Antigone
Simon Strauss reports from the Berliner Ensemble and its performance of Sophoklos’ Antigone (FAZ 18.01.2026, p. 9). He speaks of great devotion to an elevated text of Hölderlin, speaks of high concentration and correctness of the performers, of whom he all knows their name, and who at the same time move around in body and spirit of legerity. Gestures and laughter, tensions and smiles, three actors on stage speak together in rudimentary familiarity. All in white. Although they operate within a multitude of things as if an angel of history has left things behind for them in mass and variety and distributed them at their ease. The stage is constructed as if moving in a wide Swiss tunnel construction crossing below the Alps. There is Kreon, there is Antigone, there is this challenging debate on the burial of her brothers. However, all politics are declined to the human struggle of moral anthropology. Antigone delivers her ontological-anarchistic credo: “My being is not for hate, but for love”, thus answering to the political manifesto of the ruler: „Never is the enemy a friend, even when already dead”. This is the ontological freedom of love-liberated subjectivity which relates to being not to deed and action as versus enlightened early romanticism defending the nation state: “It is the state that maintains us!” And: “It’s the act, not to be praised when turning itself against a whole world”. And while the German romantics like Friedrich Schlegel who rigidly abducted Tyranny, Kreon, the ruler and opponent of Antigone defended the state as a protector of law, against disruptive Impulse of a human individual’s morality. Kreon seems to defend collective order and homeland love as sacred good, and in the sense of divine law, he tends to belittle the individual impetus of moral power. However, Antigone stands firm in her subjective valuation of a high-ranking impulsive character. “My (personal God) Zeus (and all the other gods) did never inform me about any wrongdoing (frevelhaft), in fact, if a sister demands the right to bury her deceased brother.” Against Kreon she argued then persistent and impertinently defended grief and her personal affection in the specific case of her dead kin. Kreon says: “All that is not to my regret!” And then surprisingly: “Really, one does not die in such a general manner.” Will say what Antigone pursues, is to give her life purely as an idea. And this is where later the philosophers like Hegel come in. He admired Antigone as the greatest heroine (herrlichste Gestalt) that ever lived on earth. However, in contrast to the rebellious Theban woman, the Greek chorus sings: “You have been spoiled by your irritating (zornig) self-consciousness. You were abdicated by the self-righteousness of your willing.” Antigone turns shattered and attempts to convince Kreon. However, step by step she deprives herself of all social acknowledgement. She loses the game. In a note, Hölderlin writes that “Antigone” is about a struggle-game of staged runners, in which the one who weakens first in breathing and comes in touch with his encounters, is deemed to lose.“
According to Simon Strauss, the show was a rare event, convincing on all levels of production, a masterpiece. I wish to add that his review is important, where it delivers a blunt introduction to the GROUN ZERO: I.e. conflict of the affirmative moral economy of the state men and the negative aesthetic of subjectivity. On the broader level of (global) sociology this signals the ongoing and globally unsolved struggle between the oikos of communality and state empowered ecumene in the hands of libertarian subjectivity of the individual actor. “Antigone” moves on to the aesthetic consciousness in modern discourse, the rise and fall of social recognition of the individual actor. As a subject. “Antigone” includes the dimension of the Global South. Here, the entanglement of Greek antiquitiy and the stage of modernity turns into actuality. In fact, what happened in Berlin, was to add a new breath into German theatre: A manifestation of the ongoing struggle between subjective moral economy and statal tyranny.
The marathon course of life with heavy breaths on many fields, in forests and on hills, and in planes and valleys is for sure going to end.
Nachtrag:
Warum fesselte mich diese Antigone-Besprechung? Das Problem der moralischen Ökonomie der Eppstein-Class ist angesprochen. (Hans-Henny Jahns Pastor Ephraim Magnus kommt in den Sinn, Hannah Arendts Auschwitz). Das Recht auf Libertinage, als wäre es das Recht des untergehenden Abendlandes: Freiheit des Subjekts. Dagegen der Absolutismus als staatliches Recht. Was aber, wenn die Verdammten dieser Erde (Frantz Fanon) im Ressentiment des Global South verhaftet sich selbst der Kulturtechnik der sozialen Anerkennung bedienen? Wo ankert dann das Recht auf Widerstand? Wohin führt es, was, wenn es als allgemeines Recht sich als Kraft des Subjektiven durchsetzen will, Islamisierung der Aufklärung/ Woke? Technisierung und Konsumismus als Moral-neutral/digitale Reduzierung des ,Rechts auf Subjektivität‘? Das Ende des Westens liegt in Nostalgie und Romantik, Lust und Körperlogik schon begraben. Der Mensch als Versteinerung des Phallus?
GS