Reading Sophocles’s Antigone: Death, Burial, and Kinship

Sophocles’ Antigone has been central to many philosophers’, literary theorists’, and psychoanalysts’ thought. Those who have provided original interpretations and given the text significant critical attention include Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and, more recently, Alenka Zupančič.

This talk mainly focuses on Zupančič’s Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax (2023), which offers a fresh interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone, originally written in or before 441 BC. One of the main achievements of this book is its profound analysis of the so-called written and unwritten laws, which play such a key role in Antigone. Moreover, Zupančič’s original reading of the play offers a fresh understanding of the notions of death, undeadness, and funeral rites, and of their significance in Antigone. Another strength of the book is its exploration of the concepts of incest, desire, and kinship in relation to the play.

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Reading Sophocles’s Antigone- Death, Burial, and Kinship

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SPEAKER – FABIO TONONI
Fabio Tononi is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM) in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (FCHS), NOVA University of Lisbon. He is the editor-in chief of The Edgar Wind Journal and a steering committee member of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, which is part of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. His research interests include the essence and tasks of philosophy and science, the writings of Aby Warburg and Edgar Wind, the aesthetics of Sigmund Freud, the relationship between art and cognitive neuroscience (specifically as they relate to memory, imagination, empathy, the unfinished, motion, and emotion), the
interconnection between art and ideology, and postmodernism. For more information about Fabio Tononi’s work – please, click here.

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