Interpreting the Sentencing of Creon’s Sentencing of Antigone Based on Derrida

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Interpreting the Sentencing of Creon’s Sentencing of Antigone Based on Derrida

The article theorizes meaningful forms of resistance based on Antigone by Sophocles, one of the mainstay texts of western literary tradition. The focus will be on Antigone’s urge to act contrary to Creon’s decree, which renders Sophocles’ heroine into a representation of sacrifice, civil disobedience, and mourning, which are the constituent aspects of practical resistant subjectivity. The analysis will show how Antigone’s resistance changed from deeply filial duty, heroic and private, into powerful public expressions of solidarity and collectivity. The clash of Creon with Antigone is analyzed in the premise of Jacques Derrida’s literature on violence and law.¹   

The current political and social context is the basis of interpreting the text to draw a parallel between a citizen in a neoliberal and a liberal state. Similarly, the analysis is not based on universal ethics to avoid pitting Creon’s law against Antigone’s private law. Sophocles’ dramatization is not the sole agent of translating resistance into desirous, powerful discharge. Instead, the paper recasts Antigone as an activist and her position as a political collective. The play is used as a framework for interpreting the common plight of European citizens and a pathway of developing meaningful resistance.    

When Antigone disobeyed Creon’s directives in the homonymous play by Sophocles, she cast herself as an outcast. In the Theban State’s and its ruler’s eyes, Antigone had committed a serious crime and was condemned to death and buried in a cave outside the state.² Superficially, Antigone went against the law and deserved punishment. However, it must be excruciating to be punished when no law was broken. It was unfortunate for her to be punished for the others’ misdeeds. In the following sections, the Antigone is revisited to establish the parallels between the possibility of effective resistance in the present and the abstract elements of resistance subjectivity. 

Apart from Antigone being a towering emblem of women’s struggle in the culture of the west, it is the historical state of affairs that compels the revisiting of this legal text.³ When considering the myths that make up the western literary imagination, it is compelling to weaponize them. It will be apparent that Sophocles’ play is not a clash between Antigone and Creon, but rather an actual presence of indissolubly mixed with democracy. As a legal text of western culture and literature, in its capacity, the Antigon is practical when read against modern-day socio-political developments.⁴ Therefore, to that end, it is necessary to shift focus from Polynices’ burial as an act of obeying the law to metaphysical law that goes past the political resistant subjectivity. 

Nicos Poulantzas informs the paper’s understanding of the state, defining a state as an independent construct that controls citizens’ socio-political responsibilities, freedoms, and rights. According to Poulantzas, the state is a complex unity that seeks to establish universal symmetry. He asserts that its constitutive interests are intimately aligned with the ruling class’s interests.  

Moreover, the liberal state is conceptualized from the analysis of Carl Schmitt’s review of liberal democracy by Chantal Mouffe, mainly according to the limits of citizenship to explain the trespasses and duties of citizens vis-à-vis state.⁵ The scholar examines Schmitt’s deductions on the incompatibility of liberalism with democracy and assists in drawing the parallels between the neoliberal state’s citizens and Antigone together with the social objection theory. However, the focus is to formulate a comprehensive account of the neoliberal state rather than underscoring its laws’ centrality and the inherent violence in the relationship between capitalist states and citizens. 

For accuracy purposes, the paper conceptualize neoliberal state is on Foucauldian lines, a state-controlled by market’s law. The neoliberal state is conceptualized as a coherent yet abstract, national formation, whose embezzlement and misappropriation of national resources contributes to the suffering of ordinary citizens. Neoliberalism equates socio-economic, cultural, and political rationality to co-opting the regime’s apparatus to the financial industry and private enterprise’s dictates. 

Most advanced West capitalists treat citizens as a collective miasma that reminds us of Antigone’s fate after disobeying Creon’s decree. However, a telling difference is that whereas Thebes’ king punished Antigone for breaking the law, neoliberal states’ leaders have been punishing their citizens based on the principle of ‘There Is No Alternative (TINA). Unlike Antigone, who opposes the existing political system at the time, the neoliberal states’ citizens operate within a system that considers them secondary to the financial rationality’s imperatives. Therefore, Derrida addresses the neoliberal law, whose inherent violence works to punish citizens for other people’s sins—at the same time, protecting the privileges of the ruling elites. Apparently, there is a significant gap between democratic law and neoliberal law.     

In Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls examines the law as a conception of justice established on fairness. He reexamines the social contract for liberal societies after World War II and their social institutions.⁶ Rawls equates justice to the truth when he seeks to revise the utilitarianism principle by arguing that justice is the primary virtue of any social institution. Further, Rawls asserts that every person possesses holiness based on justice that even society’s welfare cannot override. The scholar delivers a vantage point that would seem strange for most people in modern-day Europe. While a recent Eurobond report indicates that the statutory minimum wage of countries, such as Belgium, Greece, and the Netherlands, has been reduced massively, the Oxfam Inequality Report suggests that the wealth of eight billionaires is equivalent to that of 3.6 million people. Beyond such fragrance, there is a widespread impression that the causes of the recent global economic crisis and their perpetrators have not been addressed.⁷ Therefore, the neoliberal law has led to the establishment of an over-generalized and complete truism.  

Instead of governmentality or rationality, the terms’ law’ underscores precisely the juridico-political nature of the post -2007/08 resurgence of neoliberalism and its impact on citizens. The Hellenic Parliament ratified the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Greece and the EU to underwrite bailout programs. Therefore, the suffering of the Greek citizens was approved by formal laws by its legislature. As such, the neoliberal rule is far more strategic than Derrida’s believes and more brutal than the laws that indicted Antigone. Whether it is about suicidal acts of Greek prisoners for fear of burdening their children, drowning refugees, demonized British working-class families, or the unforgiving media, the non-liberal state’s law condemns its people to a condition of miasma for the sake of policy. The term ‘miasma’ is meant to describe the precise conditions that these laws impute on citizens. Therefore, people reconsolidate class consciousness by comprehending the state of affairs as the subjects and governed by oppressive laws. In addition, they renew their commitment to promoting joint resistant subjectivity sufficient to effect reasonable opposition. It is such opposition that Antigone contributes to Thebes.   

The analysis parallels Tina Chanter, who considers Antigone a political actor, seeking to articulate the law that Creon is blind to, arguing that Antigone crafts a political future for Thebes.⁸ Even though Antigone did not exist within a democratic state, whose role is to protect and serve the people, Creon’s handling of state-power, sovereignty, and the law resembles most modern, neoliberal leaders. These leaders are willing to accept the adverse effect of neoliberal rationality on their people. Therefore, the analysis of the text should consider the resistance in Thebes as praxis. It is necessary to revisit Antigone as a civil disobedient and political actor collaborating with another citizen to resist the state’s trespasses. Chanter’s view of Antigone as a female agonist does not amount to worship because the latter’s actions was due to personal motivations. Ismene is a coward. She succumbed to her fears and refused to support Antigone’s cause.  

According to Agamben, in citizen-state debate, the state with impunity can strip citizens of their lives and return them to a bare life condition. However, Agamben refers to Aristotle to trace the hazy relationship between qualified life and unproductive life. The western liberal democracies and modernity promote the use of impunity to address disregarding the very structures meant to safeguard the people’s lives and their right to political, social, and cultural existence. The unreliability of the relationship between state and citizens’ devoid life inspires violence that compromises both entities. As evident in Antigone, violence can occur without death. Creon’s sentence suggests that Antigone was no longer a human being because he defied the state’s decree. She is sentenced into a cave with meager food rations to last her days.  

Even though Agamben considers himself a state of being that is neither dead nor bare life, its view resembles Antigone’s post-sentence as miasma. These diseased limps need amputation from politics. Miasma is useful imagery because it signifies a wayward, abnormal body that is infectious. The allegory uncovers the challenges that involve the act of dedicated resistance. It allows the understanding of the existence of citizens as miasma, and it promotes class awareness and fuels resistance. Moreover, it explains how Antigone helps consolidate modern pollical intervention concerning the rulers. 

Derrida’s placement of violence at the center of the performative and conceptual expression of law, together with Ambien’s description of homo sacer as a state of resentment between animal and bare life, serves as a powerful intervention on the theorization of the relationship between form and citizen, and the possible strategies to resisting punitive laws. The neoliberal states’ penal laws are immoral and irrational and more degrading than Antigone’s fought. 

Creon, in his speech, uses the terms thrones (the crown) and polis (city). When used together, these terms merge to define a state that combines authority, which is from the people’s will, and control from sovereignty. Such power is grounded on transcendental, self-reflexive, and metaphysical legitimacy. This authority seems to exist regardless of the people’s will, which is parallel to that of neoliberal states.

Although modernity means that a liberal state is non-existent without citizens, these citizens increasingly witness continuous trespassing of their objective and wills by the state. According to these states’ laws, citizens need to suffer to the extent that most will lack alternatives or even commit suicide. Before reaching such a condition, however, collective forms of resistance are necessary. Returning to Sophocles, the main character seeks is committed to resisting the state and its punitive law that disengages people’s will. Also, the law lacks credibility legitimacy.⁹ Despite Creon’s moving speech, the choice to leave Polynices remains uninterred is anchored on self-glorification. Notwithstanding, the fact that only Antigone is willing to resist these decrees is abhorrent. She highly has a position as a civil disobedient and meticulous objector.       

An audacious, powerful lady standing up against oppressive decree and what she believes to be her right and even assaulting the king is commendable. Angione makes a stand by defying the king’s command. She opposes both the king’s rule and, most critical, the state in every one of its articulations. Antigone disregards the entire symbolic order that validates Creon’s decree. Worse off, Antigone being a woman, who in the Theban state’s eyes is a non-citizen, reinforces the magnitude of her standoff. Antigone still has a civil role in resisting trespassing of her rights.   She is a citoyenne, meaning she is connected to the Thebes crown and betrothed to Creon’s son, Haemon. Therefore, her womb, bare life-body, and qualified life as a potential queen are intimately linked to the state. Consequently, it is critical to consider Antigone as both a woman and a women-citizen.

The shift between ‘women citizen’ and ‘women’ does not desexualize or depersonalize Antigone because of the connection between her social position and her sexuality. Antigone’s fates as a lady are connected organically to the state both by Haemon and Oedipus. As such, Creon seems relentless in his decree to follow the law because it is the king’s law, his law, and because it is his state’s law. Creon’s decree cannot be merciful or flexible precisely because he needs it to be the decree.   

Antigone’s Relevance in Australian Legal Context

Antigone is a shift in western thought that the Australian law is oriented to, where is the conflict between the law of humankind and the law of nature began. This conflict is at the center of Antigone’s legal divide, positive law vs. natural law.¹⁰ According to natural law, morality is an essential requirement for abiding by the law, and therefore, morality and law are inseparable. As Burns argues, natural law implies divine law. Conversely, contemporary legal theories have maintained secular underpinnings. Humankind laws are an insult to the natural law in both religious and material manifestations.

When implementing positive law, the constitutionally recognized legal authority should separate morality from law. However, natural law is conspicuous in the positive Australian law. From the natural law perspective, positive law, based on common law, is why society chooses to establish a justice system by settling on a stable and distinct legal process.¹¹ Case law is a product of positive law, and it forms an appropriate piece that minimizes the role of political power and authority.¹² Further, it maximizes the role of community assent and individual liberty in administering the justice process. Therefore, although due process does not guarantee that courts do not force or exert judgment, the case’s law check and balances make it so likely. Moreover, the central role of the jury in case law indicates a shift to common sense, and hence limiting partisan will and elite theorizing.    

Another case of natural law in the Australian case law is the reasoning process in appellate courts. In most appealed disputes, each size is accorded an opportunity to argue precedents in the favor but use other precedents that help them form a pattern of facts in their cases. Such an option allows the court to reinterpret the established precedents, and it shows that positive law favored the facts and tried over novelty. Even though natural law is anchors in absolute human nature, it is not less superior than positive law, and in some cases, it is even more dominant. For instance, when circumstances behind a case change, the positive law has to change as well. Because the rule is unwritten, judges have the freedom to adjust it without exercising raw power while still sticking to the formal judging process of hearing arguments, focusing on the central issue, and only settling the current case. Subsequently, the randomness of such judgment leaves room for manipulation. 

Another instance of natural law in the positive Australian law is in judging. Judging is grounded on the thought that nothing that conflicts with reason is lawful, although the common law believes in tried and true. The underlying concept is that the latter will not contract itself, and judges are not expected to be kings and philosophers to ensure distant reasoned rules. Therefore, in positive law, the judge seeks to breach obvious concerns and accommodate all legal sources applicable to a given case. It is commonly opined that it is offensive and impossible to implement when positive law is contrary to common right and reason. In such a case, natural law regulates and voids it. In British practice, parliamentary sovereignty supersedes reasonableness claims. However, in other jurisdictions, such as the US and Australia, the idea has necessitated judicial review to expunge statutes that contradict natural law.    

Positive law, as natural law, argues that anything that is against reason is unlawful and cannot singly develop new jurisprudence. However, it can provide a case to rid contradictions in law, hence creating a whole new direction.¹³ English law, the premise of Australian law, derives its authority wholly from natural law, and therefore, one can invoke natural or divine sources to get rid of artificial law.¹⁴ Aspects of international law upon which Australia integrates its law recognizes that enacted or favorable decree lacks the necessary impetus to be qualified as the valid law. The sovereign law issues directives and that every person within the jurisdiction is needed to obey. Natural law is rooted in the idea that the law is a command, although this is not the root of positive direction.

Law is a social tool that derives its fairness from certified sources. Such is the construct of sovereign law, and common law borrows the structure by deriving its validity from a lawfully constituted authority, such as courts or legislature.¹⁵ In addition, the natural law’s existence is subject to independence from the human forms that created it. Natural law is centered on morality, but the positive direction is reforming to challenge law based on character. Therefore, it will be accurate to argue that positive law is premised on natural law.¹⁶

Conclusion

Antigone by Sophocles confirms the dominance of natural over artificial (positive law). Consequently, the struggle and conflict between Antigone and Creon demonstrate the war around the higher natural law-moral law versus positive law. Creon decrees represent favorable laws and mirror the arbitrary use of power by rulers. In Antigone, citizens have a right to reject defilement of their liberty to attend to personal obligations. The play is relevant to Australian law, marking a shift in western thought, where there is a conflict between humankind and God’s law. Natural law exists in positive Australian law. Natural law is the reason the established system decides to develop a legal process.

Similarly, natural law guided the appellate court’s process of reasoning. Although the law is anchored in absolute human nature, it does not stop the changing of positive direction, and in some cases, it might force such changes.¹⁷ In the Australian context, natural law is evident in the saying that anything that is against reason is unlawful.  

References

1. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism. In Deconstruction and

2. Pragmatism: Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty. Edited by Chantal Mouffe. London: Routledge, pp. 79–90. 

3. Hegel, G. W. F. 1979. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4. Caygill, Howard. 2013. On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance. London: Bloomsbury. 

5. Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. I. Edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

6. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.

7. Honig, Bonnie. 2009. Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of Exception. Political Theory 37: 5–43. 

8. Chanter, Tina. 2010. Antigone’s Political Legacies. In Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism. Edited by S. E. Wilmer and AudronėŽukauskaitė. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

9. Chanter, Tina. 2010. Antigone’s Political Legacies. In Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism. Edited by S. E. Wilmer and AudronėŽukauskaitė. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

10. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.

11. M Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford University Press, 1992) 303.

12. Chris Roederer and Darrel Moellendorf, Jurisprudence (Juta and Company Ltd, 2007) 45.

13. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993) pp. 1, 3.

14. Grabriel A Moens, ‘The German Border Guard Cases: Natural Law and the Duty to Disobey Immoral Laws’ in Suri Ratnapala and Grabriel A Moens (eds), Jurisprudence of Liberty (LexisNexis Butterworths, 2nd ed, 2011) 271.

15. Jussi M Hanhimaki, The United Nations: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008) 11.

16. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993) pp. 1, 3.

17. Grabriel A Moens, ‘The German Border Guard Cases: Natural Law and the Duty to Disobey Immoral Laws’ in Suri Ratnapala and Grabriel A Moens (eds), Jurisprudence of Liberty (LexisNexis Butterworths, 2nd ed, 2011) 271.

18. Jussi M Hanhimaki, The United Nations: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008) 11.