Sophocle

Summary

Dominique Pagani reads Sophocles mainly through Antigone, by way of Hegel. For him, the play, read properly, does not stage an individual against society but one community against another: the family, the voice of blood and the gods below, against the city. The individual remains a shadow without particular features12. He recalls that Hegel regards this tragedy as the absolute work, an exception to the historicity of art3. He often returns to the chorus on man as deinotaton, the unsettling marvel who tames seas and horses but has no remedy against death, which he reads as a hymn to anthropology and a summary of praxis4. He also notes that Hölderlin paraphrases this chorus and declares Sophocles a republican. In Oedipus Rex he sees a perfect detective plot, since the culprit leads the investigation5. Finally, he dwells on the death of Oedipus at Colonus, welcomed by Theseus. He contrasts the poet his city regarded as a demigod with the modern poète maudit.

1. 1#3 Harnessed to confinitude4 Apr 2020 · 1:45:48
2. 2A for Antigone15 Dec 2014 · 6:52
3. 3Tribute to Domenico Losurdo2 Jul 2018 · 1:16:22
4. 4Worldliness in Clouscard: the world as “cunning of reason”22 Jul 2023 · 2:02:23
5. 5The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society9 Aug 2025 · 33:14

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