The quintessence of dust : sovereignty and creaturely life

What is quintessential about dust? Two radically different answers might be given to this question. The first comes from ancient Greece and it refers to the dust that Antigone sprinkled over Polynices’s dead boby. This is dust as a symbol of defiance, dust that signifies resistance to Creon’s sovereign authority by evoking ancestral, sacred law – dust as a metonymy for revolutionary power. And there is also Sebald’s dust, the emblem of natural history, as Eric Santner puts it, that is, as emblem of the destruction, the detritus that discloses a history that is not premised on progress and which does not promise an ultimate redemption. In other words, Sebald’s dust has no defined revolutionary aim, but is rather an object linked to awakening and to messianic temporality that retains a revolutionary possibility, albeit one that – unlike Antigone – does not challenge the sovereign directly.