Dissidence, collective relationality, and the pluralized bodies beyond one and the same
From the dance piece Speechless (2019) by Sofia Mavragani.
Source: sofiamavragani.gr
Antigone, in her unyielding desire to mourn in public the enemy of the polis which perverts the masculine order of universality, is an impossibility that exposes the limits of the polis; or, in Hegel’s memorable phrase, she is the “eternal irony of the community.” In the ambiguous subtext of Hegel’s argument, feminine desire is both the deficiency that eternally remains outside of the community and the alterity that disrespectfully threatens to dissolve its order. And yet, even though she is excluded from polis, she does have a class privilege as a royalty. The Sophoclean Antigone treats slaves as less than humans compared to her brother whose death, as she characteristically claims, deserves memorialization due to his royal status but not that of a slave. Tina Chanter asks: “Is the failure to notice or attend to the assumptions Antigone imports into her defense of her brother a direct result of the impossibility of a white, European tradition confronting its own failure to see its endorsement of slavery and colonialism as an indictment of its claims to be civilized?” (Chanter, p. 62) How does a rewriting of Antigone by Apartheid prisoners evoke another politics that is actively opposed to the regulative ideal of what is to count as a human according to the normative order of the polis? How does a reenactment of the Antigone of the Apartheid prisoners by Palestinian prisoners enact the problems of law under conditions, i.e. in detention, in which legal realities are falling apart?
The Freedom Theatre, Jenin refugee camp, Palestine
From The Island online – April, 17, 2020
Directed by: Gary M. English
Preformed by: Faisal Abu Al-Haija & Ahmed Al-Rokh
On the Palestinian Prisoners’ Day (The Freedom Fighters Detainees)
What kind of performative promise is Antigone to all those who are excluded from public discourse and who nevertheless articulate their voice within and against the very system that marginalizes them? Whatever becomes of all those who are banned from the body politic and remain unsought and unmourned? Could the illegitimate mourning of different Antigones be an opening toward the (future of the) radically irreducible other that has been left out and resists dialectical closure by the Same?
From the play Antígona: Historia de objetos perdidos
by Chilean actress and dramatist Daniela Cápona Pérez.
Trailer of the film Son of Saul (2015) by László Nemes.
In Athena Athanasiou’s words:
The critical concept of mourning defines a political articulation of the present as haunted by (its) absent presences: namely, the disavowed but persistent remains of uncanny presences cast as absences through matrices of social disposability. It also pertains to the political conditions through which those spectral bodies out of place make themselves present, and present to one another, despite and against those forces that have disregarded them, and in ways not reducible to the normative presuppositions of self-presence. In this respect, I am calling for a conception of mourning that might become an occasion for mobilizing a critique of the present through fostering reflexivity about the phantomlike remainders and reminders of the historical regimes of racism, nationalism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, able-bodiedness, and capitalist exploitation and precarity.
Thus, reconfigured as a performative mode of relationality that resists closure and finality, mourning addresses the agonistic (in)determinations of political temporality whereby vulnerability, brokenness and dispossession are ways of opening to transformative modes of sociality. This transformative potentiality remains the place and time of critical poetics, responsiveness, and dissent in the midst of histories of subjection and abjection.
Ghostcatching, choreographed by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser & Shelley Eshkar.
To quote here from the mournful poetry by Αbel Merropol in “Strange Fruit,” that has been sung among others by Billie Holiday:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
“Strange Fruit,” sung by Billie Holiday, poetry by Αbel Merropol.
One of our skype research team meetings during the pandemic, that on November 17th, 2020, took place in between different time zones, those of Athens and Santiagο, but also in a charged atmosphere. That was a day commemorating the student uprising against the dictatorship of 1967-1974 in Greece with a public holiday, collective remembrances and massive rallies. In November 14th, 1973, students, with support from other workers syndicates, occupied the Polytechnic school in Athens against the oppressive military regime with the demand-slogan: Bread-Education-Liberty. In the early morning of 17th November, the regime caused a bloodshed sending a tank to crash the Polytechnic resistance movement. The 2020 year’s memorialization echoed a legendary Greek court ruling in the early fall that declared the far-right Golden Dawn party that had associations with the military junta, a criminal organization. On the other hand, the conservative government of New Democracy at the same year, with the pretense of the pandemic, banned authoritatively any public gathering commemorating the Polytechnic uprising all over Greece. Michalis Chrisochoidis, the minister for citizen’s protection, in pathologizing collective protests characteristically announced that “the streets and demonstrations carry virus and produce illness.”
Achille Mbembe writes:
Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation. If war there must be, it cannot so much be against a specific virus as against everything that condemns the majority of humankind to a premature cessation of breathing, everything that fundamentally attacks the respiratory tract, everything that, in the long reign of capitalism, has constrained entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression. To come through this constriction would mean that we conceive of breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead as that which we hold in-common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation. By which I mean, the universal right to breath.
How do we rewrite histories of embodied resistance, especially those that bring forth situational, translocal, and hybrid imaginaries of radical democracy so the majority of humankind is not suffocated?
“March March” by The Chicks.
First page of the newspaper Avgi, November 17, 2021.
The main title reads “Democracy can not be put in quarantine,”
accompanied with a photograph of the Athens Polytechnic uprising in 1973.
“Ηow to live a life in an inhabitable world?”, Judith Butler asks. Drawing on Max Scheler’s renderings on the tragic as a phenomenon under which certain experiences are gathered (On the phenomenon of the tragic), she speculates that the tragic has a viral character. Like the virus, she marks, the tragic encircles us and discloses a future of the world. How do we contest an inhabitable world of contemporary predicaments of power such as imperialist globalization, financialisation, capitalist governmentality, war biopolitics, and the emergence of authoritarianism in Western democracies? Antigone/Antigone in the context of our research here becomes a performative resource of critical discourses in relation to witnessing, trauma, hierarchies of mourning, and the narrativization of the unspeakable.
The three photos above were taken by our research team member Alkisti Efthymiou during the feminist rally in Santiago, Chile, on March 8th, 2020. On the third photo, the text reads: “Go away from Ithaca, Penelope. The sea is yours too.”
So, the conservative Greek government in its law-making function criminalized the constitutional right for public embodied protest. This ban was the precursor of another law in February 2021 against the public university that aimed to undermine drastically its autonomous and democratic character. From a space of free and critical thought, this law intents to transform the university to a disciplined and penitentiary mechanism. The governmental imposition of armed and in uniform police in campus captures the deeply repressive character of the neoliberal university they intend to impose. The governmental and media narrative that depicts the university as unlawful tries to criminalize it so it can be controled and cleaned from the ‘hegemony of leftist thought’. The newly formed movement against the policing of academic life in Greece is uniting voices with the international initiative ‘defund the police’. This is a police that produces racist violence as the movement Black Lives Matter has uncovered. The governmental directive “law and order” undermines the agonistic gains of a constitutionally democratic university. This aberration makes again relevant the all times revolutionary claim Bread-Education-Liberty.
In what voice and from what position can the displaced “speak”?
On March 8 the same year of 2020, during the international feminist strike, demonstrators (keeping the public health measures due to pandemic) were arrested in Syntagma square in Athens again on the pretense of the pandemic. The state and other agencies of power have typically attempted to discipline bodies that resist subjection and normalization. But bodies enact agency, including the agency of being involved in, and intertwined with, the intricacies of power.
Feminist strike on March 8th, 2021, at Syntagma square, Athens.
Moto: “They do not silence us, quarantine does not protect us from the pandemic of gender violence.”
Photo: Eurokinissi/Τatiana Bolari
The genealogy of feminist dissidence that is performed in Sofia Mavragani’s dance piece Speechless, a piece on the borders of theater and music, echoes Emma Goldman, the late-nineteenth-century maverick feminist, on the feminist movement: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” (“Choreographies,” an interview of Christie McDonald with Jacques Derrida):
Speechless, concept and choreography: Sofia Mavragani,
performers, co-makers: Hara Kotsali, Giorgos Kotsifakis, Sania Stribakou,
music composition: Martha Mavroidi.
References
Athanasiou, A. (2021). Mourning’s work and the work of mourning: thinking agonism and aporia together. In McIvor, D.W., Hooker, J., Atkins, A. et al., Mourning work: Death and democracy during a pandemic, Contempary Political Theory, 20(1), 165–199. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00421-5.
Butler, J. (2000). Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. Columbia University Press.
Butler, J. (2022). A Livable Life? An Inhabitable World? Scheler on the Tragic. Puncta, 5(2), 8-27. https://doi.org/10.5399/pjcp.v5i2.2.
Chanter, T. (2010). Antigone’s Liminality: Hegel’s Racial Purification of Tragedy and the Naturalization of Slavery. In Hutchings, K. & Pulkkinen, P. (eds.), Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? Palgrave.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2020, April 13). The Universal Right to Breathe. Translated by C. Shread. Critical Inquiry Blog, April 13, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/.
McDonald, C. V. & Derrida, J. (1982). Interview: Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald: Choreographies. DIACRITICS, 12(2), 66-76.
Uribe, S. (2016). Antígona González. Translated by J. Pluecker. Les Figues Press.
Elena Tzelepis