In June of 1978 the French philosopher Sarah Kofman arrived at the Arsenal in Strasbourg to see a performance of Antigone. As it turned out, she and the other fifty-odd members of the audience would be participants—in the catharsis, of course—but more concretely, from their very entrance along a rickety stairway, they were actualizing a mise-en-abîme, as one would say of the performers that they were to actualize a mise-en-scène: 'And you cannot avoid the feeling of the fragility of the 'ruin,' of the collapse that threatens you at every moment (L'espace 1146). Kofman further observed, 'if you have the fortune (?) to be in the first row, you will have - throughout the whole performance - your legs suspended in the void,' while the players, too, performed 'on gangways, scaffolding, on 'planks' without guardrails' (L'espace 1147). The fragility that obtained within was, in fact, visible at the very approach to the Arsenal, a 'veritable military ruin': the first glance 'at scorched walls, at broken panes,' recalled 'a house bombed out during the last war (L'espace( 1145), which, even after Vietnam and Algeria, still meant the Second World War. But for Kofman, not simply French, the recollection of that wartime while climbing, dangerously, to an attic, evoked other memories: 'you dream of Anne Frank, of all those Jewish women forced to hide, to live clandestinely in order to survive through the hellish night. And you think that a Greek tragedy thus translated - that can still concern you' (L'espace 1146). The site of destruction, of the last war in Strasbourg or Thebes, of a Strasbourg superimposed on the abyss of Thebes, of Antigone's Thebes translated in time and space to Strasbourg, is also the site of a certain survival. Though Anne Frank herself died in the camps, other Jewish women, among them Sarah Kofman, hidden in the midst of Paris [see Kofman, Rue Ordener], lived on. But these ulterior destinies are not the concern of the performance. Rather it is the action of the survival, more precisely, the passivity or passion of survival that defines the site, the scene or abyss as a ruin. 'Something attains the category of ruin,' writes Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, 'when its material collapse serves as a base for a sense that extends triumphantly; survival, no longer of that which was, but rather of that which did not attain being (Algo alcanza la categoría de ruina cuando su derrumbe material sirve de soporte a un sentido que se extiende triunfador; superviviencia, no ya de lo que fue, sino de lo que no alcanzó a ser) (El hombre y lo divino 235).