Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality

In Private Lives, Public Deaths, Jonathan Strauss shows how Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone crystallized the political, intellectual, and aesthetic forces of an entire historical moment―fifth century Athens―into one idea: the value of a single living person. That idea existed, however, only as a powerful but unconscious desire. Drawing on classical studies, Hegel, and contemporary philosophical interpretations of this pivotal drama, Strauss argues that Antigone’s tragedy, and perhaps all classical tragedy, represents a failure to satisfy this longing.

To the extent that the value of a living individual remains an open question, what Sophocles attempted to imagine still escapes our understanding. Antigone is, in this sense, a text not from the past but from our future.