Abstract
There is an extensive feminist tradition of reading Sophocles’ Antigone within a framework of political theory in response to Hegel’s influential comprehension of the play in the 19th century. More than thirty articles have been published in recent years, and several significant books, in which Antigone, the heroine, has been made an icon and battleground of feminist theory. This article aims to take a quite different tack to illumine the force of this debate and its potential significance for the modern feminist political approach to ancient tragedy. It sets out to investigate two central interlinked questions which have been underappreciated in the continuing response to Hegel: first, the place of religion in Hegel’s reading of Greek tragedy; and, second and more importantly, following from this first question, the role of teleological thinking in the political use of tragedy in modern thought.
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Notes
Lacoue-Labarthe, "The Caesura of the Speculative", in Typography, Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed C. Fynsk: 208–35, Cambridge, Mass, 1989; Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life, Bloomington, 2001; Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans P. Fleming, Stanford, 2002; Terry Eagleton (2003) Sweet Violence, Oxford; Goldhill (2012) Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy, Oxford, 137–263; Billings (2014) The Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy, Princeton.
Honig (2009) “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of Exception”, Political Theory 37: 5–43; (2011) “Ismene’s Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’ Antigone”, Arethusa 44: 29–68; (2013) Antigone Interrupted, Cambridge; Goldhill (2006) “Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood” in Zajko and Leonard, eds., Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, Oxford, 2006, 141–62.; Goldhill (n.1); Goldhill (2014) “The Ends of Tragedy”, PMLA (forthcoming).
Goldhill (n. 1), especially 132–200.
Schelling (1989) The Philosophy of Art, trans D. Stott, Minneapolis, 254.
Schelling (n.4) 89.
Paolucci and Paolucci (1962) Hegel on Tragedy, New York. 165–7. See Pippin (1988) Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge.; Beiser (2002) German Idealism: the Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801, Cambridge, Mass.
Steiner (1961) The Death of Tragedy, London; Williams (1993) Shame and Necessity, Berkeley and Oxford. On Nietzsche see Silk and Stern (1981) Nietzsche on Tragedy, Cambridge.; Schmidt (2001) On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life, Bloomington.
On Hegel’s Christianity see Hodgson (2012) Shapes of Freedom: Hegel's Philosophy of World History in Theological Perspective, Oxford; Krell (2005) The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God, Bloomington; Lewis (2011) Religion, Modernity and Politics in Hegel, Oxford; Shanks (1991) Hegel's Political Theology, Cambridge; Shanks (2011) Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit, London. In general on Victorian Christianity, a huge bibliography could be given: good starting points for the evangelical revival are Bradley (1976) The Call to Seriousness: the Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, London; Bebbington (1989) Evangelicism in Modern Britain: a History from the 1730s to the 1980s, London; Ward (1992) The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, Cambridge; on Tractarianism, Chadwick (1990) The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, Cambridge; Nockles (1994) The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857, Cambridge; and for a full bibliography Crumb (2009) The Oxford Movement and its Leaders: a Bibliography of Secondary and Lesser Primary Sources, Lanham; in general for the politics see Paz (1992) Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain, Stanford; Parry (1986) Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875, Cambridge; Machin (1987) Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1869–1921, 2nd edition, Oxford; Reed (1996) Glorious Battle: The Cultural politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, Nashville.
Schelling (n.4) 258.
Schelling (n.4) 258.
Schelling (n.4) 258.
Schelling (n.4) 258.
Schelling (n.4) 262.
Schelling (n.4) 262.
Hegel (1967) The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. Baillie, intro. G. Lichtheim, New York., New York, 490. On this paragraph, Rudnytsky (1987) Freud and Oedipus, New York, 162 writes tellingly that “All the parallels between Freud and Hegel come to a head in this passage.”
Hegel 15.551.
Billings (2013) "The Ends of Tragedy: the Oedipus at Colonus and German Idealism", Arion 21: 111–29 is an exception: I am pleased to be able to thank Joshua Billings here for many productive conversations on German Idealism and tragedy. See also Holmes (2013) “Antigone at Colonus and the End(s) of Tragedy”, Ramus 42: 23–43.
Hegel (1944) Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols, trans. J. Sibree, New York. 103. On Hegel’s Christology, see Shanks (n. 8 1991).
Hegel (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, Trans B. Knox, Oxford, II: 1219.
Hegel (n.19) II; 1219.
Bachofen (1967) Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. R. Manheim, Princeton, 181.
See, for example, Butler (2000) Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York; Honig (n.2 2013); both with extensive bibliography. See also Mills (1996) "Hegel's Antigone", in Mills ed (1996) Feminist Interpretations of Hegel, University Park, PA, 59–88; Benhabib (1996) “On Hegel, Women and irony", in Mills ed (1996): 25–44; Chanter (1995) Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers, New York; Speight (2001) Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency, Cambridge; Elshtain (1982) “Antigone’s Daughters”, Democracy 2: 39–45., (1989) “Antigone’s Daughters Reconsidered: Continuing Reflections of Women, Politics and Power” in White ed (1989) Life-World and Politics: Between Modernity and Post-Modernity, West Bend, Indiana, 222–36, (1996) “The Mothers of the Disappeared: an Encounter with Antigone’s Daughters”, in Jensen ed (1996) Finding a New Feminism: Rethinking the Woman Question for Liberal Democracy, Lanham, Md., 129–48; Kirkpatrick (2011) “The Prudent Dissident: Un-Heroic Resistance in Sophocles’ Antigone”, The Review of Politics 73: 401–24; Engelstein (2011) “Sibling Logic; or, Antigone Again”, PMLA 126: 38–54; and for recent politicized readings, Ahrensdorf (2009) Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy: Rationalism and Religion in Sophocles’ Theban Plays, Cambridge., 85–150; Badger (2013) Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy: Cities and Transcendence, London, 71–94.
Honig (n. 2 2013).
See Goldhill (n.1 2013) 31-2 for the analysis and implications of this linguistic and ideological commitment to self.
Thanks to the participants in the APA session where this paper was delivered. A far longer version of the analysis of Hegel will be published in PMLA later in 2014.
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Goldhill, S. Antigone: An Interruption Between Feminism and Christianity. Int class trad 21, 309–316 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-014-0354-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-014-0354-y