Antigone and the Sublime: Acts of Impossible Affirmation

Abstract

In this article, I interpret Antigone through the philosophical category of the sublime, which enables her to transcend the order of nature and her empirical self. Through a close textual analysis of the Greek word amechanos (impossible), I argue that Antigone manages to affirm a place for herself within the incoherent kinship legacy left her father Oedipus by resolutely honouring her brother as an end-in-himself. At the same time, this burial also affirms her nature as a “mother bird” opposed to the normative gender roles available within Kreon’s polis. Understanding Antigone as a sublime figure also helps to explain two otherwise inscrutable references in the text: the first when Antigone compares herself to Niobe, and the second when the chorus describe her as the only person to enter Hades “alive”. My argument that Antigone becomes a sublime Idea concludes with an analysis of her through the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis, or as an indeterminate analogy that exists concurrently between the realms of aesthetics (sublimity) and ethics (autonomy).