Human Utility and Refuge: Oedipus’ Politics and Critical Antiquities

Oedipus may be “modernity’s favorite ancient subject,” but modern interest in Oedipus has overwhelmingly concentrated on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. In this article, I shift the focus to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus to reveal previously unrecognized politics in both plays. Oedipus’ transformation from a dispossessed, monstrous figure to revered beneficiary of a hero-cult in Colonus highlights an enduring problem in the history of political thought: what is the utility of the singular individual to the political community? Two forms of political authority emerge from this problem of human utility. “Theban utility” presupposes communal needs and determines an individual’s utility in their terms. By contrast, the “Athenian politics of human utility” attends to Oedipus’ singular identity, the fluid nature of communal needs, the expansive and indeterminate nature of human utility, and the kinds of commitment that govern attention to these elements of political association. I then identify the significance of these forms of authority for readers situated in late modernity in two ways: through philosophical analysis and by tracing the manifestations of these modes of authority in the recent history of immigration, refugees, and Indigenous politics. In doing so, I reconceive utility as a resource for the dispossessed to move themselves across boundaries of exclusion. Governing the whole argument is a broadly Nietzschean interpretive strategy that advances the cause of Critical Antiquities.