A course for the School of Materialist Research

Spring 2025 seminar for The School of Materialist Research

ANTI/GONES: Political subjectivity, dissidence, and contemporary Antigones

Taught by Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis

As we seek to reflect the possibility for a critical theory responsive to the urgencies of our bleak historical present, οur attempt is to explore how the figure of Antigone indicates the conditions of possibility for political subjectivity and dissidence in response to regimes of injustice. Various names and political concepts can capture Antigone’s act: resistance, disobedience, protest, dissent, refusal, insurrection. Through this course, we hope to engage these multilayered concepts and questions, focusing on the dialectics between subjection and subjectivity. We outline how subjectivity involves the polis, as subjects are produced and foreclosed by means of regulatory schemas (racialized, classed, gendered and sexualized), but it is also through these frames that that subjects occasionally enact practices of embodied disobedience and resistance. Drawing on Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, we take Antigone’s mourning as a way to reflect on how the historical and social contingencies of vulnerability are taken up as situated knowledges for transformative political imagination. We examine cultural and artistic enactments of situational and translocal Antigones from the Global South that point to the ethical and political performativity of contemporary feminist queer decolonial perspectives and activisms.

The School of Materialist Research offers Integrated Credit Program (ICP) seminars on original content engaging materialist thought and practice across the humanities, arts, and sciences each Fall, Spring, and Summer Semester. Seminars are intended for graduate students, post-docs, early-career faculty, and curious members of the wider public. Among the faculty that have taught are Julia Kristeva, Achille Mbembe, John Ó Maoilearca, Thomas Nail, Patricia Reed, Patricia MacCormack, Bogna Konior, Daniel Sacilotto, Benjamin Woodard, AbdouMaliq Simone, Giuseppe Longo, Cary Wolfe, Anne-Françoise Schmid, Paul Cockshott, Katarina Kolozova, and Paul Reynolds. Seminars are free of charge, online, and open to the public.