Cécile Roudeau (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3)
Through translation, musical interpretation, and geographical relocalization, Heaney and Walcott pushed displacement into the center of a recent performance of Sophocles' Antigone, The Burial at Thebes. But, in spite of its translation into English (Seamus Heaney's "English"), its revision as dramma per musica and shift from fifth-century Greece to twentieth-century Latin America, Sophocles' tragedy, was only dis-located so far—it’s first performance took place last year at the London Globe, in the replica of Shakespeare's own theater, the very center of a certain idea of Englishness and Western culture. Surprisingly (or not), the performance was largely rejected by critics and audiences alike as unsavory and even "inept". Performing a delocalized Antigone or delocalizing a performing Antigone (who, through her speech acts, performs an alternative law) was unwelcome in today's version of the theatrum mundi. While the series of displacements might have been the very guarantee of Antigone's relevance at the Globe and for the globe, it was precisely this series of particularizations that were questioned and eventually rejected. And yet, from Sophocles to Walcott, Antigone's claim, her tentative voicing of an alternative law, has raised the question of the place and agency of particularity, and problematized the tension between the legitimate site of enunciation of the law and the source of its effectivity. Redoubling Antigone's regionalization, her peripheralization both as woman (following up on Sophocles) and as non-western, Burial at Thebes questions the very possibility of a space of performance for the particularity of the law (nomos). Can such a hybrid, un-place-able artistic object as The Burial at Thebes allow for the implementation of a regional standpoint for universality? Taking up the concept of situated knowledge (Donna Haraway), this paper will inquire into the possibility of a "situated" and decentered enunciation of the law.
