Antigone: A Hero for Our Time

Sophocles’ Antigone is a Rorschach test. People see in it whatever they are thinking. To the self-professed and much married communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Antigone is a “bitch,” though she may also be an admirable figure in her zealous and determined striving against her government. Or perhaps, Žižek suggests alternately, she is a troublemaker creating havoc within an otherwise healthy, well-organized state. In recent versions of the play that he has published with differing endings, Žižek has put forward both points of view. More common interpretations, however, see Antigone not as a rebel but as a self-obsessed martyr and a fanatic.