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Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality

Online ISBN:
9780823252954
Print ISBN:
9780823251322
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality

Jonathan Strauss
Jonathan Strauss

Professor of French

Miami University
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Published:
1 August 2013
Online ISBN:
9780823252954
Print ISBN:
9780823251322
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

In Private Lives/Public Deaths, Jonathan Strauss shows how Sophocles's tragedy Antigone crystalized 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 unconcious 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 the failure to satisfy this desire. 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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