“You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone
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Mona Becker
is a postdoctoral researcher and teacher at the department of English and American Studies at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. She was awarded her PhD in playwriting in 2019 from the University of Essex. Her postdoctoral project focuses on postmemorial narratives of National Socialist and colonial violence.
Abstract
Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone is a singular play with a singular heroine, yet both the play and the titular heroine have been part of an ever-growing body of reinventions and adaptations. Slavoj Žižek’s play The Three Lives of Antigone (2016) continues this tradition. Žižek offers three consecutive, different endings to Sophocles’s tragedy: 1. The “original” ending in which neither Creon nor Antigone compromise on their principles, Antigone dies, and the chorus praises her conviction; 2. Antigone convinces Creon, but the city burns in a civil conflict as the chorus laments; 3. The chorus takes action, executes both Creon and Antigone and proclaims Thebes a people’s republic. It is easy to assume that Žižek proposes the third option as the most desirable ending; the text, however, puts the onus to choose firmly on the audience. This article investigates the correlation between individual and community, original and adaptation, ensemble and spectator in Žižek’s play, arguing that through the means of the stage, the 2020 German-language production of Žižek’s adaptation successfully bridged the divide between the singular individual and the community suggested by Sophocles’s and questioned by Žižek’s versions of the myth.
About the author
is a postdoctoral researcher and teacher at the department of English and American Studies at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. She was awarded her PhD in playwriting in 2019 from the University of Essex. Her postdoctoral project focuses on postmemorial narratives of National Socialist and colonial violence.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Acknowledgements
- Articles
- Introduction: Theater and Community. Poetics, Politics, Performances
- Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction
- The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre
- The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage
- “You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone
- Community and Manipulation in the “Parallel Worlds” of Tim Crouch
- Dissensual Performances of Race and Community in Claudia Rankine’s The White Card and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview
- Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
- Mary Kathryn Nagle in Conversation with Nina De Bettin Padolin and Ilka Saal
- The Politics of Queer Be-longing and Acts of Hope in Peter McMaster’s Solo Performance A Sea of Troubles and Split Britches’ “Zoomie” Last Gasp (WFH)
- Queer Hope in Working-Class Performance: Scottee’s Bravado and Class
- “Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors
- Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?
- Reviews
- Avra Sidiropoulou, ed. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2022, 276 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £35.99 (paperback), £32.39 (ebook).
- Michael Meeuwis. Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage: We Want What You Have. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021, vi + 144 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £38.99 (paperback), £35.09 (ebook).
- Nicola Abram. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xiii + 224 pp., $109.99 (hardback), $109.99 (softcover), $84.99 (ebook).
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Acknowledgements
- Articles
- Introduction: Theater and Community. Poetics, Politics, Performances
- Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction
- The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre
- The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage
- “You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone
- Community and Manipulation in the “Parallel Worlds” of Tim Crouch
- Dissensual Performances of Race and Community in Claudia Rankine’s The White Card and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview
- Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
- Mary Kathryn Nagle in Conversation with Nina De Bettin Padolin and Ilka Saal
- The Politics of Queer Be-longing and Acts of Hope in Peter McMaster’s Solo Performance A Sea of Troubles and Split Britches’ “Zoomie” Last Gasp (WFH)
- Queer Hope in Working-Class Performance: Scottee’s Bravado and Class
- “Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors
- Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?
- Reviews
- Avra Sidiropoulou, ed. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2022, 276 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £35.99 (paperback), £32.39 (ebook).
- Michael Meeuwis. Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage: We Want What You Have. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021, vi + 144 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £38.99 (paperback), £35.09 (ebook).
- Nicola Abram. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xiii + 224 pp., $109.99 (hardback), $109.99 (softcover), $84.99 (ebook).
