test Oikic Exile and Maternal Hauntology|Dia-noesis: A Journal of Philosophy

Oikic Exile and Maternal Hauntology Clytemnestra’s Chthonic Sovereignty in the Matricidal Cosmogenesis of Greek Tragedy

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Published: Nov 23, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/dia.43457
Keywords:
Clytemnestra Matricidal Cosmogenesis Oikic Exile Maternal Hauntology Chthonic Sovereignty
Shobhana R. Sree
Panimalar Engineering College Poonamallee, Chennai
Abstract

In Greek tragedy, Clytemnestra emerges as a controversial figure whose voice articulates a suppressed cosmology struggling against erasure. As she has been read traditionally in terms of gender inversion, revenge, and political transgression, this paper re-placed Clytemnestra, under matricidal cosmogenesis, the cultural procedure in which patriarchal order assures itself by overriding maternal and chthonic action. She represents oikic exile, the estrangement of oikos itself, and maternal hauntology, spectral recovery of the lost maternally ordered. Her nets, baths, and blood language are ritualized and claim chthonic sovereignty, a sub-power based on the underworld and sacrifice as opposed to civic law. By drawing upon linguistic analyses of Agamemnon by Aeschylus and Caruth, Ricoeur, Said, Derrida, Irigaray, and Cavarero, this article identifies Clytemnestra as a paradigmatic victim of trauma, alienation, and cultural estrangement.

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