“You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone

Abstract

Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone is a singular play with a singular heroine, yet both the play and the titular heroine have been part of an ever-growing body of reinventions and adaptations. Slavoj Žižek’s play The Three Lives of Antigone (2016) continues this tradition. Žižek offers three consecutive, different endings to Sophocles’s tragedy: 1. The “original” ending in which neither Creon nor Antigone compromise on their principles, Antigone dies, and the chorus praises her conviction; 2. Antigone convinces Creon, but the city burns in a civil conflict as the chorus laments; 3. The chorus takes action, executes both Creon and Antigone and proclaims Thebes a people’s republic. It is easy to assume that Žižek proposes the third option as the most desirable ending; the text, however, puts the onus to choose firmly on the audience. This article investigates the correlation between individual and community, original and adaptation, ensemble and spectator in Žižek’s play, arguing that through the means of the stage, the 2020 German-language production of Žižek’s adaptation successfully bridged the divide between the singular individual and the community suggested by Sophocles’s and questioned by Žižek’s versions of the myth.