A New Triptych for International Relations in the 21st Century: Beyond Waltz and Beyond Lacan's Antigone, with a Note on the Falun Gong of China

Abstract

Sophocles, acclaimed as one of the three great Greek dramatists, wrote three plays set in Thebes, each concerned in part with the nature of kingship, in part also with the caprices of fate and heaven, and, supremely, with the human reaction to the interface of state and heaven. The Theban plays were written at different times of his life, and their central characters are Oedipus (of complex fame) and his daughter, Antigone. In the play named after her, Oedipus has died and she has emerged from his life of public shame, only to be caught up in a struggle between her two brothers for supremacy in Thebes. Leading rival armies, the two brothers fight and kill each other. Creon, the regent, orders that the brother who led an army of foreigners against Thebes should remain unburied, and his body left to rot. Antigone, herself mortified by this insult to family, decorum, and religious law, disobeys Creon and symbolically buries her brother. She is arrested and brought to trial. Creon’s son, Haemon, is her fiancé. The trial and the exchanges between Antigone and Creon are a great debate on whether state justice or spiritual law is higher. Many have seen Antigone as a Kantian figure, appealing to a moral and spiritual code beyond the state’s. The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Lacan, in his acclaimed Symposium, represented a very different Antigone, in part to establish an attack against Kant. This essay, among other things, addresses both the Sophoclean and Lacanian Antigone and, towards the end, introduces another.