The Posthuman and Irish Antigones: Rights, Revolt, Extinction

Antigone’s afterlives in Ireland have always enacted critical gestures of social protest and mourning that expose the fundamental fragility human rights caught up symbolic conflict between oppressors oppressed. This paper seeks to explore scope rereading certain Irish figurations Antigone – exemplary text European humanism through a posthumanist lens unveils new radical understandings modern injustices, legal fissures, capitalist insinuations an “inhuman politics” against proletarian minorities twentieth-century society transnational contexts. The possibilities theorization at intersection with gender, class, rights, reflect connecting threads, political, aesthetic, critical, two texts: early anonymous poem titled “The Prison Graves” dedicated activist revolutionary Roger Casement unpublished play-version by Aidan C. Mathews 1984, René Girard. Written produced as critique systematic institutional violence neoliberal oppression during epoch anti-revolutionary zeitgeist, myth shifts its dialectic from nationalist nostalgia Cold War era reciprocate counter-protest passing Justice Bill. is reimagined hypochondriac resident slums proletariat member degenerate acting troupe. Her classical (mythical), aristocratic (white, European, Western) figure has become posthuman commodity: actor now, she performs same role for millennia post-nuclear contaminated prison state Thebes/Dublin. Peteokles bourgeois-turned-rebel mediary; Polyneikes remembered communist terrorist who been airbrushed records police state; bibliophile Ismene religiously reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Chorus real oppressor.