Migrant Deaths and European Revenants in Thomas Köck’s<i>antigone. a requiem</i>(2019): Sophocles’ Tragedy Recomposed and Decomposed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses antigone. a requiem (2019) by the Austrian playwright Thomas Köck as one of the latest contributions to a growing body of work that has engaged with Sophocles’ Antigone in light of current migration debates. Avoiding psychological realism in favour of postdramatic techniques, antigone. a requiem differs aesthetically from other recent revisions in that this tragedy-as-requiem does not primarily aim for the audience’s affective response. Inspired by Judith Butler’s theory of the spectral return of socially neglected, ungrievable lives, the play replaces Antigone’s unburied brother with corpses washed ashore on European beaches to question European migration policies through a critical assessment of Europe’s necropolitics. Formally recomposing Sophocles’ tragedy as a requiem with a distinct linguistic musicality, Köck’s play skilfully repurposes the funeral song shared by Sophocles’ Antigone and chorus and relocates Antigone’s anagnorisis to the chorus of contemporary Europeans who eventually recognize themselves in the dead. Köck’s requiem also decomposes its model, as it stages the undead as revenants who return to remind Europe of its history of colonization and exploitation, in which Sophocles’ Antigone was employed as a carrier of European values. In this respect, Köck’s recomposition also sings a requiem for Antigone itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".