Overview

In Private Lives, Public Deaths, Jonathan Strauss shows how Sophocles' tragedy Antigone crystallized the political, intellectual, and aesthetic forces of an entire historical moment--fifth-century Athens--into one idea: the value of a single, living person. That idea existed, however, only as a powerful but unconscious desire. Drawing on classical studies, Hegel, and contemporary philosophical interpretations of this pivotal drama, Strauss argues that Antigone's tragedy, and perhaps all classical tragedy, represents a failure to satisfy this longing. To the extent that the value of a living individual remains an open question, what Sophocles attempted to imagine still escapes our understanding. Antigone is, in this sense, a text not from the past, but from our future.

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Strauss' monograph stands as a unique contribution that will be impossible to ignore for many years to come. The reason is that Strauss does not simply do an analysis of Sophocles' play, nor does he merely review the literature - although his readings of both the play and the literature are exemplary. In addition, Strauss constructs 'Antigone' as a figure or a concept that is essential today in order to comprehend our individuality as well as the political.-Dimitris Vardoulakis, University of Western Sydney For some readers these thematic anchors will hold in tension an impressive interdisciplinary project that incorporates analyses of not only ancient dramatic and philosophical texts and their reception in contemporary theory but also cultural practices regarding burial, such as funerary monuments and speeches, revealing the emergence of the concept of individuality. For other readers the anachronism that Strauss 'seeks to work through rather than avoid' (p.9) may prove one anchor too many and sink a project eager to find traces of a distinctly modern subjectivity in Antigone, which he locates, negatively, in the form of a desire.--Critical Inquiry

Author Information

Jonathan Strauss is Professor of French at Miami University. He is the author of Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel, and the Modern Self and of Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Fordham).

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