In his very beautiful essay about Antigone, George Steiner sums up two centuries of Occidental questionings about this figure - become by necessity extremely singular -, of the Greek tragedy. From Hegel to Kierkegaard, without forgetting Hölderlin, Heidegger or Steiner himself, all these authors tried to describe the Oedipe's daughter as a character of exception, an individuality being opposed to the almighty laws of the polis that would represent Creon. Thousands pages, certain unmistakably brilliant, will be written for to release this figure of the tragic clay and this singularisation can be done only by the introduction of differential patterns. Their Antigone is what is not her sister Ismene, is what is not her uncle Creon, etc.

However, when he analyzes the Creon-Antigone's relations and in front of the rigorous symmetry wanted by Sophocles, Steiner is obliged to notice that :

"Are not they in fact profoundly similar ? (...) Each is reading himself in the other one and the language of the play indicates this fatal symmetry. (...) Their common obsession of the law makes of each a mirror image of the other one. From where the narrow agreement, in dimension as in tone, of the disasters which they undergo successively". (Antigones, page 203 - Gallimard - 1986)

This does not prevent this great author from evacuating at once the very problematic identity of the two opponents to bounce towards a new differentiated explanation system (the opposition between man and woman) which, of course, does not allow him to answer the only true question, which he however askes: " But how does Sophocles reach this dialectic of the similar opposites, Dialectic which is not exhausted, either by being meditated, or by being replayed ?". (ib. page 204).

Let us note that, in spite of the report of the previous page, Steiner reaffirms the dialectic of similar opposites, intended to save the thousands of pages of which he was previolusly the admirable recensor. Because of two things one: either Sophocles was mistaken while affirming, throughout the tragic debate, the profound identity of Creon and Antigone, or all our magnificent authors were properly delirious. The differential thought, which is unable to conceive the production of sense from a situation of balance, equality, identity, cannot of course come to end from dialectic of opposites that did not want Sophocles.

Rene Girard is the only one capable of bringing an answer, since he is the only one to understand and explain the connections of doubles which become, bit by bit, Creon and Antigone. He will grant only some lines to our heroin (Job the victime of his people), but the mimetic hypothesis of MRVR and the developments that the author dedicates to the tragedy in Violence and the Sacred were already sufficient to understand that the symmetric construction of the Sophocles debate was quite safe free.

The Creon-Antigone confrontation is only the description of the process of decomposition of their initial differences around the corpse of Polynice, object of their rivalry. It is about a mimetic confrontation, and it is for that that each one is led "to read in the other one, to be the mirror of the other one" as notes it Steiner, until any more being able to distinguish who is who, who says what... The initial object of the rivalry for a long time disappeared, it remains only two rivals who look at themselves, totaly fascinated one by the other. The more the tragic debate advances, the more what seems to separate them contributes in fact to bring them closer, to make them identical.

Rene Girard will show that this description of a crisis of the differences by the mimetic contagion is the object of all the Sophocles tragedies which reached us. We shall find this during the study of Girard's anthropology, because the process goes much farther.

This poses another problem, which is for much in the refusal of the Girard's hypothesis. If Rene Girard is right, he is right against Hegel, Heidegger, and consorts. Many readers are not ready to burn what they adored...