Antigone’s Voice

Antigone has buried her brother. When she is brought before Creon the sentry describes her by means of her voice: “She cried out bitterly, with a sound like the piercing note of a bird when she sees her empty next robbed of her young.” But in the philosophical tradition, from Hegel to Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan, Antigone’s voice has hardly been heard. Mourned for her premature, self-inflicted death, it was Antigone’s deeds that were understood as dramatizing the possibilities, both the risk and the promise, of human existence. Turning to Adrianna Cavarero's and Luce Irigaray's analyses of the play, I explore Antigone's voice and its relationship to air -- the element in which birds soar, the medium and precondition for acoustic waves, sounds and voices -- in order to develop an ecology of the feminine and articulate the possibilities, psychological and political, which an array of cultures and contexts of reception opens for us