Antigone

Summary

Dominique Pagani reads Antigone through Hegel, for whom her conflict with Creon is "the supreme ethical opposition", the one between family and city1. He refuses to make her a leftist and feminist heroine defending the individual against a totalitarian State, and sees this reading as an anachronism, that of a "mini-Hannah Arendt"2. For him, she speaks for an archaic community founded on the blood tie, family piety, unwritten laws and the underground gods, against the political community3. He finds both adversaries at fault: Antigone is wrong to disobey the law of the city, and Creon oversteps his prerogatives by extending that law to the corpse, which belongs to the family4. He compares her to Brünnhilde, distinguishes her from Iseult because she does not "play for herself", and also mentions Hölderlin's reading, which praises her "sublime presumption"5. Finally, he makes this conflict the historical content of modern unhappiness.

1. 1#10.2 Dialectics of identity and difference6 Oct 2021 · 56:35
2. 2#11 Return to the logics of the subject21 Jun 2020 · 37:16
3. 3A for Antigone15 Dec 2014 · 6:34
4. 4#2.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?15 Feb 2016 · 38:28
5. 5#10.5 The figure of Antigone, such as into herself at last…24 Nov 2021 · 1:43:25

Summary produced automatically from 60 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.