The Antigone Effect: Art/Theory/Politics

Dear Colleagues,

We live in tumultuous times. There are culture wars the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1980s. Looming even larger is a pernicious anti-democratic turn—in the US and abroad—that has instilled a general sense of dread whenever elections approach. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong desire to organize, act, and create positive change. To be the protagonist of an empowering counter-narrative. Enter the staying power of Antigone. As Jacques Lacan mused in his Seminar VII on Ethics: “Is there anyone who doesn’t evoke Antigone whenever there is a question of a law that causes conflict in us even though it is acknowledged by the community to be a just law?”¹ Interest in Sophocles’ heroine was revived within modernity as a powerful allegory centered on the paradoxical nature of an autocrat’s law—one that put state over family, law over family, and, ultimately, a monarch’s will over that of the Gods. Hölderin, Marx, Freud, and Brecht all famously toiled over it in the Romantic and Left periods. So too did Lacan, Kristeva and Derrida, in the French psychoanalytical context, and Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, more recently, in the cultural theory context. Meanwhile, contemporary curators, artists, and filmmakers, have read the Greek myth through revolutionary, subaltern, and/or insurgent discourses. Notables are Catherine David’s documenta X (1997), Alexander Kluge’s film “Germany in Autumn” (1978), and Sara Uribe’s Antigona González, (2019). This “Antigone Effect” Special Issue reconsiders such precedents (among others) in the context of the current anti-democratic turn, featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and digital producers whose work diligently confronts the dilemma through Antigone’s lens.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor (email) or to the Arts editorial office (arts@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purpose of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Note

¹ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.), p. 243.

Prof. Dr. Juli Carson
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• antigone
• contemporary art
• film
• critical theory
• psychoanalysis
• anti-democratic turn