From Dialectical Closure to ParallacticalIndeterminacy: A Study of the Political and Individual Modes of Being in Slavoj Zizek’s Antigone

Parallax is the difference in perception caused by the spatial shift of the observer and the observed. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has used thisscientific notion to interpret apparently antithetical positions in the fields of politics, neurobiologyand philosophy. His contention is that the parallax shift makes some phenomenon appear as two, while a change in perspective can make us see that theyare, in fact, ONE. The notion of parallax can also be exploited to read a literary text and, in this article, I intend to use it to read Slavoj Zizek’s own re-writing of Sophocles’ play Antigone. Antigone, as a character, has enamored and appalled criticsand philosophers throughout history. Her defiance against the State has been interpreted and evaluated from different perspectives and viewpoints. The play stages the conflict between two modes of being, thepoliticaland the individual,and the appeal ofits polemic seems not to have gotten stale all these centuries. In his re-writing, Slavoj Zizek has provided two alternates to the original ending. He has described this as an “ethico-political exercise”(Zizek,2016, p. xxv)and not a literary venture butI have attempted to read his play as a literary text applying his philosophical notion of the parallax. I have used textual analysis as my method in order to read the selected text. My contention is that the two alternate endings provided by Zizek presentthe individual and political as two warring modes of being but a shift in parallactical position can make them appear as ONE. Moreover, it can also be argued that even the two alternates are an outcome of a parallactical movement in perspective that masksthe inherent ONENESS of the two.