Antigone Again: Conspiracy and Curse

Bonnie Honig’s recently published book, Antigone, Interrupted, is a significant new contribution to ongoing debates in philosophy, political theory, and literary studies about the reception of Sophocles’s Antigone. This review analyzes the strengths of Honig’s readings, the theory of “agonistic humanism” that they support, and the book’s deft navigation of the relationship between interpretation and theorizing. It also queries the emphasis on Antigone’s quest for sovereignty at the cost of acknowledging her imbrication in ancestral curse and tragic frames of agency and advocates more attention to the different modes in which Antigone and those around her speak to the audience and to one another.