Resti di un naufragio: María Zambrano nel labirinto di Antigone

The essay discusses María Zambrano’s rewriting and interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s Tomb is structured as a tragedy in the form of an essay in which the Spanish thinker gives life to an unknown language that mixes dramaturgy, poetry, and philosophy through which the female self of the tragic heroine takes voice. By turning to a logos rooted deep in a “poetic reason”, Zambrano splits Antigone’s word from Creon’s phallogocentric discursive order, bringing forth a new feminine symbolic ‘sacrificial’ order founded on love and pity. There is no trace, then, of the action that produces the contrast with Creon, that is, the burial of Polynices, because the real center of the play is the tomb in which Antigone is confined without being dead. Being buried alive, she can meet the ghosts of those who have crossed her life and re-weave the threads of her family history to purify it, giving a new chance of life and storytelling. In short, producing a new birth.