Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Parallel to the contemporary proliferation of technological, political, and historical positivism, a wide variety of modern and postmodern writers continue to explore the infinite diversity as well as the limits of the human condition. My paper examines modern adaptations of Sophocles’ “Antigone” for their contemporary artistic, political, and historical significance. Through versions written by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, and Slavoj Zizek, I first discuss the creative license of the playwright to blend plot structure and content in novel ways to address current affairs, particularly in France and Germany, but ultimately world-wide. Antigone herself reflects this artistic freedom in her choice to obey the gods, state authority, traditional paternal convention, or her own human conscience. Resistance and obedience to authority are key to the ironic play between free will and fate, narrative revision and plot structure, as well as the free choice and constraints of the audience, the people, to judge the contest between divine law, natural law, and personal moral conscience. The decision entails no mean consequences—resistance or submission to totalitarian rule or the free choice of democracy, which entails its own blend of freedom and destiny. While all three versions of the play remain hermeneutically connected in structure, each also constitutes a distinct and self-referential epistemology with its own dialectical pursuit of the sense of human life and ultimately of history itself, whether it be cyclical, positivistic, or fatally entropic.