Abstract

In Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, 1 the engaging analysis of the concept of the tragic in ancient and modern dramas hinges on Kierkegaard’s poetic invention of the figure of a new Antigone and the shift in her subjectivity. Such analysis moves from the unquestioning acceptance of fate in Sophocles’s Antigone to the self-reflective brooding of Kierkegaard’s creation. Kierkegaard’s illustration of the tragic derives from a mixture of the characteristics of ancient and modern dramas. His Antigone incarnates the peculiarities of both: necessity of action and self-subjectivity. The fictitious author of Either/Or, Part I that goes under the name of A, the Aesthete, reads the story of Antigone before a meeting of the Symparanekromenoi, the “Society of the Buried Lives.” 2 A imagines himself among a group of individuals who are leading lives spiritually dead or alienated within society. They become the discreet spectators of a most secretive representation: a revisited version of Antigone. This ironic parable in the romantic mode belongs to the genre that Novalis named “literary Saturnalia.” It is a fragment, a shred of theatre that can be viewed with the mind’s eye but not entirely grasped because it depicts a “nebulous” 4 and most reserved modern heroine. The story of the new Antigone and her proverbial inwardness echo Kierkegaard’s biography and his obsession for silence and indirect discourse. How not to think of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms such as Frater Taciturnus or Johannes de Silentio, ironically alluding to a silent form of wisdom? 3