Times of Crisis and Seeds of New Intimacies on a N orth A egean I sland: Activism, Alternative Exchange Networks, and Re‐Imagined Communities

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102138/1/sena12040.pd

Neither Sensible, Nor Moderate: Revisiting the Antigone

In this essay, I try to conceptualise meaningful forms of resistance in the present by revisiting Sophocles’ Antigone, one of the most important texts of western literary tradition. I focus on Antigone’s compulsion to act against Creon’s decree, which turns Sophocles’ heroine into a metonymical expression of (civil) disobedience, sacrifice, and mourning—to my mind, the constitutive elements of effective resistant subjectivity. In my analysis, Antigone’s resistance is transformed from a deeply private, filial duty, essentially seen as heroic, into a rich, public expression of collectivity and solidarity. To illustrate this, I capilatise on Judith Butler’s designation of Antigone firmly in the political, and then proceed to make use of Bonnie Honig’s recalibration of her disobedience as one which transcends solitary action to express the collective, democratic feeling of a whole polis. I then mobilise a three-pronged theoretical framework. Firstly, I analyse the clash of Antigone with Creon through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s work on law and violence. Secondly, I explore the possibility of a biopolitical framing as developed by Giorgio Agamben since, at its core, the clash in the play is enacted within the parameters of a vitiated habeas corpus: from the moment Antigone confesses her misdeed she is treated by Creon, the sovereign, as a non-human—as an animal or, indeed, a miasma. In the last section of this essay, I mobilise the work of Howard Caygill with a view to analysing what I perceive as three discernible yet concatenated stages (or aspects) in the formation of Antigone’s resistant subjectivity: her full awareness of what it means to disobey (hence to resist), her acceptance of sacrifice, and, finally, her commitment to the political potentialities of mourning

The Late Style of Edward Said / ﺃﺳﻠﻮﺏ ﺇﺩﻭﺍﺭﺩ ﺳﻌﻴﺪ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺮﺣﻠﺔ ﺍﻷﺧﻴﺮﺓ

[Edward Said\u27s interest in late style -a concept drawn from Theodor Adorno\u27s account of Beethoven\u27s late music-was explicitly channeled to a book project that was not, however, completed in his lifetime. Yet, a careful reading of Said\u27s completed late work-the book on humanism and the political journalism of his last two years-reveals an exercise in late style as such: in other words, the work of an intransigent and restless spirit, unsatisfied with the certainties pronounced in his name, and focused on a mode of interrogation against the grain of identity-what the author called the task of secular criticism. /كان إهتمام إدوارد سعيد ﺑ أسلوب المرحلة الأخيرة من حياة ﺍﻟﻤﻔﻜّﺮﻳﻦ - الذي ينطلق من عمل ثيودور أدورنو عن الأسلوب الموسيقي في المرحلة الأخيرة عند بيتهوڨن - سيصب في كتاب يعدّه ولكنه لم ينته منه قبل رحيله٠ ومع هذا فإن قراءة متمعنة لكتابات سعيد في المرحلة الأخيرة - كتابه عن النزعة الإنسانية ومقالاته الصحفية السياسية في العامين الأخيرين من حياته - تكشف عن ممارسة لأسلوب هذه المرحلة كما تم توصيفها في كتابات المرحلة الأخيرة: أعمال تتسم بثبات في الموقف وروح قلقة وعدم اقتناع بما يُزعم باسمه ويسقط عليه وتساٶل مشكك في الهوية، مما اعتبره سعيد من مسئولية النقد الدنيوي٠‬

Communism and Poetry

This essay poses certain theoretical questions regarding the curious (but substantially evident) phenomenon of many of twentieth-century's most experimental poets being avowed (albeit maverick) communists. The first part of the essay suggests a series of dialectical questions for further examination, built on a constitutive antagonism between the desire to control historical knowledge and the poetic daring to invent the historical horizon. The second part of the essay pursues, as a way of illustration, a comparative reading of two poems by Ritsos and Alexandrou

The Regime of the Living

Stathis Gourgouris, ‘The Regime of the Living’, talk presented at the conference Anarchē: Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of the Ground, ICI Berlin, 7–8 July 2021, video recording, mp4, 27:41 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e210707_14