Viermi (Polinice). De la idealism la fenomenologie

Abstract

This article proposes a phenomenological reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone, focusing on the absent yet dramaturgically essential body of Polynices. The analysis begins with the opposition between Creon’s formal and political idealism, grounded in law, order, and discursive authority, and Antigone’s ethical position, which emerges from a concrete, embodied encounter with her brother’s unburied corpse. Although Polynices never appears on stage, his body functions as the material and symbolic centre of the tragedy, destabilising the boundaries between inside and outside, life and death, inclusion and exclusion, the sacred and the profane. Drawing on phenomenology, deconstruction, political philosophy, and theories of ritual and abjection, the article examines the corpse as an unstable presence that exceeds the ideological frameworks imposed upon it. Antigone’s gaze is understood as an intentional and transformative act through which the dead body becomes both an object of perception and a source of ethical meaning. At the same time, Creon’s prohibition of burial turns the corpse into an instrument of political power and exposes the community to a collective experience of desecration and trauma. The final section of the study shifts from textual interpretation to performance practice, arguing that contemporary theatre can render visible what Sophocles leaves outside the dramatic field. By materialising Polynices’ body on stage, the director moves from a logocentric model of meaning towards an embodied, affective, and phenomenological mode of knowledge. In this way, the absent corpse becomes a site where artistic practice produces meaning through presence, perception, and the spectator’s direct experience.