is completed, then an activist like Crimp could be seen as an Antigonean figure whose politics of mourning is less a lamentation of power than a strategy for claiming power.

But there is another way of thinking about the politics of mourning, where mourning is the endless practice of facing down the ambivalence of self and other by restoring wholeness to our objects of attachment, in part by cultivating and occupying the spaces and relational forms that allow us to reclaim the full range of emotions and ideas that belong to being alive. This is not a private labor, but an intersubjective and social struggle for what Klein and Winnicott both call “integration.” Building from the groundwork provided by object relations psychoanalysis, the democratic theory of mourning looks for the spaces, settings, and relational practices that support the work of integration through dialogic and collaborative encounters between whole, ambivalent objects amid the search and struggle for a livable democratic order. The democratic work of mourning does not transcend an angry, agonistic politics, but it orients this politics to a higher-order practice of democracy in which neither agreement nor disagreement can be ruled out of bounds, and in which conflict and settlement are seen as live possibilities on the risky terrain of the political.

How can a revised account of Antigone support this work? So many interpreters of Antigone have focused on her identity—as sister, as civil disobedient, as an insistent voice of mourning, as the daughter of Oedipus—or on the impossibility of her identity—her impurity that bedevils gender and familial norms, her hideous antihumanist excess that casts the entire symbolic order into crisis. But often left unacknowledged is Antigone’s ambivalence—her multisidedness that, despite her apparent dogmatism, marks her as a figure in transition. If Antigone can be reenvisioned as an ambivalent actor, then her militancy and her mourning might be seen as constitutive components of a depressive form of political agency. By listening for Antigone’s ambivalence, we can also locate her democratic anger at the structures of misrecognition within Thebes. This anger can be situated within an ongoing struggle for integration at the intersection between the equally fractious spaces of the polis and the psyche.

Like many other interpreters of Antigone, I focus primarily on her enigmatic speech that ends with the claim that only a brother’s death—not a husband’s, nor a child’s—could have inspired her actions. This speech has been interpreted, by Jacques Lacan and others, as the culminating moment of Antigone’s autonomy—in which she advances an entirely different order that overturns the hold of symbolic and cultural norms.¹⁰⁰ As discussed earlier, it has also been read by Honig as an expression of Antigone’s complex, layered political claims that cite and challenge the order of things at Thebes (or Athens). For Honig, then, the speech is the culmination of the clash of wills and political orders represented by Creon and Antigone. Yet there are moments within Antigone’s final speech that show it to be less a culmination than an incomplete and unstable act of transition—away from the persecutory guilt and melancholic identification that mark her first appearances in the play and toward the riskier terrain of depressive agency.

To see this shift, we must look back to these first appearances and place them within the light of Klein’s “positional” theory of mourning. For Klein, paranoid-schizoid defenses against grief manifest themselves as a slavish attachment to the lost object, which, under the pressure of idealization, has become “extremely perfect.”¹⁰¹ To admit the imperfection of the internalized object would be a form of betrayal, so the ego is forced into a form of “slavery” in which the “extremely cruel demands and admonitions of its loved object … become installed within the ego.”¹⁰² The idealized object demands absolute fidelity; other objects of attachment fade in comparison, if they are not split off entirely as “extremely bad” objects who threaten the position of the internalized perfect other. The ego becomes “prey to contradictory and impossible claims from within, a condition which is felt as a bad conscience.”¹⁰³ Love and hatred are split off from one another—love is attached to the internal perfect object, and hatred is projected out onto those who would threaten this bond (or bondage).

When Antigone first comes onto the stage, she appears to be in the thrall of a persecutory commitment to her dead brother Polyneices. Despite Creon’s edict that Polyneices’s body should go unmourned, Antigone claims that she “will not prove false to him” (40) and will not be kept “from my own” (48). Her sister, Ismene, grows concerned about Antigone’s “dark thoughts” and argues that they should yield to the authorities rather than risk a suicidal transgression. Antigone, however, is unpersuaded. Ismene’s refusal becomes an inexcusable betrayal (“I would not urge you now; nor if you wanted to act would I be glad to have you with me”), and Antigone would prefer to be buried alongside her dead brother than to fail in her duties to his memory (“I shall lie by his side”). Antigone seems captivated by an idealized image of Polyneices. Despite the latter’s recent violent assault on Thebes, Antigone feels compelled to “love … him as he loved me” (74). She knows that her actions—even if they scandalize the city, will please “those I should please most” (89). When Ismene pleads that Antigone is in “love with the impossible,” it drives a further wedge between them. The pressure of the idealization forces Antigone into a furious rejection of her sister: “If you talk like this I will loathe you, and you will be adjudged an enemy” (93). Antigone draws a clear, sharp line between “noble” and “base” actions and asserts that she, unlike her sister, will not prove false to her noble birth. She then omnipotently assumes the burden of her burial duty, which she describes—tellingly—as a “terror” (95).

Later, once her actions have been discovered and she has been confronted by Creon, Antigone intensifies her defenses of splitting and idealization, isolating not only the noble from the base but also splitting off her guilt and hatred onto others. She maintains that her actions are blameless (“there is nothing shameful in honoring my brother” [512]) while denying the hatefulness she has just expressed toward Ismene and Creon: “It is my nature to join in love, not hate” (525). She once again denies her sister (“I will have none of your partnership”) along with all other objects of attachment aside from Polyneices. In doing so, however, Antigone does more than deny the counsel of false friends; she also denies filial obligations that fall outside the singular commitment to her brother. She also denies herself—she denies her hatred (“I … join in love, not hate”) even as she expresses it (“I will loathe you”).

From the light of Klein’s account of the paranoid-schizoid position, Antigone’s actions make a perverse kind of sense. As a defense against loss (of her brothers) and guilt (perhaps her relief that Polyneices did not triumph?), Antigone is in the persecutory thrall of her idealized object, splitting not only the social world but her very self into extremely perfect and safely hated pieces. The stunning dissonance between her claim to join “in love” and the venom and loathing she directs toward her still-living attachments is explained by a split between a good and a bad Antigone, matching the split between good and bad siblings and lovers (note the incestuous longing for Polyneices and the blithe disregard of Haemon). Forsaking all living attachments, Antigone cuts a figure of autonomy, but in reality she is under the sway of a melancholic, unyielding law guarded over by the idealized Polyneices. The latter is stripped of ambivalence, and Antigone splits herself—her nobility from her impurity, her love from her hate—and all of Thebes into hermetically sealed camps of the pure and the corrupted.

But this is not the end of Antigone’s story. In her final appearance on stage, Antigone—while maintaining that her actions were just—appears to overcome her defenses of idealization and splitting and to move from a paranoid-schizoid position of persecutory “terror” toward a depressive awareness of the consequences of her actions. Recall that for Klein the depressive position is marked by the appearance of the whole object, but this takes place in part through the appearance of other objects—that is, the internal world of the ego comes to be less dominated by the cruel, persecutory voice of the idealized object and becomes a multiplicitous assembly of fractious and many-sided objects. Mourning in the depressive position repairs the internal and external worlds of the subject by restoring their wholeness and multiplicity. As Sedgwick puts it, the threshold to the depressive position is “the simple, foundational, authentically very difficult understanding that good and bad tend to be inseparable at every level.”¹⁰⁴ This realization marks the end of omnipotence, itself based on the splitting of the ego and its objects of attachment. For Klein, omnipotence eventually leads to the sadistic, cannibalistic destruction—in fantasy—of “the external world and … real people” through the zero-sum calculation of annihilation or absolute triumph. The depressive position marks the ability to recognize this destruction as a “disaster,” and to make reparative connections within the self and to the world.¹⁰⁵ By identifying with multiple, whole objects, the ego forsakes omnipotence for a depressive agency in which others can—and inevitably must—take part. The perverse consolations of the paranoid-schizoid position—including the airtight distinctions between noble and base—are mitigated. As Thomas Ogden puts it, in the depressive position fantasies of “omnipotently annihilating one’s rival … no longer provide a satisfactory solution to a problem in a human relationship.”¹⁰⁶

Where and how does Antigone transition toward a position of depressive agency? When Antigone makes her final appearance on the stage, her tone is markedly different than before. Until this moment, she had shown little care for her other objects of attachment—from Ismene to Haemon to the city of Thebes itself—while maintaining strict fidelity to the corpse of Polyneices. Yet at this moment, she laments her impending death and the sacrifices that it implies. She bemoans that she has “not lived the due term of my life” (895). She has “known nothing of the marriage songs, nor the chant that brings the bride to bed” (811–12). She recognizes and addresses the audience of Theben elders, imploring them to see “under what laws I make my way to my prison sealed like a tomb” (845). Instead of her manic, single-minded focus on Polyneices, she now bemoans not only her own fate but also the fate of Thebes and of her infamous parents. In effect, Thebes has been restored as an imperfect but still “good” object that licenses her disapproval of its current course. Relatedly, Antigone appears to overcome the defenses of idealization and demonization that have insulated her from the full range of her “painful … cares” (857). She cries, “What parents I was born of, God help me!” (865) and she implicates Polyneices in the tragic actions that have led to her death: “Brother, it was a luckless marriage you made, and dying killed my life” (870–71). Antigone has, through a work of mourning, repaired the connections to her internal and external worlds (“O my father’s city, in Theban land” [840]). She acknowledges plural, whole objects along with the consequences of her actions, which, though they have won her “great renown,” make her punishment akin to the “saddest of deaths” (825). Even though she maintains that it was for Polyneices alone that she would have acted—because “no brother’s life would bloom for me again”—she does so while entertaining the ideas of motherhood and matrimony (“had I been a mother … if my husband were dead”). In other words, Antigone puts the obligation to her brother within the context of other relational possibilities, whereas before she had been exclusively concerned with the demands of her departed sibling. The idealized object (Polyneices) yields to the desired but disappointing good object (Thebes), which in turn repopulates the assembly of Antigone’s internal and external worlds. She is reconnected to the world that she is, tragically, quickly to exit.

Antigone also obtains a depressive form of agency, insofar as she overcomes her omnipotent fantasies of autonomy and calls on the citizens of Thebes to acknowledge and to question the norms by which her grief has been criminalized. She asks them to “see what I suffer and who makes me suffer” (847), which invites the polis to reflect on its normative codes and political decisions. Antigone politicizes these decisions. Whereas the chorus responds to Antigone’s laments that “the long-lived Fates” (929) shape individual and collective destiny, the agon between the messengers toward the end of the play shows that her intervention has turned the propriety or impropriety of public grief into a political question that cannot be solved through reference to the gods. In realizing a depressive form of agency, Antigone does not posit, omnipotently or autonomously, an alternative order of law, but she situates herself within the ongoing struggle over the orders of recognition at Thebes. In this (Kleinian) light, we can reenvision Antigone—not as a hero for mortalist humanists, or as a sanctified figure of pure resistance, but as a conflicted character embedded within a struggle both to mourn her dead brother and to live within a polis marked by relations of mutual recognition instead of social erasure.

The risk of reading Antigone in this light, of course, is that we commit the error of reading the action only through the psychological account of Klein’s positions, instead of adjoining this account to a political narrative of resistance and integration. Antigone’s “burying rage” may make perverse psychological sense if seen from within the paranoid-schizoid position, but by reading it in this frame, we might unjustly tether the politics of grief/rage to a normative ideal of depressive working through, which could pathologize and patronize Antigone’s resistance. Yet this is a specious objection. Klein’s account should not be seen as a strictly psychological story because she points not only to the individual, psychic labor of mourning but also to the structures of recognition that get this labor off the ground. Antigone’s actions, then, make psychological and political sense insofar as they reflect her psychic struggle and the norms and nomoi by which her choice was forced and her persecution intensified.

A Kleinian account of Antigone’s story, however, shows that the effectiveness of her protest and her attainment of depressive agency are coimplicated. We see this not only in the exchange between the messengers at the end of the play, but in the movement of the chorus itself. When Antigone first addresses Creon, at the height of her manic omnipotence, the chorus sings despairingly that “for those whose house has been shaken by God, there is never cessation of ruin … no generation frees another … there is no deliverance” (584–92). Yet in the final exchange between Antigone and the chorus, the latter speaks of afterlife and regeneration—including the “great renown” and “distinction and praise” that Antigone has won from death (835, 817). The chorus implies that Antigone—whose name, once again, means “antigeneration”—will live on. Despite being walled in a living tomb, she carries a seed of renown that can still flower, just as Danae, who was also held in a “tomb-like cell” nevertheless “kept, as guardian, the seed of Zeus” (945).

One should be careful, however, not to use Klein to exorcise the specter of Antigone’s rage, which is an essential aspect of her story and the (ongoing) story of mourning’s politics. While the play hints at the structures of recognition that might mitigate a persecutory and zero-sum politics, it is also a potent reminder of the perpetual misrecognitions and conflicts to which we are prone. Yet these conflicts cannot serve as an effective ground for an agonistic politics—any more than the moments of recognition can license a nontragic consensualism. The ground—Antigone’s ground—rather, is the risky terrain where conflict and recognition play it out, where the search for justified and justifiable political order(s) is bedeviled but never fully derailed by the native fractiousness within and between psyches. Klein saw this as the interplay between the death and life instincts, but these instincts interact with the uneven experiences of care and neglect, respect and desecration, in which we perpetually find ourselves. For Klein, the best response to this situation was a depressive awareness of complexity and ambivalence that keeps love and integration as live possibilities amid the baleful circuits of hatred and misrecognition to which we are tragically susceptible. Antigone—albeit briefly—seems to achieve such awareness, which can serve as a model for how we might understand and practice a democratic politics of mourning in our own time.

Conclusion: Antigone and the Democratic Work of Mourning

The connection between anger and public expressions of mourning has a long history and a lively present. Under the image of the resistant, mournful Antigone, political theorists have defended an agonistic approach to public life and activists have performed inspiring acts of resistance. Yet this chapter has argued for a different approach to the politics of mourning, not by leaving Antigone behind, but by resituating her claims within Klein’s account of mourning and within the broader struggle for integration on the risky terrain of the political.

For Klein, mourning is an ongoing developmental challenge, and an account of what Sedgwick calls the “agency” of the depressive position points toward relational dynamics and social spaces that might make democratic mourning a live possibility. Outside the story of Antigone, I have argued that the complex activism of Douglas Crimp and ACT UP provide an example of how depressive agency and democratic anger form crucial components of the democratic work of mourning. Crimp argues for a productive synergy between mourning and militancy, based on his awareness that militancy can be a self-defeating and self-denying form of defense and disavowal. Bonnie Honig also praises Crimp’s marriage of mourning and militancy, but for Honig the most crucial aspect of Crimp’s story is the “rage and righteous anger” that might inspire political theorists and activists to leave behind a lamentation framework and its largely apolitical (or postpolitical) resonances. Here, however, I am attempting see mourning less as lamentation and more in terms of the ongoing psychosocial challenge of integration facing democratic societies marked by dislocative traumas, desecrations, and misrecognitions.

Ironically, in her earlier work on mourning, Honig seemed closer to this position. There, in her reading of membership, identity, and immigration policies, Honig used Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object to theorize the conditions for separation and complex attachment within both immigrant and receiver communities. The idea of a transitional object, for Honig, illuminated efforts to create an environment conducive to a more generous immigration policy and to less dogmatic forms of national identity.¹⁰⁷ Honig’s reading of object relations psychoanalysis suggested that “there are institutional and cultural conditions for the proper work of mourning” and that political action requires and can actively seek to create these spaces and practices of mourning.¹⁰⁸

Honig has shifted away from this politics of mourning because she is anxious of the postpolitical or ethical displacements inherent to the “bad script” of lamentation. However, in counseling a decentering of mourning in the interests of a broader, natal agonism, Honig may be too hastily quitting the politically generative territory of grief. Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object (and his larger concept of potential space), along with the agency of Klein’s depressive position, on the other hand, recontextualize mourning within the democratic struggle not only for disruption but for agreement, not only for hegemony but for recognition. Potential spaces and transitional objects are what allow us, pace Crimp, to “confront ourselves” and to acknowledge our ambivalence as a step toward more open, generative engagements with others. They point to an alternative practice of mourning that challenges the assumptions of agonism. Honig wants to supplement mourning with the “more life” of activism, not only to infuse political life with generative natality but also to ensure that, pace Crimp, the rage and righteous anger that feeds political protest will not be subsumed by an overindulgent focus on mortality. Yet Crimp’s insight is that there is a form of mourning that does not sacrifice rage but educates it, that makes rage more realistic and reparative, and that does not postpone political action but makes possible collaborative forms of agency. This is the democratic work of mourning, as described here and developed further in chapters 3 through 5.