Il modello per Antigone di Bertolt Brecht

Brecht’s direction of Sophocles’ Antigone clearly shows that the classical text gives rise to manifold interpretations, reinterpretations and re-writings, and that it is to be adopted as a “rough” model that should be “updated” and “historicized” in contemporary life – such as the life in National Socialism and in World War II. Brecht’s text overlays two realities and two female characters: the “classical” Antigone and the “new” Antigone – her contemporary Doppelgänger. Thus, Antigone becomes a modern heroine because she represents and witnesses the social problems of the time; just like other female figures in Brecht’s poetry and theater – such as Ophelia, Joan of Arc, or the infanticide Maria Farrar, all victim of a social, political and economic system that alienates them – she embodies a social strangeness and otherness. Her history, transposed in the contemporaneity, is an example of the “politicization of the bare life”, that is in other words the transformation of the dualism between state and family, public and private life – which characterizes classical Antigone – in the crass distinction between zoḗ and pólis, political and natural life – which, according to Giorgio Agamben, represents the founding act of modernism. The classical drama turns into a social drama. Bercht’s Antigone should therefore be read in the light of the Brecht’s relationship with the classic antiquity, which proves to be a dialectic relationship of “distancing” and “approximation”, “corruption” and “revaluation”, “estrangement” and “understanding”. In other words, Brecht rediscovers the value of the classical text by its negation in contemporary reality, and vice versa understands modern society through the model of antiquity. The overlaying of literary and extra-literary elements, of ancient and modern reality, shows on the one hand that the drama is not linear and straight forward, because – in accordance with Marx’ historical materialism – it proceeds through curves and jumps, and in the other hand that certain events repeat themselves cyclically in the history of mankind. However, Brecht’s text also allows for the possibility of transformation: nothing is static and unchangeable, especially not the classical text, which leaves the state of eternal and immortal beauty and enters the realm of the human and the possible, of the social connections and the incessant transformation. Art loses the “auratic” character of the instantaneous revelation of an absolute and unrepeatable moment: in the transformation and change, the ancient world can live again and appropriates the multitude of its latent meanings.