Antigone Claimed: I Am a Stranger!

Political Theory and the Figure of the

Stranger

HENAO CASTRO
ANDRES FABIAN

This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical-political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under
which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of textual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty-first century, that is,
for those symbolically produced as not-legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent
ontological status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of speech
and action in equality with others.

I am a Stranger! O dear brother, doomed in your marriageyour

marriage murders mine, Your dying drags me down to death alive!
(A, 95050 [86070])1
Antigone, the famous heroine invented by Sophocles in ancient Greece, buried her
brother, Polynices, in obedience to the unwritten divine laws, which she claimed to
follow, and in disobedience to the civic laws laid down by her uncle, Creon. A male
actor performed her fictional act in the theater; women were not allowed to participate in public domains and could only be spectators of the tragedies at the Festival
of Dionysia. According to the story, Creon was the new sovereign of Thebes after Eteocles and Polynices (Antigones brothers) killed themselves fighting for Oedipuss
throne. Creon left Polynices body unburied outside the city, although still visible to
citizens, to be chewed by birds and dogs. He did so because Polynices raised an army
in Argos to destroy Thebes after he was ostracized by his brother. Contemporary
interpretations of the story have framed Antigones act as territorially circumscribed
to a singular polity (Butler 2000; Cavarero 2005a; Honig 2009). Nevertheless, Antigone claimed the political subject-position of the stranger as her own, calling herself
lj (A, 95558 [86570]), which means resident alien (Whitehead 1977).
Hypatia vol. 28, no. 2 (Spring 2013) by Hypatia, Inc.

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By emphasizing Antigones various allusions to the figure of the stranger, I will

argue that her act symbolizes the counter-politics instantiated by strangers today (refugees, undocumented immigrants, noncitizens) as they experience the global conditions of political membership for those ontologically divided between two polities.
Going beyond a singular polity allows us to read the politics of nonburial that Palestinian women are confronting today in their struggle to exist against the occupation
of their territories by the settler-colonial state of Israel as an exemplary case of the
obstacles faced by those displaced into lawlessness as they attempt to give public
meaning to the deaths of their relatives.
The symbolic peak of this struggle took place in February 2006, when the Museum
of Tolerance in Jerusalem, launched in May 2004, was forced to temporarily suspend
construction due to a legal challenge presented to Israels High Court. According to
Saree Makdisis reconstruction of the event, the site of the Museum of Tolerance, it
turns out, includes a cemeteryin fact, the largest and most important Muslim cemetery in all of Palestine, which had been in continuous use for hundreds of years from
the time of the Crusades until the uprooting of Palestine in 1948 (Makdisi 2010,
520).2 Despite the efforts of Palestinian organizations to stop the construction, the
leaders of the project continued with the excavations.3 Who and what gets to be
remembered conflicts with police agendas of control and political lines of conflict.
Here we see two forms of remembrance that are in conflict, one enacted by the
sovereign state with its material excess and set of exclusions, the other enacted politically by resourceful, dispossessed strangers with their efforts to continue affirming
their existence. It is this counter-political force that Antigones strangeness helps us
understand and makes politically translatable in the reinterpretation of the script that
I offer in this paper.

I. THE STRANGER
The Spanish word extra~
no, like the French etranger, bears a meaningful ambivalence that is lost in the English word foreigner. Stranger indicates someone unfamiliar, uncommon, infrequent, odd, rare, as well as alien, outsider, outcast, and
foreigner. Contemporary political theory written or translated into English is more
familiar with other terms: foreigner (Bonnie Honig), alien (Seyla Benhabib), refugee, stateless (Hannah Arendt), or noncitizen (Giorgio Agamben). However,
none of them are able to capture the same linguistic polyvalence rooted in the word
stranger. Despite the nuance in each of these terms, I will use them interchangeably4 in my effort to theorize the ontological condition of the stranger as the one in
which lifeaffirmation of existence through actionand deathlegal-political nonrecognitioncoexist ambivalently, which I will do through my reading of Sophocles
Antigone.5
I use the stranger as the referent for this complex and irreducible set of categories:
noncitizen, foreigner, stateless, refugee, and also as the subject-position providing the
perspective from which one theorizes and tries to (re)invent. This is the usage I

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found in Antigones performative claim to be a stranger, which explains why I

argue that Antigone stands for refugees, undocumented immigrants, and noncitizens
in the reinvention of the plays symbolic repertoire in the twenty-first century.
Section II locates my theoretical contribution in the domain of political theory and
explains my uses of the terms life and death. Section III justifies the use of Antigone
for performing such a reading by means of a textual, intertextual, and extratextual set
of arguments.

II. THEORIZING

THE

STRANGER

Tracing the significant literature in political theory oriented toward the (de)construction of the stranger, I turn to Hannah Arendts celebrated chapter in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, titled The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of
Man (1951), where she elaborated the famous idea of the right to have rights
(Arendt 2004, 34134) in her effort to theorize the condition of statelessness. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Arendt claimed that we became aware of this
right when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these
rights (political belonging) because of the new global political situation, one in
which there was no longer any uncivilized spot on earth [left], because whether we
like it or not we have already started to live in One World (37677). The transformation of the world into One World, into a huge interconnected territory already
fully and unequally shared out (we call this globalization), faces a radical challenge:
what about those who belong to none of these entities into which civilization is
distributed and who nonetheless inhabit the world with an equal right to do so,
despite the fact that according to such an arbitrary division there is no room left for
them?
The stranger, having lost her/his home and political status, which is equivalent to
the loss of a juridical-political space of recognition, cannot find another one. This is
what I am calling a death, following Arendts association of denationalization, deportation, and the international sanction of lawlessness as a possible status (Arendt
2004, 577) with the first of three murders in the road to total domination. Although
reduced to mere being (fx), the stranger continues to live (speak and act) in this
world, which, requiring her/his vital energies to subsist in it, offers no space for her/
his existence to be recognized. This unremitting affirmation of existence through
action in the world is what I am calling a life, following Arendts conception of a
b (Arendt 1998).
The stranger is already outside that place called home. However, there is no
place outside it where (s)he can be, because outside her/his home there are only
other homes to which (s)he does not belong either. Every place at which (s)he
arrives is already someone elses home. This is the paradox of the stranger: the one
who cannot belong to a world (s)he inhabits and in which (s)he exists with an equal
right to do, because of the ways in which belonging to that world have been organized, that is, as resting on the prior belonging to a political entity already counted

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among those in which the One World has been ordered. The paradoxical coexistence of life, which I understand as the affirmation of existence in this world
through speech and action (b), and death, which is the product of not being
counted by a political entity that juridically-politically recognizes this existence
(non-b), is the result of a gap between those who populate the world and those
who are recognized as rightful members of the political entities into which recognition in the world is distributed. The two counts are not interchangeable, nor are
they commensurable. The former exceeds the latter, inventing some as supplementary, producing a remainder that escapes the territorial closure: a surplus, an excess
in which life and death are no longer separable but ambivalently cohabiting the
same body.
This paradox is still formulated as a problem we need to solve. The evocative
we in this instance refers not only to the normative theorists claiming it, but also
to those who do have a stable, juridical-political, recognized condition from which to
speak and act as the ones in charge of solving the problem into which the strangers
have been transformed. In this way, the strangers juridical-political muteness is duplicated in the effort of the theorist to frame the solution to the problem as depending
and resting almost exclusively in those whose speech is already potentially audible,
therefore duplicating the invisibility into which the strangers are placed by ascribing
to them a danger that they pose to us.
The force of this discursive construction is noticeable since Arendts concluding
remarks in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Having framed their ontological paradox
under the motto of the end of the rights of man,6 she defined the stateless as the
carrier of a great danger: the danger of being thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation because equality and
significant political expression, by which one belongs to human artifice (b) and
not merely to the human race (fx), are the exclusive privileges of being the
citizen of some commonwealth (Arendt 2004, 383). Arendt was not indicting the
stateless, but judging the consequences emerging from the decline of the nation-state.
However, there was nothing to see in their condition, for her, other than deprivation.
But, is it possible that from their point of view, even if lacking a safe and secure
belonging in those political entities already counted, strangers are more than just
natural givenness and even potential inaugurators of another kind of politics
incommensurable with that of the republican citizen but irreducible to that of natural givenness?7
Arendt never resolved what she framed as a great danger. For her, nation-states
were part of the problem, a World State was a monstrosity, and supranational institutions lacked active and democratic constituencies to legitimize them. Although
her solution was never achieved, she did offer conceptual tools to advance one, and
those who have attempted a solution, like the political theorist Seyla Benhabib, kept
Arendts insight almost intact: strangers are still a problem requiring a solution
(Benhabib 2004). In Benhabibs cosmopolitan federalism, which is as indebted to
Arendt as it is to Jurgen Habermass theory of discourse and deliberative model of
democracy (Benhabib 2002), the contextual rights of nation-states to self-determine

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their conditions of membershipin a world in which a right to exit equals a right

to enterare balanced with the universality of human rights, regardless of local
contexts. This balance incorporates a crucial obstacle, which Arendt had already
identified. Universal human rights are only morally enforced while citizenship rights
are also politically institutionalized, reproducing the asymmetrical treatment given to
the rights of the other, always disadvantageous in comparison to those of the
citizen.
Influenced by Derridas deconstructionism, Benhabibs best critic, Bonnie Honig,
was probably the first to invert the terms of the question. Instead of asking how
should we solve the problem of foreignness? informing Arendt, Benhabib, and,
according to Honig, most contemporary discussions of democracy and citizenship
(Honig 2001, 1), she posed the question as what problem does foreignness solve for
us? (4). Thus, strangers are no longer discursively constructed as a problem. What
they carry with them is not a great danger, something we fear, but an alibi, something we cherish: an agency we need in vulnerable moments and particularly in
those of (re)founding. Honig critiques the construction of strangers as the problem
we need to solve by exposing the ways such a construction, in which they are
always subordinated to an us from which they are excluded, allows democracies to
profit from both xenophobia and xenophilia.
What if we change the perspective from which these questions are framed and
ask, how can we (strangers) solve the problem of citizenship? Or what problems
does citizenship solve for us (strangers)? The oddity of these alternative formulations shows us two things: on the one hand, the silent privilege given to the secured
juridical-political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework, and, on the other hand, the contingent character of such
sites as potentially unfixed and unstable. Thus, we can ask for whom this agency of
foreignness performs politically salient functions. Is it only posing problems or providing solutions for the citizens, the nationals, the territorialized demos, the already
recognized, or is it also performing some crucial political functions for those claiming
it, the unrecognizable ones deciding to perform their unintelligibility in public and
inaugurating a new world as a result?8
Giorgio Agamben viewed the solution, and no longer the problem, from the perspective of the stranger. From such a perspective, for which he used the concrete case
of Palestinians expelled by the state of Israel, he proposed the still unclear and materially opaque paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality ... that would
thus be implied, could be generalized as a model of new international relations
(Agamben 2000, 23). What was left unclear in the otherwise promising ideal of
reciprocal extraterritoriality, in which the guiding concept would no longer be the
ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular (23), was
the agency in charge of realizing it. My paper, building on Honigs theory of political
agonism, seeks to offer a theoretical framework in which such an agency can be read,
one in which the stranger is not independent from the discursive uses performed by
its symbolic invocation, but is no longer reducible to the functions it performs for an
us from which it is exteriorized.

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III. WHY ANTIGONE?

Among the different Antigones (re)invented in the history of Western political
thought,9 her juridical-political status as an exclusive, marginal, insufficiently recognized citizen of a second order has not yet been sufficiently destabilized as the framework of reference. In most cases, the reading of her performance is scripted into the
range of contradictory alternatives prefigured by the always incomplete order of
citizenship. Whether it is about the sources of her marginalization or the terms of her
potential exclusion/inclusion, what needs to be reworked and rethought is the civic
order, not the noncivic one.
Since the influential reading of Hegels Phenomenology of the Spirit (1803), the literature inscribes her in a territorially circumscribed dichotomy, which opposes the
city to the family, the public to the private, and man to woman. Such boundaries
frame her as intensively oriented toward the civic order as the locus of her legibility,
never as a full citizen, always outside the normative framework, yet always defined by
her relation to it. As a civil disobedient she is considered either as a civilian who disobeys or as someone who, having disobeyed, waits for her civic status to be clarified
in the legal resolution of her act. In other words, the literature presents her civic
status as complicated by her act without ever exceeding it. In this section I provide
three arguments in support of the no-civic domain of the stranger as an alternative
framework for reading her agency: the first identifies her strangeness in the text of
the play; the second by an intertextual reading of her act in conjunction with contemporary debates about marriage in transnational contexts; and the last in the extratextual materialization of her performance by Palestinian refugees on the theatrical
stage.

TEXTUAL
The emphasis on Antigones (un)civility contrasts heavily with the explicit claim she
makes for the overlooked political subjectivity with which she identified herself in
the play: that of the stranger. After she buried the body of her brother, Polynices,
which Creon had forbidden, she was condemned to be buried alive. Before committing suicide, she performed a dirge for herself, a speech in which she claimed to be a
stranger. First she tried to see herself as Tantaluss daughter Niobe, who, like her, was
also a living death10 and who she named as the stranger queen from the east (A,
915 [820]). However, the Chorus challenged the potential hubris (excessive pride)
exhibited in such a claim and replied, But she was a god, born of gods, and we are
only mortals born to die (A, 925 [830]). No, Antigone did not belong to the nonhuman world of Greek divinities; she belonged to the inhuman world of the mortals.
Nonetheless, she retains an important aspect of Niobes ambivalent conflation of life
and death in her second unchallenged performed identity: her strangeness. Antigone
claimed, I am a stranger! (A, 955 [850]),11 making use of the term lj,
which means resident alien, to identify her condition, which Shane Phelan defined

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as a figure of ambivalence [that] troubles the border between us and them (Phelan
2001, 5).
Antigone had previously used lj to characterize her condition on the
road to the rockbound prison to which she was condemned, strange new tomb
always a stranger, O dear god, I have no home (lj) on earth and none below,
not with the living not with the breathless dead (A, 940 [870]). The ambivalent
characteristics of the stranger (lj) are grounded in the two conditions referenced in this passage: lack of home (homelessness) and the ambivalent coexistence
of life and death referred to negatively and figuratively.
First of all, the stranger, having lost her home, cannot find a new one; she inhabits the condition of homelessness. This condition is pretextual to Antigone; it has
already taken place in Oedipus at Colonus12 when Antigone asked, How can we
[Ismene and Antigone] travel home to Thebes? I see no way (OC, 1960 [1740]).
There is no way they can travel home to Thebes because Thebes and home are no
longer correlative terms; one cannot be predicated on the other. Antigone left
Thebes with Oedipus when he was expelled from the city for having committed the
heinous crimes of parricide and incest. Having blinded himself in order not to see his
deeds, he needed Antigone to guide him after requesting his friends to take [him]
away, far, far from Thebes, quickly, cast [him] away (OK, 1475 [1340]).
Oedipus was transformed into a stranger by the new sovereigns decision to expel
him from the city (OC, 1665 [1520]); Antigone was in charge of leading him to
Mount Cithaeron at Colonus,13 the place of Oedipuss birth and death (another
instance of life and deaths coexistence).14 His exile was the only possible substitute
for his death because statelessness is a death of another kind, a death in which life
(fx) is not yet terminated. It is to Arendts credit that she named the production
of the stranger by the sovereign, through expulsion/denationalization, as the first of
three deaths, which she did when analyzing the totalitarian production of the musselman15 in the concentration camps during World War II:
The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the
juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting
certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and
forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization,
the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done,
on the other hand, by placing the concentration camp outside the
normal penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the normal
judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable
penalty. (Arendt 2004, 577)
The label illegal, which today is attributed by some to resident aliens with no
proper documentation, registers and rhetorically mimics this murder of their juridicalpolitical person (b). Strangers, lawless subjects, are already dead to the world to
the extent that no political community, no home, recognizes their speech and action
as legitimate, placing them outside the law. But the unprecedented calamity of the

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first loss suffered by the rightless, as Arendt put it, is not the loss of a home but the
impossibility of finding a new one (Arendt 2004, 372), the fact that lawlessness is
not only produced but forced to be sanctioned by the remaining political entities.
Antigone and Ismene differed from Arendts description of statelessness to the extent
that they returned to their native land, Thebes. However, Thebes, the home [of
their] old ancestral house (OC, 1990 [1770]), is no longer a home for them; thus
they find themselves in the vulnerable condition of the stranger.
This leads us to the second characteristic of Antigones strangeness, the fact that
her death, the murder of her juridical-political persona, is not equivalent to the end
of her life. She is neither with the living nor with the dead, clearly not one of us
nor one of them, but an ambivalent figure confusing the partition between the two.
Her lifethe vital energies of her body (fx)persists in the same world in which
her existence cannot be counted. And it persists in the performative form of action
and speech (b) that are the privileges of the citizen. Life (public appearance)
and death (legal-political unrecognizability) coexist with unpredictable effects in her
embodied performance. This feature she shares with Niobe and Oedipus at Colonus,
but also with her brother Polynices, made into a stranger by her other brother, Eteocles, who expelled him to become Thebes sovereign.
For both of them, Polynices and Antigone, life and death are mutually constitutive, each determining the other through their paradoxical cohabitation. Antigone
and Polynices are two correlative versions of the living death16 defining their symbolically produced ontological condition. The most characteristic aspect of Polynices
corpse is its refusal to leave the world of the living, despite being already dead (Cavarero 2005). His exiled body, already lifeless and bound to darkness, is kept in the
light, on display to be seen by the citizens. It is left in the open to accomplish a
policing taskthat is, reinforcing the spectacle of sovereigntyby being beheld by
citizens in its obscenity, by producing fear and extending the sovereigns right to kill
beyond temporal circumscription in war. But the dead body speaks in return to the
policing dynamic of the sovereigns right and destabilizes its theater of horror. It saturates the whole tragic scene. The excess of the edictthe policing hubris of Creons
heinous theater, represented in the ghastly image of Polynices tortured body, chewed
by dogs and birdsis counteracted by the excess of the bodys presence in its infectious morbidity.
The living dimension of the dead body of the exile, present outside the city, has
another consequence: the multiplication of corpses inside the city. All family members of Creons house will become corpses, victims of the functional metamorphosis
he bestowed on Polynices body, the possibility to prolong his right to kill in the regulation of life. The contagious potency of the dead body of the exile is relentless and
powerful. The living death will turn those who are alive into cadavers by their inability, as living bodies, to provide a proper burial for his already inert corporality. Polynices corpse will reappear for Creon in the corpse of Antigone (his niece), Haemon
(his son), and Eurydice (his wife); its cadaver returns to haunt Creon and will receive
three burials until the proper one is performed. The improper treatment of the stranger by the citizen/sovereign results in the destruction of his home. In comparison to

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the powerless orders of Creons lively voice, the voiceless demands of Polynices
corpse are unstoppable and profoundly audible. Though dead and mute, the body of
the returning exile is more alive and loud than that of the sovereign. The paradoxical
body of the stranger in which death and life coexist has what Creons own voice
lacks: a radical and transformative effectiveness over the city. And we might say that
Polynices accomplishes in death, as a stranger, what he could not in life, as a citizen/
sovereign of Argos: to return to the place from which he was expelled (Thebes) and
destroy the tyrannical government responsible for his forced displacement.
Antigone is another version of this coexistence: not a dead body that is alive, as
in Polynices case, but a lively body that is already dead (unrecognized by the civic
order). She does not look like a cadaver; hers is a speaking death. Her death-drive is
found in the semantic orientation of her speech, continuously invoking death in her
different interventions. When she justified her act in front of Creon, Antigone said,
Die I must, Ive known it all my lifehow could I keep from knowing?even without your death-sentence ringing in my ears. And if I am to die before my time I consider that a gain (A, 510 [460]). Later on, when Ismene entered the scene trying to
share Antigones deed, she added, Let the dead and the god of death bear witness!
(A, 610 [540]), and then, Never share my dying, dont lay claim to what you never
touched. My death will be enough (A, 615 [540]). She even told Ismene, You
chose to live, I chose to die (A, 625 [550]), and her final words to her sister were
Courage! Live your life. I gave myself to death, long ago, so I might serve the dead
(A, 630 [560]). The distinction between living a life and giving oneself to death
makes this ambivalent cohabitation all the more explicit. She will serve the dead
she can serve the deadprecisely because she is not merely dead, as Polynices corpse
is not either. The orders of life and death become the sites of confusion with disruptive consequences.
Both of them, Polynices and Antigone, have been produced by the sovereign. But
the consequences of their paradoxical ontology cannot be controlled by the ruler
who never exhausts the alternative meanings erupting out of the symbolic marker
bestowed in them: strangeness. They participate in their own production as much as
the sovereign does, and when the site of enunciation changes, they counteract the
symbolic functions attached to their bodies. Polynices, the dead body kept alive,
extends death into life, exceeding the sovereigns economic use of his body, multiplying the corpses in Creons home. Antigone, the living one whostill speaking
faced Creons words she no longer exists (A, 640 [560]), extends life into death,
giving/forcing those silent, mute, and inactive to speak and react: Haemon, Ismene,
and the people were moved to action and speech as a result of Antigones performance.

INTERTEXTUAL
When Antigone claimed, I am a stranger! (A, 955 [860]), she built a political
connection with the doomed marriage of her brother and privileged her natal over

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her marital family, to employing Honigs distinction (Honig 2010).17 Read through
this lens, she introduced marriage into the transnational regulation of political membership. Her coalition with her brother was not primarily biological but political. Her
duties to her brother, conventionally interpreted as a problem of the family versus
the polis (Hegel 1977; Lupton 2005), could be reinterpreted as a problem of the
stranger versus the citizen if we read into them the political drama of filial attachments in the transnational regulation of political membership through family law.
What if Antigones turn to Polynices and Ismene (strangers), and not to Haemon
(citizen) in the public realm is not a sign of her Homeric ethos (Honig 2009, 7) but
a refusal to compromise the ontological ambiguity of her strangeness in marriage?
She might have turned first to Ismene and not to Haemon, because of Haemons
bond to those responsible for violating her brothers body, but there is something else
politically significant in her allegiance to her foreign siblings over her citizen fiance
that might have played a greater role. Is the political fragmentation of the family
merely contingent, or does Antigones allegiance reveal the inseparable function of
marriage in organizing and regulating political membership?
In order to read Antigones preference for the natal over the marital family under
the script of the stranger, I propose an intertextual reading of the play with two contemporary accounts of marriage in transnational contexts. The first case is Suzana
Maias recent analysis of Brazilian women traveling to work as erotic dancers in New
York; the second is Kimberl
e Crenshaws exposure of the vulnerability of immigrant
women to spousal violence when applying for citizenship. Maia found that the only
choice for these Brazilian women, if they decided to stay in the United States and
wanted to be able to move back and forth between the two countries, was to get
married (Maia 2012, 124). As a citizen-making device by which they regain their
legal status, marriage is also an immigrant-unmaking one. Antigones refusal to marry
Haemon, and instead to speak for Polynices and with Ismene, may have in the text
and context prioritized natal over conjugal kinship forms, but if we approach the play
intertextually we see another possibility: what if Antigone here shows a decision not
to undo the ambivalent ontological condition of lawlessness she shared with them as
strangers?18
If marriage constitutes a citizen-making device by which the uncertainties of the
strangers world are potentially overcome through legal recognition, it can also duplicate the vulnerability of the foreigner while transitioning to citizenship, by eliciting
other kinds of violence in the power relations of the marital couple. According to
Crenshaw, immigrant women are vulnerable to spousal violence (Crenshaw 1991,
1249) because they are afraid of being deported if they try to fight against it, given
the temporal provisions established by the United States marriage regulation (they
have to remain properly married for two years before applying, and some other
requirements must be met by their spouses afterwards), and because they depend on
their husbands for information regarding their legal status (1241). The threat of
deportation and the access to information become opportunities for the husband to
carry on his abusive behavior with impunity, something Antigone might have had in
mind after witnessing the treatment the exile received from Creons family. Cutting

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across the global regulation of political membership, marriage endows Haemon with
a surplus that makes his relation to Antigone unequal. On the contrary, Ismene and
Polynices are equals to Antigone, therefore it is with them she can act in concert.19
Antigone sees in Polynices not only the brother toward whom she has duties and
obligations (Hegel) or the lover for whom her desire is uniquely attached (Lacan),
but also the symbolically produced stranger whose conditions of existence she shares,
being deprived as she is of public logos in the policing-patriarchal and heteronormative organization of the civic space.

EXTRATEXTUAL
What If Antigone Was a Refugee? was the title of an event organized by the Freedom Theater at St. Paul the Apostle Church in New York on October 16, 2010.
Reading Antigone in the Jenin Refugee Camp was the name of the panel from
which I learned that Antigone was not only read but also performed by young Palestinians at the Jenin Refugee Camp in the northern West Bank, years after the Israeli
invasion of 2002 and around the time when the Museum of Tolerance was being
constructed. Antigone provided a voice for the inexhaustible political energies of Palestinian refugees in their struggle to exist as a people against the Israeli states
attempt to erase them. Their struggle was re-presented through the script of Antigone
in this deprived area of occupied Palestine where Antigones invocation to the queen
from the East finally materialized.
This recent performance in the West Bank echoes Antigones probable first performance in the fifth century BCE, most likely staged in the theater of Dionysus at Piraeus, described by Nicole Loraux as an alien enclave inside the territory of the city
into which it is nevertheless fully integrated (Loraux 2002, 25). The ambivalent spatiality of the theater carried out a crucial function for Lorauxs attempt to depoliticize
the tragedy by emphasizing the phonetic role of the mourning voice over the semantic role of the staged agon in the script. It made it possible for her to claim that spectators discover themselves to be mortals first (antipolitical) and citizens second
(political) through the catharsis experienced in the performance (81). For Loraux,
the tendency to transform the theater into a double of the assembly (ekklsia) by
filling this Athenian institution with political, civic, and democratic attributes overlooks the significant presence of foreigners and women, which were never forgotten
by Attic orators (19) and for whom it was not the civic discourse but the ineffable
grief that the oratorio was really about. However, what Loraux calls antipolitical in
her effort to split the theater from its civic enclosurethat is, the turmoil of division
enjoyed by Dionysusis what rests at the core of the agon staged by Antigone and
Creon if the status of stranger is not attributed to the spectators but also to the
actresses, as in the Jenin Refugee Camp.20
Loraux helps us to see that the tragedy is not necessarily bound to the cultivation
of a civic ethos and that its polyethnic audience forces us to find another role for it.
However, the openness she performs is interrupted by relocating its essential

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function in the antipolitical phone without logos (Cavarero 2005b) of the mourning
cry, in which another attachmentthat of belonging to the race of the mortals
neutralizes the constitutive and conflictive differences of the audience, replayed in
the semantic content of the script in which Antigones strangeness is once again rendered invisible. In other words, Loraux decivilizes the script of the tragedy by displacing its locus of legibility from the performance to the audience, but she does it at the
cost of overlooking the semantic dissonance of alternative meanings in the play in
order to stress a cross-ethnic phonetic universality in our shared mortality. On the
contrary, the performance of Antigone by Palestinian refugees helps us to see the
agonism of the stranger in the audience, in the cast, and in the semantic content of
the play. Not by chance Antigones second and written lawin which the metric of
the poem changes, introducing a strange modulationinvokes the story of a Persian
woman, known as Intaphrenes wife (Fagles 1984, 46; Honig 2010, 1416). Having
been performed by Palestinians in occupied territories, against the erasure of their
existence by the settler-colonial state of Israel, Antigones social text must be considered as representative of a metic political drama in todays globalized world, and not
as a universal narrative bound to filial relations.

IV. LISTEN

TO THE

METIC!

After this textual, intertextual, and extratextual exposition of Antigone as a stranger,

it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty-first
century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not-legally locatable and who
resignify their ambivalent ontological status between life and death as an alternative
sociopolitical location of speech and action in equality with others. By making use
of the script of Antigone, strangers profit from its literary status, enlarging the scope of
their audience in at least two ways: 1) attributing resonance to the theme of the
stranger by the cultural position historically allocated to the tragedy, and 2) opening
a space of potential political coalition by making lawlessness politically translatable
through Antigones character, which decolonial, feminist, and other movements have
also mobilized. It is time to listen to the metic, Antigones performative speech-act:
I am a stranger, and address its challenge to the asymmetrical distribution of political membership in the One World we inhabit today.

NOTES
I am grateful to Nicholas Xenos, Angelica Bernal, Ivan Ascher, Roberto Alejandro, Barbara Cruikshank, Emily Heilker, and Ashley Bohrer for their criticism and feedback. This
paper developed from my attendance at Bonnie Honigs seminar on Antigone at the 2010
School of Criticism and Theory Program at Cornell University; to all the members of the
seminar and especially to Honig I am greatly indebted. Previous versions of this paper
were discussed with the members of the political theory reading group at the University of

Andres Fabian Henao Castro

319

Massachusetts, whose suggestions and critiques, like those of the two anonymous Hypatia
reviewers, I deeply appreciate.
1. A note on citation: A stands for Antigone, OK for Oedipus the King and OC
for Oedipus at Colonus. All the numbers after the letters correspond to the numbers in the
margins of Robert Fagless translations of the plays, which are the ones I will use unless
otherwise indicated. The numbers inside the brackets correspond to the Greek original.
2. Udi Alonis film, Forgiveness (2006), named after he attended Jacques Derrida and
Avital Ronells seminar on forgiveness at New York University, employs the Hebrew word
Mechilotwith its double meaning of forgivenesses in the plural and of underground
tunnelsto speak about the construction of an Israeli mental institution for Holocaust
survivors, among others, on the burial grounds for victims of a massacre of Palestinians. I
am grateful to Hypatias anonymous reviewers for this reference.
3. The impossibility of grieving, burying, and honoring the lives of the dead by giving them public significance is one of the most frequent forms of violence suffered by Palestinians in their occupied territories and in the US (Butler 2006), but also by relatives of
undocumented immigrants who share with them similar forms of vulnerability as a result
of their precarious status. While the Museum of Tolerance was being launched in Israel,
with the support of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, a great mass was celebrated at the USMexico border to remember the undocumented immigrants who died
trying to cross the desert, and whose bodies were either left unburied, improperly treated,
or buried unidentified in common graves, and only in a few cases properly returned to
their families on the other side of the border. Two years later Claudine Lomonaco published the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Season of Death claiming that 2005 marked a
death record for immigrants trying to cross the Arizona desert (Lomonaco 2006). Five
years later Arizonas Governor, Jan Brewer, signed the strongest law to date against immigrants, SB1070, which criminalized the failure to carry proper documents and institutionalized racial profiling as a policing technique to persecute immigrants.
4. I do not consider their genealogies to be equivalent, nor is it my purpose to propose the stranger as the new common denominator standing for such a grammatical spectrum. Notwithstanding, I justify this promiscuous use because the terms share similar
conditions of precariousness and vulnerability. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben noted, These noncitizens [referring to those who cannot be naturalized nor who want
to be repatriated] often have nationalities of origin, but, inasmuch as they prefer not to
benefit from their own states protection, they find themselves, as refugees, in a condition
of de facto statelessness (Agamben 2000, 22).
5. I use Antigone when referring to the play and Antigone when referring to the
character in the play.
6. The paradox lies in the fact that those in whom human rights should have been
more determinant and urgently ascribed, because they couldnt claim any identity other
than that of belonging to humanity, were the ones in whom they couldnt be protected or
even recognized.
7. Given that strangers share similar conditions of vulnerability, such a generalization
might override strong differences in their realities and resources. Thus it is important to
take into account the different specificities and conditions of their agencies. Current
activists in the Pioneer Valley Project, an organization in support of undocumented

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immigrants in Springfield, Massachusetts, contend with resources very different from those
inhabiting refugee camps in the West Bank.
8. Derridas analysis of the foreigner question as coming from abroad (letranger)
makes a similar point (Derrida 2000, 3).
9. Antigone has been considered as the everlasting irony in the life of the community (Hegel 1997, 288 Number 475), the revolutionary member of antifascist and antiimperial leftist organizations (Brecht 1984), the ex-nihilo against which the symbolic
order of the signifying chain defines its limits (Lacan 1997), the embodiment of womens
desire in the matrilineal alternative order to patriarchy (Irigaray 1985), the original point
of reference for discourses of civil disobedience against the arbitrariness of governments
(Randle 1998), the abject queer heroine of an anomalous desire capable of destabilizing
the architectural relationship between the nation-state and heterosexual-monogamous
forms of kinship (Butler 2000), and the symbol for the anticolonial struggle against apartheid for the African Diaspora (Rooney 2000), just to mention a few.
10. The term that Fagles translates as living is ~ whose noun-form is fx,
not the more political notion of life as b.
11. Fagles uses the same word, stranger, to name them both: Niobe and Antigone,
whereas in the Greek we find two different words being employed: mam for the former
and lj for the latter. Both terms bear a similar ambivalence, justifying Fagless
interchangeable use of them, but whereas mam denotes a greater degree of externality
separating us (citizen) from them (foreigner), lj refers to the resident alien, a
more ambiguous figure in which the distinction is not that clear, even if it was by no
means equivalent to lawlessness in Greek antiquity (Whitehead 1977). The same root,
j (home), is found in lj and in , meaning exile, which Oedipus
uses when saying to Creon, Drive me out of Thebes, in exile (OK, 1665 [1510]).
12. Oedipus at Colonus is the second play in the chronology of the surviving Theban
trilogy, although the last one to be produced (after Sophocles death) according to the
chronology of its composition.
13. The event at Colonus, a village near Athens, marks a crucial moment of hospitality in the Theban trilogy. Theseus, king of Athens, gives protection to Oedipus, the
abominable stranger, and his city is rewarded as a consequence of this act. Such hospitality to the abject exile, the toxic body of Oedipus, guarantees victory for Athens over
Thebes, won on the site of Oedipuss unknown gravesite.
14. It is important to note that it was at Colonus that Antigone called the strangers
friends, when Creon (from her former city) was trying to take her away, They tear me
awayhelp me, strangers, friends! (OC, 960 [840]). Grenes translation: Friends, I am
dragged away did not include the explicit reference to the stranger in the Greek:
kjla drgm, m m (strangers), although it kept the reference to friendship (Grene 1991, 119).
15. On the musselman, see Agamben 1999 and Arendt 2004.
16. I use Polynices corpse and Antigones semantic orientation toward death as
forms of catachresis, that is, mixed metaphors accounting for their juridical-political death
rather than referring to the physical termination of their lives.
17. Such a privilege should not be confused with the conventional reading of her
act as symptomatic of her assumed natural orientation to the family, a reading heavily

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321

indebted to Hegel. If she turned to the natal and not to the marital family (Honigs distinction), it is not because she belongs to the apolitical domain of the private, but because
family is always already political in her account. Although I cannot explore this trend,
Honig is right in pointing out that Haemon tried to reappropriate her for the conjugal
family through the symbolic gesture of his suicide (Honig 2010), a gesture interrupted by
Creon, an act that further stresses the undecidability of her legal status.
18. Butlers symbolic use of Antigones anomalous desire acquires another political
dimension when placed in a transnational setting (Butler 2000). Antigones refusal to
marry Haemon could be interpreted as a rejection of the heteronormative construction of
the nation-state, which her heterosexual marriage would have reinforced. Since 1996, the
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defined marriage in the US as that between a man
and a woman, denying marriage as a citizen-making device to queer, binational couples.
But even queer activists lobbying for legalization of same-sex marriage, like Immigration
Equality, would be rejected in Antigones refusal to marry, figuratively contesting their
willingness to normalize queerness in their strategic battle to repeal DOMA (Phelan 2001;
Puar 2007). I am grateful to Alix Olson for pointing me toward this dimension.
19. For equality as a condition of political action, see Arendt 1998 and Ranciere
1999.
20. Honig makes a similar critique on the depoliticizing consequences of Lorauxs
turn to humanism (Honig 2010, 57). She questions the presumed absence of politics in
the priority that Loraux gives to the universality of the mortal over the particularity of
the citizen. I agree with Honigs critique of Lorauxs problematic appropriation of
Nietzsche for the reproduction of a binary between language and sound to the extent that
any concept of universality in the latter is inescapably bound to a certain configuration of
politics. But I dont follow this line of argument; instead, I trace such configuration in the
geopolitical architecture of the tragedy.

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