History of European Ideas

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Antigone's tomb: ‘Prologue’

Roberta Johnson

To cite this article: Roberta Johnson (2018) Antigone's�tomb: ‘Prologue’, History of European
Ideas, 44:7, 977-986, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2018.1517000

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HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS
2018, VOL. 44, NO. 7, 977–986
https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1517000

Antigone’s tomb: ‘Prologue’1

Translated by Roberta Johnson
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

The fact is that Antigone did not commit suicide in her tomb as Socrates, erroneously, tells us. More-
over, how could Antigone, who had never exercised control over her life, kill herself. She did not even
have time to reflect on herself. Awakened from her child’s dream by her father’s mistake and her
mother’s suicide, by the anomaly of her origins, by her exile, obliged to serve as a guide to her
blind, king-beggar, innocent-guilty father, she was forced to enter into the fullness of consciousness.
The tragic conflict found her as a virgin and took complete possession of her; she grew within it like a
larva in its cocoon. Without her, the tragic trajectory of her family and of the city would not have
been able to unfold, or, even less, make manifest its meaning.
The tragic conflict would not have become such, would not have entered into the category of tra-
gedy, if it had only consisted of a destruction; if this destruction had not unleashed something that
surpassed it and saved it. Had that not occurred, the Tragedy would be nothing more than the narra-
tion of a catastrophe or a series of catastrophes, in which at most the end of one aspect of the human
condition or the whole human condition is exemplified. It would not have been a tale that achieved
poetic existence, unless it was an unending wail, a lamentation without end and without finality, if it
were not going to end in an Elegy – which is another poetic category.
Among all the protagonists of Greek Tragedy, the young girl Antigone is the one in whom the
transcendence typical of the genre is revealed most visibly and with the greatest purity. But, in
exchange for this she needed the time she was given and a bit more. Time also fell upon her, the
time necessary for Oedipus’s transformation from being the author of a double ‘sacred’ crime
into a ‘pharmakos’ that liberates and purifies.
Meanwhile, the destructive process avidly continued to devour. The civil war with the paradig-
matic death of the two brothers, one at the hand of the other, after receiving the father’s curse. Per-
haps it is a rather ingenuous but a most valid symbol of all civil wars. And the tyrant who thinks he is
closing the wound, multiplies it with opprobrium and death. The tyrant who thinks he is the master
of death, only feels alive when he is dealing it out.
Antigone’s death leaves the repentant tyrant without any hope of rescue, or rather he is forced to
reverse his decision. In the struggle between the brothers, he has only been able to save his honour
thanks to the defeated cadaver. The rest remained floating in the air: Oedipus’s hasty ending, Yocas-
ta’s asphyxiation, pale Hemon’s unexpected death, and even the unlived life of Antigone herself,
whose possibility only came into being with the tears she shed on the way to her grave. As if only
she could fully carry out the ritual weeping, the lamentation without which no one should descend
into the tomb.
Thus is revealed Antigone’s true and deepest condition of virgin sacrificed to the nether regions
on which the city was built. The ancients were aware that all cities are founded on the abyss and
surrounded by something very like chaos. Her place was to be doubly maintained without consider-
ing the other dimension – that of the heavens and its gods. A city was supported between three

CONTACT Roberta Johnson rjohnson@ku.edu

1
From María Zambrano, La tumba de Antígona, ed. Virginia Trueba Mira, vol. 3 of Obras completas, ed. Jesús Moreno Sanz (Barce-
lona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011), 1115–29.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
978 R. JOHNSON

worlds – that upper, the terrestrial, and that of the infernal abysses. A human sacrifice was required
to maintain it, a fact that surely would not surprise the moderns. The sacrifice of a virgin must be an
ancient rite. And in truth nor should it evoke surprise. Sacrifice continues to be history’s last
recourse, its secret mechanism. No attempt to eliminate sacrifice, substituting it for reason in any
of its forms, has managed to take hold. Inevitably the figure of Joan of Arc consumed by fire
comes to mind as a typical form of sacred sacrifice in all its violence. And this chain of saints,
immured virgins, offering for eternity their purity, to the purity of faith, of love that rescues and
transcends.
That action of sacrifice must be carried out in the three worlds – (1) on earth, maintaining or
preparing simultaneously a human and divine, or, at least, sacred architecture; (2) in the abysses,
placating them and saving something from them that can be saved and that pleads to be incorporated
into the light, to be given to light and life; (3) in the heavens, in its most transcendent form, the
smoke that can also be fragrance, aroma, of the sacrifice that ascends higher than the word, at
least higher than the word alone. And in certain words uttered by the one who officiates at the
sacrifice when the victim is completely passive and patient, and by means of the victim when
she offers herself, they ascend as the corroboration of the sacrifice, as its total perfection because
the suffering and its meaning are declared at the same time. They are the humanly sacred expression
and revelation.
No sacrificial victim, then, and even more so if she is motivated by love, can fail to go through the
inferno. We could say that it already happens in this way in this world where, without abandoning it,
the person given over to love must go through everything – through the inferno of solitude, of delirium,
through fire, in order to end up giving the light that only illuminates in the heart, that only lights up for
the heart. It seems that the condition consists of having to descend to the abysses in order to ascend,
going through all the regions where love is the element, so to speak, of human transcendence – firstly
fecund; then, if it persists, creative. Creator of life, of light, of consciousness.
Love and its ritual journey to the depths is what sheds light on the birth of consciousness. Anti-
gone reveals it. Socrates carried it out in his own way. Those two are the sacrificial victims that the
‘Greek miracle’ reveals to us, gives us. And they both perish for the city, by virtue of the city’s trans-
cendent laws. Because of the New Law, we could say. Because of that New Law that guides and con-
ducts, that consumes, ‘flagellates and saves, leads to the depths and saves from them’ certain chosen
ones and certain peoples in their entirety on some unforgettable occasions in our Western tradition.
One could say that the origin itself of the Occident is the hope of the New Law, which is not only the
intimate motor of all sacrifice, but also the Passion that presides over history.
For this passion, Antigone is a rather prophetic figure (as in Greek prophesy). Because it is a work
of love, her sacrifice covers the three worlds in all their extension: that of the dead, to which her pity
leads her, that of pity-love-reason, which tells her that she should be among the dead rather than
among the living, as if her life on Earth appeared to her like an ephemeral spring, as though she
were a husbandless Persephone that has only obtained one season – a spring that cannot be repeated;
the terrestrial world where she was born in the labyrinth of serpent-like entrails, in the maze of civil
war and the tyranny which followed it; that is to say, in the double labyrinth of family and history.
And upon carrying out her sacrifice with the lucidity that the New Law reveals to her, the Law that is
also the most remote and sacred, simply the Law, she reaches the place where a human society exists.
Her purity becomes clarity and even the very substance of human consciousness in its nascent state.
She is a figure of the dawn of consciousness.
For all those reasons, she could not kill herself, nor could she die like a common mortal. No
sacrificial victim dies just like that. She must live her life and death together in their transcendence.
This transcendence only occurs in this union, in this wedding.
And the punishment to which Antigone was condemned seems purposeful, giving her time, an
indefinite time to live her death, to live her death to the full and, at the same time, her life, her unlived
life and with it, along with it, the tragic process of her family and her city. And this last dimension of
her condemnation, which characterizes Greek tragedy, resplendent in the extreme in Antigone – the
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 979

abandonment, the total abandonment, by her gods. In Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone, the gods do not
intervene. No divine oracle revealed her destiny to this girl. Apollo did not say anything to her, and
perhaps for that reason neither he nor his sister Athena was concerned with her fate. It is true that
Oedipus received the announcement of his destiny, and no divine power came down to help him at
the hour of his misfortune. Perhaps for that reason, he was the most unfortunate of men. However,
he had Antigone’s company during his exile. He was carried off by earthly powers as was Heracles,
like a hero or a demi-god promised to a better life, while Antigone was alone. She was given a tomb
and time. And rather than death, passage. Time to undo the knot of familial entrails in order to live
fully the tragic process along in its diverse dimensions. And a death, a kind of death that would allow
her to leave something, the dawn that she carried with her and to come out purified of what was at
the same time an inferno and purgatory toward her extra-terrestrial destiny, just as centuries later
someone would say of themselves: ‘Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle.’2
One of the most felicitous discoveries of the Greek religious consciousness shines in Antigone –
the passion of a daughter. That is not to say that that is the only place where such a passion appears.
However, in our Western tradition it resides in Greek tragedy. Islam offers Fátima, the pained daugh-
ter of the Prophet; only behind the veil of the unknown in so many cases has she been present in the
occidental traditions – Fátima, ‘the glimmering one,’ on whom her motherly misfortunes were vis-
ited because she was a daughter, the daughter that became ‘mother of her father,’ according to her
father’s own expression.
It is in Greek Tragedy where the passion of the daughter can naturally offer the proper mode of
this genre in which the divine mixes with the human. In what is only human does one find drama,
comedy, a certain kind of novel and certain kinds of histories. However, in truth, when it all reaches
the supreme dignity of its own category, the gods always remain afloat, however, hidden God may be.
However closed divine silence may be, a certain call opens up on a remote horizon, a sole point to
which all conflict is remitted. And it also happens that, when silence is the only answer for human
clamouring and human praise, it achieves consistency, becoming almost an entity. And it is then
more, much more than a character with his or her voice.
Antigone’s passion arises from the absence and silence of her gods. One could say beneath the
shadow of an unknown God to whom the Athenians did not fail to erect an altar. As we know,
Saint Paul announced the resurrection in front of it while the Athenians remained silent. The dizzy-
ing promise created a silence instead of a blind hurtling, of the many in which is engendered apoc-
ryphal – although no less true – history which papers over true history.
And thus apocryphal history almost constantly asphyxiates true history, the history which philo-
sophical reason tries to reveal and establish, and poetic reason tries to rescue. Between the two, as
between two beams that cross, history’s sacrificial victims suffer torture. Since in the symbol of
the cross, we can find the vertical axis which signals the tension between Earth and Heaven, as
the most direct line of influence of Heaven on Earth, and which is also the axis of the figure of
human attention in its extreme vigil and of the constancy of its decision. And in the horizontal
axis, which runs parallel to the earthly ground in which the very earth raises up and imprisons its
open arms, one finds a sign of the total surrender of the mediator, a sign of his complete surrender
in being and presence, in virtue of which the bird can be captured, sacrificed (René Guéron, Le sym-
bolisme de la Croix).
Apocryphal history itself makes sure that such a figure, still a cross, is disfigured and becomes X-
shaped. In the X-shaped cross both axes appear to be the same length, and in addition the vertical
direction, the one which most distresses the servants of apocryphal history, has been abolished. The
victim nailed to it is made to spin around, run through all its possible positions depending on the
wind that blows, or the intentions and convenience of those in charge. The movement can be

Translator’s note: ‘Pure and made apt for mounting to the stars’ from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, trans. Henry
2

Francis Cary (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2009), 409.

980 R. JOHNSON

from left to right or right to left. And if it remains motionless, the cross has the figure of an X, of the
unknown.
Everything seems to indicate that places precede the functions that are carried out in them. And
thus the function of mediator today finds itself without any adequate place to act, and the person
called to that vocation without any means of visibility. And so the first, originary, primordial action
of the first mediators and, it should be said, of the Mediator of mediators, has consisted necessarily of
opening up space, its own, appropriate space, where its divine function in the human sphere (but
always under the weight of the divine) can be made manifest in some way. The ambiguity in the atti-
tude and the gesture, the mistake and the twisting of the word is the first barrier that surrounds the
space where the action and the figure of the mediator appear.
Greek Tragedy is a privileged space where the figure of a certain kind of mediator can appear – a
mediator that performs or will perform an extraordinary feat – a robbery from the gods in favour of
man, a (zodiacal) series of tasks by which ambiguous and threatening monsters are defeated; man-
datory crimes carried out under an irresistible mandate deposited in or under the consciousness of
the actor. The protagonist is already an actor, through the action he carries out with true passion, as
are all those that surround him, except for the seer and the chorus that know and proffer a moral and
even at times moralizing judgment, which the protagonist, possessed by his passion, cannot take into
account. The moral is on another plane that does not have anything to do with him. The moral
(reason) comes later and only after he has actively exhausted his pain. We could say that the
moral is an inheritance that the protagonist’s suffering leaves, thanks precisely to this hubris for
which they reproach him/her. Because without it, without the corresponding delirium, the extraordi-
nary actions, among the gods and men, between destiny and the nascent liberty, would not be
fulfilled. Gods and men need these masks beneath which the human and the divine are intermingled
to then be divided according to a just, or at least valid, measure for the human to become possible.
The gods wear themselves out in the struggle before they leave the inheritance to their heir and try to
devour the protagonist, the bearer of that prophecy called man, just as they did among themselves.
Uranus kept his own children locked up within the breast of the mother Gea. Chronos, first mediator
among the gods, freed them. He liberates and hides, just as human time will always continue to do
and devours and reinstates just as history had remade human designs and continues to do so before
our very eyes. Zeus, father of all, seems to bring the stability symbolized by the provocative rock
deposited at the foot of the mountain and serves as a home for the gods. A rock that symbolizes
an ending and a beginning, thus a limit, the first rock of the fence that circumscribes what is
human, altar of a possible and necessary pact. Only a pact which signals a limit between the unlim-
ited thrust of the gods and humanity’s no less unlimited passion for being can bring stability – the
always meagre and threatened stability of human constructions.
But the avarice and the fear of Zeus – the father that seems to bring stability – will make Pro-
metheus pay for his ‘crime’ in favour of the mortals, who can only maintain themselves in their
mortal life here on mother Earth thanks to things like art and fire that only come from the gods
and their world. It seems as though the passion of these gods was that their own children, also
gods, remain buried in the mother’s breast, or rather hidden in the father’s chest, or the no less
embittered passion that man fails to complete the birth process. In this light, Oedipus’s error
appears as one more step in the procession that Hesiod presents us in his Theogony. And Antigone’s
passion, the passion of a daughter, was ineluctable because it was also that of the male heirs, both of
whom died, dying between themselves as much as killing each other. Oedipus’s double guilt as both
father and king, was to be shared by his off-spring, although not as a repetition of the guilty deed,
but rather simply as blindness, the blindness of one who is being born, which impedes him from
seeing the (in this case) sacred limit. On those males truly fell the king’s inheritance, that first
impetus that blinded Oedipus in his desire to crown himself without looking, without stopping
to even look at the means destiny so readily offered him – without even suspecting that beneath
the naturalness with which destiny offered a gift there hid, paradoxically, the maximum transgres-
sion of natural law.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 981

But when the legacy of Oedipus, the man, rather than of Oedipus, the king, fell upon the lone
daughter, Antigone, something essential and indivisible fell on her, and for that reason dealt only
a glancing blow to the other daughter Ismene whose only part in the tragedy was to be a sister.
This essence could not be split into opposites that fight with each other. This essence was substance,
prime material for sacrifice that only sacrifice can consummate. However, for sacrifice to fulfil itself
effectively, the catalyzing presence of something pure is required. In this case, that presence was
Antigone, who through her sacrifice managed not only to redeem the family guilt, but also by
means of her purity – her human purity – make it transcendent.
And meanwhile, on the side of power, the struggle between the brothers reveals the persistence of
something that in the face of purity and Antigone’s law becomes past, a past to be buried: the old
pretension to the blind power of the gods and of king-tyrants that always comes from outside, or
from inside, and in this case from deep inside, in order to enlarge the city and consolidate power
over it.
Today, from a great distance, we can imagine that the brother who arrived in Thebes from afar –
exogamous – came to rescue her, brought by this dream in which there took shape the hope of lib-
erating the city from excessively dense power over which a shadow had been cast by endogamy car-
ried beyond all law. Antigone’s brother, who led her irresistibly, fatally, to death, could only arrive –
according to the paradoxes of tragedy – with the desire to take her (her and her city) toward life. And
thus, although we do not find any allusion to it in Sophocles’s text, nor as far as we know in any
legend, the idea comes to mind of a certain relationship, a certain analogy between Polynices, Anti-
gone’s brother who comes to Thebes and Orestes, Electra’s brother, the absolute brother, as it were,
the one who comes as an avenger-liberator to rescue simultaneously the dark power and his sister,
the victim of a chain of errors of an entire lineage. The differences in situation and even of action that
arises from the arrival of the absolute brother are so evident that I do not need to point them out.
What stands out in the two tragic situations is that it is a matter of fraternity, of a fraternity that is
debated under a sombre fatality, fraternity that is the true protagonist in the darkness bequeathed by
the father’s and mother’s realm, the mother who in Yocasta’s case did not know how to see what
Oedipus did not see, and in the case of the dark and intimate Clytemnestra, she did not know
how to extract herself from the evil Agamemnon’s excesses brought her, injuring her in her condition
as a mother and woman.
Without any doubt it is fraternity that flowers and presents itself as a nascent protagonist, as a
necessary redeeming protagonist, that is going to untie the knot of evil; it is the relationship between
a suffering, loyal, enslaved sister and a returning brother, bearer of liberty, and without a doubt heir,
at least in his own mind, to his father’s authority according to a new law born of the light that is
dawning. Even more, born of the light that demands the incomprehensible, in Orestes’s case, in a
manner which is both clear and not subject to appeal. And this fraternal relationship appears to
us as though it were crucified between the inherited shadow, the curse that is dragged along in
the shadows and the light, the promised light that is foretold.
This relationship of pure fraternity emerges intermittently like a secret vow of the man who
struggles in the labyrinth of blood ties attracted by power or, rather, the desire for power that blinds
and alienates. Only after the chain of guilt, errors, and deliriums does the moment of recognition, of
identification, arrive. The protagonist recognizes himself as the subject of guilt, and liberates himself
as a subject of his guilt, and so he liberates himself from being an object, a simple object which has
been favoured or condemned by the destiny that hovers over people and gods.
And thus, in this instant that becomes like a point, the scale points to equity – gods and people
appear as equals. Privilege and guilt are equalized, and the being and non-being of the human con-
dition reveal itself to be the inverse of the being and non-being of the gods. In man, being subject to
guilt produces an excess, a certain excess that could easily be called transcendence that situates him
like an absolute protagonist over and above the gods themselves. Around him a previously unknown,
vast emptiness forms. The city does not accept him; he finds no place either among the living or the
dead. His solitude is revealed to him. A solitude that only the unknown, mute God takes in.
982 R. JOHNSON

Paradoxically, the fruit of fraternity is this solitude, as appears quite evidently in the case of Antigone
– the sister herself, the absolute, ‘autodelphic’ sister, as Sophocles’s text says. It is in her, in Antigone,
in whom the final process of anagnorisis is fulfilled, in which a singular and guiltless human creature
becomes a pure subject of prophetic solitude. Abandoned by the gods, even by Athena, a girl like
herself, and like the daughter of her father – vigilant attention in which consciousness reveals itself,
a clarity that begins to issue from the battle between light and dark: dawn. However. Athena did not
appear, in the way she did to attend to Orestes, blighted by guilt that Apollo provoked and that her
light could not dispel. It is quite true that Orestes had gone down to the deepest abyss when Athena
intervened, not so much to save him, but to establish a sacred assembly, the Areopagus, the scale of
the gods themselves who are obliged to weigh and measure, to weigh and measure themselves, and in
that way emerging from the dominion of destiny to become responsible in obedience to the law. And
if Orestes had remained in the power of the furies of unending vengeance, everything would have
remained there, in the vengeance which does not end, and which, for the same reason, like all ven-
geance that does not end, does not manage to be history. Because history itself must also experience
its anagnorisis, it must identify itself in the law in order not to descend into a simple history of perdi-
tion, or the history of a perdition.
Meanwhile guiltless Antigone manifests the same law, an always new and revealing law, the bur-
ied law that must be revived through the work of someone humanly without guilt. It is the law left
behind, forgotten, sometimes buried; the perennial principle of the beyond, over and above not only
the gods – those gods – and of men, but rather of the same destiny that appeared to hover above
them, mute, unrecognizable. The law in which destiny is configured and, for that reason, is rescued.
The feat must be to rescue fatality.
Fraternity has been sacrificed, almost vanquished. What appears in its place is human solitude.
However, can the matter remain there in Antigone’s case? Could she become simply the victorious
Antigone? A new tragedy opened up for her as she entered her tomb while still alive; alive without a
brother or a wedding.
Thus a tragedy appropriate to Antigone presents itself in this second birth that coincides not with
her death, but with being buried alive – the perfect contraposition of that exile when her life opened
up. A second birth that offers her, as to anyone this happens to, the revelation of their being in all its
dimensions; a second birth that is life and vision in the speculum justitiae. And Antigone, the virgin,
knows herself, and even before this she feels what she is – an integral being, an entirely virginal girl.
What presents itself to her, like what she was, as a promise of the perfect marriage, she will no longer
have; that is what she sees – the unachieved end is what is revealed to the innocent condemned per-
son, what appears to the true sacrificial victim. The victim worthy of sacrifice is, in human life, the
one who has not searched for it, who has not disposed of his own being and of his own life by going
in search of sacrifice, as happens so often in modern times that, at least in this respect, does seem now
to be passing. This still intense time, populated with victims in search of sacrifice because they do not
know what to do with being and life, as a result of the vertiginous nature of time and the horror of
this ‘you have your whole life before you’ – which is repeatedly said to the anguished adolescent not
recognizing that it is exactly that utterance that frightens them – having one’s whole life before one as
though it were a compact, inaccessible sphere like an absolute living instant to instant. It is also born
out of a desire to fulfil ungraspable being, to see the real face that every man feels is hidden and yet to
be seen which is, at least in some cases, the resplendent, true and saintly face, the only one. But Anti-
gone, dawn of human consciousness, was not even conscious of her own sacrifice. So, unlike Socrates
who could not avoid it, she did not have to resort to irony. Consciousness in her reflects a ray of light
to which she yields entirely without suffering even for a minute the temptation of wanting to see
herself. She walks feeling her way in the light as though she were not, as mortals usually do,
accompanied by her moving shadow – and preceded by her image.
She entered her tomb as though she had never looked at herself in any mirror. She had her entire
being with her. She wept for her wedding, the wedding that had never before concerned her. She
wept for the time they were taking away from her, and inevitably she wept for herself, because at
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 983

that moment she felt herself and saw herself for the first time. Thus she was born upon entering into
the dark cave, having to consume herself alone, by entering into her own entrails. She who, impas-
sively and objectively, declared the true law over passion was made to die by turning in on herself.
Diaphanous, without a shadow and without an image, they made her bury herself deep, to die as if
she were committing suicide from within and, while she was consuming herself, see herself, confront
her own image for the first time. Would she accept it? Sophocles could not permit it; he could not let
her die in this way. He hit upon the remedy of suicide from without, that suicide which consists of
killing oneself by liberating oneself from the other, from have to move towards death, entering into
one’s own entrails to find the point where death’s mouth opens and slipping into its narrow passage
until she is drunk by death, just as the snake, her Thebian totem, does upon being absorbed by the
earth.
It was not possible for Antigone, who had transcended the law of her own city and her own family
and her gods to have to follow the paradigm of the ancestral totem of her native land in her mode of
dying. Merely having walked in exile exempted her from dying in that way, as they commanded her
to. But, according to Sophocles, nor could she kill herself. In truth, Antigone could not die in any
way. Unless one accepts a means of death that is a passing through – leaving life here little by little,
carrying her being with her, although not in such an easy fashion. In a creature with such a perfect
unity, being, and life cannot be separated even by death. Undoubtedly life pertains to a being affected
by death. A means of death that reveals this being and, in doing so, gives it new life gives. When death
comes to certain ‘beings,’ it hides them, and to others it reveals inextinguishable life: in history and
beyond in a limitless horizon. A revealing transcendence, which preferably we could call a passing
through, whose truest image is falling asleep.
Concealment comes about in a different way in this type of being – characters and exceptionally
human creatures –: a tomb when they are given it and a time of forgetting, of absence as in a dream.
With this forgetting they are given time they are owed, which coincides with the time that human
beings need in order to receive this revelation, clearings that open up in the forest of history.
The forest, let it be noted in passing, is formed less by the paths that become lost in it than by the
clearings that open up in their thickness, reservoirs of clarity and silence. Temples. When man wants
to know about these clearings, instead of following the imperative of traversing its paths, history,
thought will begin to unravel. The clearings that open up in the forest, drops in the desert, are
like silences of revelation.
Concealment is a nocturnal time that all living beings need in order to continue living. The dis-
continuity within the domain, within simple life, prefigures the discontinuity of history. A time of
germination in the darkness due, more than to anyone, to those that in some way fulfil the promise
of resurrection, as individuals, and to the law of reappearance that modulates history. Without dis-
continuity history might not exist, or it would be very different: an accumulation and duration super-
imposed on life.
The tomb in which Antigone was enclosed alive kept her alive for a time – the time she was owed –
consuming herself in the last stage of her life, a life which, thanks to a being who is sacrificed, sums up
the history of a lineage, of a city so that the transcendence, like smoke, of the sacrifice is elevated and
upon being elevated makes universally visible and attainable its meaning for all lineages and, even
more, for all cities. An enlivening sacrifice, like all real sacrifices. In this case thanks to the poetic
word which is also virginal.
And thus the girl Antigone above all appears unable to kill herself, and even to die in the common
manner as usually happens to characters in whom truth is embodied to the point of becoming poetry.
Truth is always prophesy and for that reason, it cannot be spoken, because it is ineffable, or because it
has already been said, as it belongs to the time in which it is finally easy to say it. And because it is
limitless.
Truth is at the mercy of those that sustain it; with them it disappears in an instant from amongst
visible things and enters with them into the tomb, the most appropriate place for germination.
984 R. JOHNSON

Here in history what is germinating and transcending in these tombs of truth is not visible except
at certain moments; in others it is unseen and is never fully seen. Like all truth in a nascent state, it
cannot be captured in a concept, or an idea. And the human creature that maintains it displays an
indestructible unity while offering variations on its form that, certainly, do not change it. Like the
dawn, like the fragrance of the recently opened flower, it can spread without disappearing. And
its only way of ceding is to disappear again, creating as it does so an anguish and a silence that
become intertwined for as long as concealment lasts.
Antigone founds a lineage or at least she allows us to see one, what in today’s language, we call an
archetype. She allows poetic characters and human creatures to be recognized, leading them, as she
leads herself, above and beyond herself. It is the lineage of the immured who are not only alive but
living. In certain places or in the middle of the city between indifferent people, within a partial death,
which leaves them for a time, which wraps them in a kind of grotto that can be hidden in a meadow
or a garden where they are offered a pure fruit and a living water that secretly sustains them – dream,
sometimes prison, impenetrable silences, illness, alienation. What seems like death. Real places and,
at the same time, means by which consciousness eludes and alludes, files before these creatures. They
hide themselves and reappear in accordance with unknown numbers. They return in an apparition
that progresses like the dawn. The seven Sleeping Saints slept in their cavern for 300 years until they
visibly resuscitated before falling definitively into death. In Ephesus, they awake cyclically in the
devout consciousnesses, according to what the very eminent Louis Massignon tells us as he awakens
them now.
Simplicity, purity, clarity define these figures making them recognizable. What one can affirm
about them and what radiates is their condition as creatures – figures, words of the first Poem.
They are the alert memory of Fiat Lux, to which they have responded with the Fiat mihi of the
first creature without their always knowing it. Long-lived virginal creatures, which, as their lives
are cut short, are given their own, inalienable time. Dilthey says of Hölderlin: ‘There is an old belief
that the gods manifest themselves and reveal the future of things in innocent souls. Hölderlin lived in
such pious, innocent purity and in translucent beauty of being.’3 These souls were prophets but not
only and not just of future things but even more so of man’s being that shines in them like a
prophecy.
The most human aspect of man, at least as it appears to us today, is consciousness. And it is a
consciousness that Antigone illuminates, the dawn she repeats in each one of her reappearances.
Without a doubt this Sophoclean tragedy is, among all those of this author and all the others we
know of, the closest to philosophy, although it was not for strictly philosophical motives that Kier-
kegaard was attracted to it. In his own way, he was of the ‘Antigone’ species because of his destiny as
a son, because of his search, since the philosopher must always search from the initial state in which
he finds him to be simply a creature. And also because of his hunger for fraternity – his conflict had
to be resolved in the world of brothers, in that of the Son – because of his insurmountable solitude.
Nor has Antigone attracted poets like Hölderlin for the polished poetry in which his being is diapha-
nously achieved. Antigone’s vocation – or the Antigone vocation – precedes the division between
philosophy and poetry, it exists before the crossroads at which the philosopher and the poet separ-
ated, in some cases, with such rending. How much effort has been expended trying not to look back.
It was a useless effort in some periods of history since in those periods this past is revealed as the
beginning, the assimilable origin of man’s first homeland on Earth.
However, what Antigone’s sacrifice offers is most definitely consciousness. A consciousness in an
incipient state that springs from the sacrifice of a soul, or rather of a being, in its integrity. A con-
sciousness which later in philosophy will appear as if born of a restricted subject, of an ‘I’ that

3
Translation from Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works. Volume 5. Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi (Prin-
ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Translated by Joseph Ross, 303. In the original Spanish, ‘innocent souls’ appears as ‘almas
vírgenes’ [virgin souls], ‘innocent purity’ as ‘pureza de alma’ [purity of the soul] and ‘translucent beauty’ as ‘impoluta belleza’
[unpolluted beauty].
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 985

through consciousness achieves existence. The subject will become the ‘pure subject,’ although with-
out being purified as would be best or, at least, without showing us how it had purified itself. And it is
not strange that out of this purity the ‘I’, in the consciousness that has been confided to it, has been
growing increasingly less pure, has been sinking to the point of coinciding with the ‘empirical I’
today called the ‘ego’ and even deeper. That is the direction man has taken today, although, it is
only fair to add, not without a sometimes exasperated desire for anagnorisis, for self-recognition
in a clear mirror that does not reflect his condemnation.
Meanwhile the consciousness of ‘these virgin souls’ does not depend on any ‘I.’ The subject is of
the whole being that has offered itself beyond life and death, that has given its one answer in a Fiat
that in one single instant has taken all time for itself. Consciousness born in that way is prophetic
clarity that the dawn inexorably holds out to us, a human Speculum Justitiae in which history
looks at itself. It would be a mortal risk to look at oneself in the Speculum Justitiae, if it did not
come from sacrifice; if it were not prophetic and vivifying at the same time.
It was demanded of Antigone and she was simultaneously given a time between life and death in
her tomb. A time with multiple functions in which she had to drink up, although in a small way, her
unlived life and, more than in her imagination – which she scarcely employed –, by offering to all
those characters entangled in the tragic rope, to all those enclosed in the magic circle of fatality-des-
tiny, the time of light, time for the necessary light to penetrate their entrails. Because the magic circle
was the wall of a labyrinth, of the labyrinth of the familial entrails folded over themselves and the
disordered constitution of the city or, rather, the foundations of the city, its nether parts.
Antigone in her tomb is a presence. In the best-case scenario, in the common life the person man-
ages to make his mask a little transparent and at the same time animated – we should not forget that
we are talking about the light of life. But, in the life of the human person, however much he may be
given over to light, there is always a darkness with something hidden in it. In the best cases, the per-
son resists the light as much as he seeks it out. Only through sacrifice can this resistance be dissolved.
This sacrifice is invisible in most cases and in others it is carried out instantly in a violent and visible
manner, although it was incubating from the beginning.
And thus, the person is never completely present even to his own consciousness, and at times even
less to his own consciousness than to that of others. Integral presence is achieved only by the one
who is dispossessed of that dark nucleus which is resistant to making itself visible; the dispossessed
who is also the unalienated. Little does it matter that the wounds of anyone who has experienced this
continue to smart, and that he feels that this wound is opening and widening. It is a wound formed
by an impossible suture between his being and non-being, what he has been and what he could have
been, of what was possible for him and the reality imposed on him. The vision of the unlived life
torments the victim in the process of dispossession and de-alienation. Only liberty, when it draws
near, makes slavery visible. Only when the identity of the being that was born as a human comes
into view, is the alienation in which he lived drained away, consummating itself by allowing itself
to be seen.
According to Sophocles, Antigone entered into her tomb lamenting her wedding that did not
take place. She entered in a delirious state. And only then, although the poet does not indicate it,
did she see that she was not allowed to have a husband so that in her, by her complete sacrifice,
the family knot could be undone and the difference between the law of men, the law of the gods
and the true law which reigns over them would remain forever clear. This true law exists above
gods and men and is older than them; they are but its diaphanous prophecy, as in the case of
Antigone, or the deformed image to be found in all forms of power that do not submit to it.
She knew then that she had not been allowed a human wedding, because she had been, from
birth, devoured by the abyss of her family, by the entrails of the city. And then her wailing
and her delirium were unleashed at the same time. The girl weeps as Joan wept on the way
to the bonfire, as the lives interred in a stone sepulchre or in solitude beneath time have wept
without being heard. And the delirium springs from these lives, from these living beings in
the last stage of their fulfilment, in the last time in which their voice can be heard. Their presence
986 R. JOHNSON

becomes one, an inviolable presence; an intangible conscience, a voice that arises time and time
again. While the history that devoured the young girl Antigone continues, this history that
demands sacrifice, Antigone will continue to be delirious. While her family history, that of her
entrails, demands sacrifice, while the city and its law do not cave in to the vivifying light.
And so, it will not be odd if someone hears this delirium and transcribes it as faithfully as
possible.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.