Antigone Claimed: “I Am a Stranger!” Political Theory and the Figure of the Stranger

Abstract

This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical‐political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of textual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty‐first century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not‐legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent ontological status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of speech and action in equality with “others.”