Antigone and Medea: greek tragedy in the construction of the polis project

Abstract

This work addresses Greek tragedy, taking as its starting point the ontological distance between the modern world and the Greek world, drawing on the hermeneutical works of Aida Míguez Barciela and Felipe Martínez Marzoa.

The production of Greek tragedies coincides with the origin of the project of the polis: the project of equal citizenship under the same laws. However, this coincidence is not accidental, but rather the opposite: the polis, the project itself, was a way of embracing the very thing Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides were addressing. What happens in tragedy and what happens in the polis are one and the same: the dissolution of ties, distrust, everything falling apart; the world has come off its hinges, there is nothing left to hold on to.

Antigone and Medea will be the places where this same tension, inherent to the Greek world itself, appears: Greek tragedy, if it is a true poetic genre, will deal with the same things that philosophy always deals with. Tragedy is being itself, and for that reason, tragedy, as such a poetic genre, is essential to begin to understand to what extent the Greek world and our historical world, Modernity, are too distant to be understood in a single way, once and for all.