Antigone

There is an interpretation of the myth of Antigone based on the concept of civil disobedience, i.e. in terms of the tension between myths of the human law and myths of the universal law. Has the universal law or law of the gods (the God) prevalence over human law (civil law)? The question is so confusing that it barely makes sense. Curiously enough the universal law is so embedded in our most basic valuations that we mistake it to express the essential human nature, and feel human law as a mere human all too human appendix of the profane ways of the meaningless modern world. From this point of view, just like Thoreau did by refusing to pay taxes to a Government which condoned slavery, Antigone refused to comply with a law which condemned the corpse of her brother to be the plaything of the crows and a banquet for the dogs. The primitive or metaphysical determination which orders the burial of corpses clashes against the functional or economic determination that denies any entity and identity to the enemies of the city, of the group. Very often ethical problems have no consistent solutions since, like old cities, gather within their walls contradictory codes for action corresponding to different space-time scenarios of the life of the group. And so, Creon and Antigone count both with arguments in favor of their actions.

The myth of the Oedipus saga expresses better than any other Greek myth the implications and contradictions of the narratives of immortality which started under the mythico-ritual axes of the universal law. They are today completely relevant, for the individuation problem has been barely understood. Antigone and her family are the living examples of the precarious nature of individuation, the fragility of the more basic social persona, father, mother, son, etc. which can be tangled in the most confusing way when the dice of the gods rumble freely over the table of the world. Antigone wants for Polyneices, and for herself, the narrative of an identity, only complete and closed at death, but at a meaningful death, a death with a tomb, and a name, a death which fades an existence in the short vibration of the social memory. Tebas wants to dissolve the memory of the Oedipus family in the womb of the earth burying Antigone alive in a cave, where she faces the liminal nature of life: existing betwixt and between light and darkness, flower of one day, a mystery for itself, deprived of a narrative beyond the basic and blind impulses of the animal emotions.