ANTIGONICK

« There are many wonders in this world, and none greater than man », declares the first chorus of Antigone. The pride of the ancient Greeks —who sailed the Mediterranean in wooden boats or fought death with simple potions— seems almost childish in the age of the global economy. 

And yet…

The figure of Antigone is for me both tutelary and chosen. She accompanies me with a powerful, loving sisterhood. Born of a stain —the incest of Oedipus and Jocasta— Antigone defies through her actions the condition that should have been hers. She will hold her father’s hand as he wanders through the night; she will confront Creon in order to give burial to her brother Polynices. Renouncing is not in her heart. She will be buried alive.

The conflict between Antigone and Creon has now become part of the intellectual and political consciousness of our democracies. After years of studying law, it seemed to me that in a damaged democracy the only weapon left is the law. But what law are we speaking of? The law of nature, or the law of men?

There are strange links that sometimes reveal how the creation that begins today was perhaps already contained within the previous one. In L’Au-delà by Didier-Georges Gabily, Silencieux dreams in the limbo of his alcoholic coma of a supermarket Antigone. With the actors involved in that work, we spent several days at La Fonderie —the Fonderie du Radeau in Le Mans. There we began readings of Robert Garnier’s Antigone, the one accompanied by the old word piety. And also a preliminary journey through Anne Carson’s variation Antigonick, translated by Édouard Louis. The hours spent digging into Garnier’s muddy, dense, rooted, human language were a flash of revelation. That language which was once our French, before “Malherbe came”, so ancient that it first reaches us almost as a foreign tongue. We learn. From each language, from each story. The myth carries us and escapes us at the same time, shifting with the plays that compose it. The labyrinth.

Then we set off again with these texts, summoned with voices and bodies; theatre texts with the voices and bodies of human beings, to speak their truth to the world.

And the hours of motionless journeys arrived.

Without using current events as a pretext for speech—an indecent immodesty —we suddenly found ourselves face to face with the prohibition against burying our dead, in a final security-driven convulsion. Since human beings have been on earth, they have buried their dead; they have created rituals of mourning. All cultures have rituals of mourning. And now we are forced no longer to perform them. What despair for the one who departs alone? What unease for the one who has let a loved one leave without accompanying them? No culture has ever left its mother’s body to rot on the ground! Two thousand years ago, before the Gospel, Antigone rises and says to Creon: Your law is criminal and I will not obey it. This young girl throws in our faces that not burying our dead is an insult to being itself, to the sun.

All grieving families, in a single night, became Antigone. The political “leaders” of our cities have everywhere rekindled Antigone’s flame —her anger and her certainty of another law, founded on immemorial and chthonic practices. The sacrifice they imposed —not the dead, not the disease, but its treatment, the indignity, the impiety, as Garnier might have written— which they have now inscribed into the law of the state of emergency, will have deep consequences. Tragic ones, because it touches the very foundation of our human condition.

Antigone. To honor her sacred disobedience, which calls upon our inalienable spiritual dimensions. It is a necessity.

Laëtitia Pitz