Keynote lecture 

Svetlana Slapšak

Retired Professor of Anthropology of Ancient Worlds, Anthropology of Gender and
Balkanology, Director of IBAMESC (Institute for Balkan and Mediterranean Studies
and Culture), Ljubljana, Slovenia
Legacy of Arachne

Keywords:
Abstract: Contemporary drama often uses ancient dramatic texts: I will only mention
Antigone by Lenka Udovički with Rade Šerbedžija, Cyclop and Thyestes by Ivica Buljan. The
main procedure is modernization (actualization), whereby the ancient text indirectly
confirms the universality (or exceptional duration of meaning), or a new reading, which
problematizes the history of the drama. In both cases, the theater critically addresses the
theory and history of literature and the theory and history of theater. That is one of the
demands Florence Dupont makes in her devastating deconstruction of what we commonly
call Aristotle’s theory of drama. As she convincingly shows, Roman popular theatre, together
with plays for a highly educated audience of the domestic and perhaps reading type, lead to
the thought of theater performed together with the audience, outside the theatre, postdramatic 

theatre, etc. It is a theater that is not a textum (weave, text), a thread that meets a
thread at right angles, an intertwining, but is much more like a textum (weave, text)
performed by a spider. The spider’s web has been a favorite visual representation of the
thoughts of many philosophers. The myth of such weaving is the myth of Arachne, who
challenged the goddess Athena to an embroidery competition: the goddess embroidered the
“official” version of the life of the gods, Arachne embroidered a scandalous version, critical of
the faults, sins and transgressions of the gods. Furious Athena hit her with a schuttle when
she saw that her work was better, and Arachne hanged herself in shame. Athena then turned
her into a spider.
The plot in the theater, a dramatic structure that is fundamentally changing today, certainly
corresponds to a cobweb more than to weaving (text). Irregularity, improvisation, author’s
approach, theater as a phenomenon of life, performative diversity – all this metaphorically
connects myth and drama. Can something of that be seen already in ancient drama?
Certainly – say in Euripides’ Trojan Women, a series of fragments about the fates of women
in war. We could imagine the play in Gaza today. On the other hand, in the world of pop
culture, we find the Kaos TV series, which, in Arachne’s way, deals with the gods in an
approximately circular plot that connects the myth and the present world. Philosopher
Cornelius Castoriadis considered chaos to be ontogenetic: the ancient Greeks started from
the creation of the world out of chaos. Without the obligation to believe in order, they could
come up with democracy, which is constantly changing. Castoriadis had the idea of a
collective imaginary: the origin and combination of elements of the imaginary can be traced
in a kind of reverse semantic history of each element to a certain foundation, which can no
longer be understood, which is initial and arational (Castoriadis neologism). The reduction
process goes back, but it is not historical, nor is it a simplification. Perhaps the creators of
Kaos have read Castoriadis after all, and even if they haven’t, the interpretation is free,
therefore chaotic. Ancient democracy had a series of codified valves for citizens to vent and
insult everyone – metaphorically and periodically, during holidays/carnivals, theater
festivals: because the theater is a key institution of democracy, of the collective imaginary.
Such connections prove the need to introduce the term mithourgy, which connects
performative practices, oral narration, participation and improvisation.

Katerina Kolozova

Full Professor at the Graduate School of the Institute of Social Sciences and
Humanities from Skopje
A Theme Revisited Too many Times: Antigone, Kinship and State
Keywords : feminist structuralism, the post-Freudian subject, feminist materialism,
maternal morality in Greek drama
Abstract : Against the background of the centrality of the notion “composition of deeds”
(systasis tõn pragmatõn) in Aristotle’s Poetics we will revisit the theme of Antigone and the
tension between kinship and state, or between morality of “blood” and political “duty.” In
doing so, we will seek to rediscover the potential of the structuralist approach, revisit Luce
Irigaray’s feminist take on Antigone and reexamine the emancipatory potential of Judith
Butler’s appropriation of Hegel’s classical reading of the theme at hand.