From G. W. F. Hegel’s first canonization of Antigone, through the subsequent accounts of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, to those of Judith Butler and Jean Bethke Elshtain and others, Sophocles’ Antigone has served as a key reference point in the histories of philosophy, political theory, and feminist and democratic theory, informing discussions of civil disobedience, sovereignty, and the division between public and private. Antigone herself has been cast as “heroic conscientious objector,” “lamenter of the dead,” and “monstrous creature of desire” (p. 7). For Bonnie Honig, however, these received readings of Antigone all suffer from a fatal flaw: they neglect the full political promise of Antigone the political actor. In Antigone, Interrupted, Honig sets out to repoliticize Antigone/Antigone by interrupting these canonical interpretations of Sophocles’ play and of its protagonist.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, “Interruption,” focuses on Antigone’s reception history in feminist and queer theory, political thinking, and cultural theory, with a particular focus on the role of maternalist thinking. Honig examines the role of the mourning mother in contemporary politics (examples include Cindy Sheehan and the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo); the writings of authors such as Elshtain, Butler, Lee Edelman, and Douglas Crimp, among others; and the 1978 film Germany in Autumn. Two things interest Honig. The first is the operation within this literature of what she calls the “Antigone versus Oedipus” frame, where a political problem is typically diagnosed as “Oedipal” (the power of the state, for instance) while its solution is cast as “Antigonean” (feminist resistance). The second is the emergence of what she calls “mortalist humanism.” This is a mode of humanism centered on human finitude and vulnerability to suffering. With its turn to ethics and its attempts to bypass political division, for Honig, its “politics of lamentation” falls into a “lamentation of politics,” a position her own political reading of Antigone is directly designed to counter.

This alternative reading is set out in Part II, “Conspiracy.” Honig’s conspiratorial reinterpretation of Antigone rests on an exploration of the dramaturgy of the play. Instead of assessing the relative merits of the arguments contained within the play, she reads Antigone as a melodrama rather than tragedy, focusing on lamentation as performative utterance. Honig bolsters this dramaturgical approach with an attention to historical context. The first conspiracy Honig discerns focuses on Creon’s conspiracy with democracy and centers on Antigone’s quarrel with Creon over the burial of Polynices. Honig reads this quarrel as a performance by Antigone of aristocratic objection to democracy, one reflecting the funerary politics of fifth-century Athens. In Chapter 5, she contemplates Antigone’s conspiracy with language, in particular how Antigone negotiates the tensions between phonê and logos. (Antigone has often been associated with one or the other term but not both.) The author’s focus is Antigone’s dirge, where she outlines the irreplaceability of her brother Polynices. Innovatively, Honig reads this speech as a partisan political act that delivers a critique of Creon through the citation, mimicry, and parody of the voices of the powerful (including both Pericles and Herodutus). Finally, in one of the most original, and possibly most contestable, moves in the book, Honig outlines the putative sororal conspiracy between Ismene and Antigone, which rests, she alleges, on her contention that it is Ismene, not Antigone, who was the first to bury Polynices.

This last example of conspiracy highlights what some critics might view as one of the more challenging aspects of Honig’s text. Received readings of Ismene have traditionally presented her as passive, lacking in agency, and antipolitical. Focusing on the dramatic context of the play, here including Ismene’s utterances and the putative coded communications engaged in by the sisters, the author recasts Ismene as a political conspirator. This rendering not only interrupts those accounts of Antigone that classify her as the epitome of the heroic individual; it also interrupts those that, in Honig’s view, overlook “those elements of most concern to democratic theory: solidarity or action in concert among equals” (p. 152), the very themes that her rereading of the play stresses. The issue here is whether Honig’s dramaturgical reinterpretation of Antigone rests on an identification of hitherto neglected aspects of the script or whether the frames guiding her own reading, agonistic democracy and agonistic humanism, lead her to what Simon Goldhill has called a “drastic redrafting of Sophocles’ play” (Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy, 2012, p. 247).

One of the most important features of Honig’s reading of Antigone is her exploration of the politics of burial in fifth-century Athens, a time when, she suggests, funerary practices were being intensely politicized. Conventional readings of Antigone construe it as a play about the death of Polynices, Creon’s prohibition on burying him, and Antigone’s refusal to obey Creon. For Honig, this allows Antigone to be cast as a universal figure of mourning. In fact, she contends, the “problem of when and how to mourn [actually] arises several times” in the play (p. 96), as the actors are confronted not only with the death of Polynices but also with those of Antigone, Haemon, Eurydice, and Eteocles. From questions concerning how particular bodies (“from traitor to polis hero, from dissident resister to mourning mother” [p. 193]) ought to be buried to how they ought to be mourned (as unique individuals or the nameless and replaceable; in public or private; excessively or moderately), Antigone is a play that for Honig reveals lamentation, mourning, and burial to be sites of social regulation, political contestation, and gendered practice. It is not a play about universal suffering or grief, as mortalist humanists surmise, but one about “the politicality of lamentation” (p. 19) in all its plurality and conflict. Antigone is not simply a figure of resistance but, rather, the inspiration for an “agonistic humanism,” attuned to life, natality, pleasure, power, and desire.

Honig’s primary worry with mortalist humanism is that it is depoliticizing, and exemplary of this, she argues, is Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), with its critique of sovereignty, stress on vulnerability and mourning, and its turn to ethics. Certainly Butler, like many of the others critiqued by Honig, pays scant attention in her writings to the specific practices that make up contemporary mourning and funerary politics, except to note in the most general of terms how nationalist exclusions condition the publication of obituaries. Honig is surely right that such an oversight is problematic because it disguises the fact that lamentation and burial are not, as Honig herself has eloquently demonstrated, universal and ahistorical phenomena but intensely contested, political practices. At times, however, Honig seems to overdraw the differences between agonistic humanism and mortalist humanism. What are we to make, for example, of Butler’s repeated invocations of “livability,” and what she calls the “livable life” in her discussions of human vulnerability, terms that appear, albeit infrequently, in Precarious Life? However, this is, perhaps, a question for another time.

Antigone, Interrupted is a significant book. Like all of Honig’s work, it is theoretically sophisticated, erudite, and engaging, furnishing both a trenchant critique of prior interpretations of Antigone and an original, provocative, and highly political revisioning of the play. In so doing, it asks significant questions not only about the political consequences and risks of privileging mortality and vulnerability as ontological facts of the human condition but also about the terms of democratic political engagement. It deserves to be widely read.