POETICS OF MIASMA: NUCLEAR WASTE AND ANTIGONE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
POETICS OF MIASMA: NUCLEAR WASTE AND ANTIGONE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Summary/Abstract: This essay traces a poetics of miasma in Sophocles’ Antigone. It reads Sophocles in overtly contemporary and ecocritical terms: specifically, in the context of nuclear waste. It argues that questions of nuclear waste cannot help but seep into the poetics of miasma central to the ethical and theological debates of the play. The geological traces left by nuclear waste constitute the ecological contamination that in some definitions differentiates the Anthropocene era, the first era in which mankind has had a recognisably geological effect. This essay traces the relation of Athenian civic space and miasma to Anthropocene pollution. There is a shift from a maternal conception of sacred burial space that Sophocles figures in Antigone’s zealous love, to a recognisably modern notion of pollution initiated by the Greek polis that occurred contemporary to Sophocles’ writing. This essay charts a genealogy of waste as it recapitulates this shift, exploring how the Greek conception of pollution remains with us today. An ecocritical reading of Sophocles’ poetics locates in 5th century Athens the forebear of our contemporary waste management situation.

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