If the modern European state inherits the emergent democracy of the ancient Greek polis, how might contemporary efforts to think through race, colonialism and slavery in relation to Hegel and Derrida incite new readings of Antigone? To what extent might such readings prove themselves to be already incipient in Derrida’s Glas? To what extent might the continual renaissance of Antigone, in the form of international dramatic appropriations of the play, particularly in racially fraught contexts of post-colonial politics, set the context for discerning such readings, or indeed themselves already perform or suggest such readings? Tegonni: An African Antigone, from which I draw the quotation of my title, is just one such example of a play that mobilizes the figure of Antigone in a direction that focuses attention on the colonial legacy that burdens her transmission through the ages (Osofisan, 1999). At the same time, the play revivifies Antigone, disrupting some of the characters’ expectations about the color of her skin, and in doing so, making visible what might have remained invisible: that the European Antigone celebrated by Hegel and his critics remains a white Antigone.

The general problematic within which it serves to situate the issue of how Hegel’s discussion of Antigone marks a disruption of Spirit’s progression, as Hegel narrates it, is one that can be broached through considering the status of self-consciousness. Briefly, as is well known, according to the story that Hegel tells in the Phenomenology of Spirit, self-consciousness emerges with the master-slave dialectic (1979).[3] It is in and through the self’s free encounter with another that one gains self-consciousness; the role of recognition is crucial here, as is the fact that the confrontation between two free and independent consciousnesses involves a struggle concerning death. If one ends up capitulating to another, by becoming a slave, then on individual as self-conscious has confronted the possibility of death, and has chosen life. The slave would rather survive enslaved than die free, for what is freedom in death? The question, with regard to Antigone, remains: does Antigone avoid the fate of enslavement by not marrying? Would she have become enslaved by marrying a husband? Is the purity Hegel imputes to her in part a result of her peculiar status, as a female character whose father has died, as one who, the tradition of commentary has it, prefers death to life, is in love with death, one who speaks of herself as doomed from the beginning of the play, one who will never become the ward of a husband, one who is solely answerable to the gods? In defying Creon, Antigone is also defying her familial guardian, for, on the death of Oedipus, Creon has become her kurios or guardian. Antigone does not merely defy Creon’s kingly authority, she defies any temporal, earthly authority, and in doing so refuses the male, familial, avuncular authority of Creon, both her king and her guardian.

Insofar as Hegel’s tale of Spirit’s progressive self-realization is intended as an historical narrative, the master-slave narrative would appear to precede and facilitate the phase of Spirit’s journey that Hegel associates with Antigone. The fact that the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, prepares for the shape that Spirit takes on as reason in the Phenomenology of Spirit, within which the adventure of Spirit with which Hegel associates Antigone unfolds, would suggest that Antigone can be assumed to be endowed with self-consciousness. Indeed, Hegel refers to the ethical consciousness that is split between state and family, and assigned to man and woman as represented by Creon and Polynices on the one hand and Antigone on the other, as self-consciousness. Yet several important questions intervene before anything definitive can be asserted with regard to Antigone’s ethical self-consciousness, not the least of which is incurred by the peculiar status that Hegel confers on tragedy as a form of art “for us,” for modernity, yet as a vehicle expressive of ethical, communal values for the Greeks. The subsequent conflict Hegel draws out, which he specifies in terms of religious and political dimensions, already bears the traces of a logic he understands as dialectical and teleological, a logic according to which he understands history to unfold—a logic that subordinates wives to husbands, converts the Greeks to Christianity, and renders (male) citizens representative of a morality that receives the legal backing of nation-states.

This logic is striated with complex and competing motivations when it comes to Antigone, who serves both as a figure for woman-in-general for Hegel, and as a character in a Greek tragedy, whose partial understanding of her role in relation to (Hegel’s conception of) ethics as a whole is also inflected by the inferior role that Hegel maps out as her destiny. This logic is also shot through with the dual sense in which Hegel reveres Antigone, having first circumscribed her within the intensely patrolled borders of the familial, subject to male authority. Having castrated her, he fetishizes her.

Two other factors complicate the scenario. First, there is Hegel’s admiration for the Greeks’ sense of communal ethics, an admiration that is tempered by the need to develop a more variegated approach to ethics, a more individualized conception of the individual’s conscience and intent. Secondly, and somewhat in tension with this first factor, there is Hegel’s nostalgic retrieval of the tragic form, transformed into an art form from which we moderns can learn not to abstract the moral law from the communal institutions from which it arises, and to which it should remain attached.

The questions that thus arise to shed doubt on whether and how Antigone might be endowed with self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense can be formulated as follows:

1) What does it mean to attribute self-consciousness to a fictional figure, drawn from myth, and representative of an age where one’s duty melds with one’s understanding of one’s socially assigned role, and one’s socially assigned role is understood to flow from one’s biological sex? And how does the family mediate sexual difference (this is one of the pivotal planes on which Derrida situates his enquiry in Glas)?

2) What is to be made of the fact that Antigone’s lot is to be thrown in with that of the gods, her fate inextricably linked to her symbolic significance in tending the dead, and as such aligned with chthonic, unconscious forces, understood by Hegel (and the Greeks) to be religious in a primitive sense (and to be less advanced than the gods with whom Creon is associated)?

3) What is to be done about the fact that there is slippage between one Hegelian text and another, for example the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right, with regard to the relation between morality, ethics, the family and the master-slave relation (which comes first, is Sittlichkeit sublated Moralität, or vice versa, and is the family a product of the master-slave relation, or does it precede it?). There is a sense in which, having relied on a naturalized discourse of sexual difference to assign specific and mutually exclusive roles to men and women, Hegel puts the question of Antigone’s self-consciousness (or lack thereof) off limits, out of bounds, by treating Antigone as (in some sense—ethically) representative of the family, yet assuming that men are (in another sense—legally) the heads of familial households. Women become subsumed by the legal personhood of their male guardians. Derrida obliquely acknowledges this when he says “Once the family is constituted, as a power of consciousness, the [master-slave] struggle can break out only between consciousness, and not between empiric individuals. . . . The individual who engages in the war is an individual-family” (1986: 135; 153-4).

And what of the individual who remains at home, wanting to bury the war dead? What about Antigone? Has her individuality (to the extent that she was ever granted any) disappeared into the family, which itself has disappeared into the (masculine) obligation to go to war . . . has she disappeared into the state, has she been obliterated altogether by her brother/father/uncle, her legal guardian? What about Hegel’s slippage with regard to Antigone’s womanly and familial status? Is Antigone cajoled into serving as a representative figure for the sister (Phenomenology of Spirit) or the wife (Philosophy of Right)? And does the master-slave dialectic, as the site for the emergence of self-consciousness, precede the conflict in terms of which Hegel construes the deeds of Antigone and Creon/Polynices, and which he conceives as in need of dialectical resolution? Even if it is clear that according to the account of the Phenomenology of Spirit the master-slave dialectic, and hence the production of self-consciousness, must precede and prepare for the emergence of Spirit as such, is it clear that women are to be counted as self-conscious subjects? Is it clear that Antigone, a mythical, fictional representation of a Theban woman, should be construed as self-conscious?

How attenuated is any putative version of self-consciousness attributed to her, given that a) she is in some sense representative of an historical people who lacked the reflective capacity that we moderns (are assumed to) have, b) she is a mythical/fictional figure said to have only an “intuitive” grasp of the ethical sense she nonetheless embodies, c) as a tragic character she is mobilized by Hegel as illustrative of a purity that is stipulated as bound up with a religious sensibility, the specific configuration of which is in need of surpassing, d) what she is “for us” is not what she was for the Greeks, or for herself (or for Sophocles)—that is, she is a character in a work of art for us moderns, while for an Athenian audience, on Hegel’s reading, she was an emblem of ethical and religious devotion, e) she is the ethical/religious embodiment of the family, but has no legal standing as a person—her personhood is subsumed by the male head of the family, f) she is intent on distinguishing not only Polynices from a slave by burying him (and in publicly defying the king and proclaiming her defiance); in doing so she is also distinguishing herself, as a woman and as representative of Polynices’ family, from a slave.

4) Given the slippage between Antigone as a figure for woman/wife in general, and as sister, what do we make of the fact that Hegel suggests in some texts that the husband/wife relation itself is to be understood in terms of, as a version of, or as akin to, Hegel’s master-slave relation (see The System of Ethics, for example), but that Derrida neglects to discuss this? He thus neglects the complication this represents for how (that which is recognized as) the family is a concept shaped, in part, through the institution of slavery?[4] How does this apply, or fail to apply to Antigone? How does Antigone’s status as a sister, and the importance Hegel attaches to it, play out in relation to the fact that there are more than intimations to suggest that the role of women as wives be understood as akin to that of slaves? Does Antigone’s status as sister allow her to eschew such a fate? If it is the duty of women to marry, and Antigone eschews this duty, in what sense does she carve out a new sense of feminine duty, as sister-never-to-marry? And in what sense is this Theban princess—who stands in for Athenian women who are nonetheless not citizens—able to eschew slavery as a wife only at the expense of endorsing slavery for non-Greeks?

The issue is complicated still further by the fact that whatever recognition Antigone is said by Hegel to attain in relation to Polynices, it is a recognition that marks an abrupt departure from the kind of recognition that Hegel seems to make programmatic, the recognition characteristic of the master-slave dialectic, involving two (male) individuals (still alive), risking their lives in a struggle that could result in one of their deaths, but, if slavery ensues for one of them (or a group of them, if we apply this dialectic collectively) does not.[5] This question of how distant is the form of recognition that pertains to Antigone from that which is standardly constructed as the more generic formula of the master-slave relation is one that detains Derrida.

By tracing the contours that describe the subterranean logic of Hegel’s containment of the threat Antigone poses, Derrida thinks through the way in which for Hegel Antigone’s recognition of her blood brother constitutes a “Unique example in the system: a recognition that is not natural and yet that passes through no conflict” (1986: 150; 170). There are several registers in which Antigone’s uniqueness for Hegel must be thought through, and the dominant prism that refracts these registers is taken to be, both by Derrida and his commentators, sexual difference. What emerges from my own argument is that part of what is at stake in Hegel’s attribution of a form of recognition to Antigone that is neither natural, nor achieved through conflict, is his implicit distinction of her from non-Greek slaves (for whom slavery is assumed to be natural), coupled with his assumption that women a) are destined for marriage, which is their “duty” according to the Philosophy of Right, and b) women should naturally accept their husbands’ authority—or the authority of those (such as Creon) who stand in for a father or a husband—as head of households. Although Hegel does not acknowledge it, his implicit distinction Antigone and Polynices on the one hand as capable of offering recognition to one another, and slaves on the other hand, echoes a distinction that Sophocles’ Antigone makes explicitly between her brother and a slave. In a passage that is usually neglected, Antigone differentiates her brother from a slave, repudiating the possibility that she would have buried Polynices had he been a slave. Since her brother is no slave, she maintains, she must bury him.[6]

Antigone’s distinction of her brother from a slave serves to indicate that the blood ties that bind her to her brother cannot be understood at a purely natural, biological level. Her recognition of him as worthy of burial already operates at a symbolic level, one that would discount him as a blood relative, were he a slave. Her distinction of her brother from slavery thereby calls to mind the deracination of slaves, who were disinherited of their familial and cultural identities, and their names, subjected to what Orlando Patterson has called “social death” (1982). Given this, everything that Hegel says about the family labors under its symbolic significance as a family that is not discounted, a family that assumes its freedom, a family that does not consist of slaves. This raises the question of how far Hegel’s discussion of Antigone sublimates a consideration of slavery, especially since both women, for whom Hegel makes Antigone representative, and slaves, were excluded from citizenship in ancient Greece.[7]

There is a formal parity between the separate spheres of action with which Hegel identifies the feminine and masculine deeds of tragic heroes, in that “each of the opposites in which the ethical substance exists contains the entire substance, and all the moments of its contents” (PhS: 268; PhG: 319), and in that “both sides suffer the same destruction. For neither power has any advantage over the other that would make it a more essential moment of the substance” (PhS: 285; PhG: 337). Yet a pervasive and enduring tension is introduced into this apparent equivalence in accordance with a quasi-foundational law that Hegel assumes without ever bringing into question, namely the law of sexual difference that aligns Antigone, in her femininity, with the family, thereby excluding her from the masculine Spirit that finds its highest determination, its truth, in the community of the state, where the individual passes out of the family.

This tension only mounts as it becomes clear that Hegel’s assignment of Antigone to the law of the family underwrites her exclusion, as a woman, from citizenship, and therefore from true freedom, which, within the general scheme that Hegel advances, he acknowledges is only possible within the proper form of community, and which finds its highest expression in the state. Hence, despite the fact that both divine law (which Hegel takes Antigone’s insistence upon burying Polynices to represent), which has its content in individuality, and human law (which Hegel takes Creon’s concern for the state to represent), which has its content in the nation (see PhS: 271; PhG: 323), are said to contain the opposite law within themselves, and despite the fact that each suffers mutual “downfall” (Phs: 285; PhG: 337), it is the political community of the nation, and not the natural community of the family, that is “conscious of what it actually does,” whereas the “other side has the form of immediate substance or substance that simply is” (PhS: 268; PhG: 319). Of course, as we have pointed out, the family is not in fact natural, but symbolic, in that the only blood ties that count are those of non-slaves. Divine law is, says Hegel, “on the one hand the inner Notion (Begriff) or general possibility of the ethical sphere in general, but on the other hand equally contains within it the moment of self-consciousness” (PhS: 268; PhG: 319). For Hegel, the ethical is “intrinsically universal” (PhS: 268; PhG: 320), yet since what is “truly universal” is the community (PhS: 269; PhG: 320), the ethical action of the family finds its higher determination not in itself, but precisely in “expelling the individual” from the family (PhS: 269; PhG: 320). The individual who is expelled into the community is the citizen—a privilege reserved for the man, from which the woman is excluded. Moreover, citizenship is reserved for free men. The ethical deed of the family, as universal, “must be placed in the relation of the individual member of the Family to the whole Family,” Hegel tells us (PhS: 269; PhG: 320).

For Hegel there is only one respect in which the family is properly ethical, and that is in burying the dead (see PhS: 270; PhG: 321). In burial, the individual is taken as a whole, in function of the community as state (see PhS: 269; PhG: 321). In taking on the “act of destruction” that death is—in burying this particular dead individual as a family member—the family representative commits an ethical deed, one that is premised on the basis of the family as a natural community (although we have raised questions about this alleged natural status), on blood-relationship, and yet is also spiritual. “Blood-relationship supplements [ergänzt], then, the abstract natural process by adding to it the movement of consciousness, interrupting the work of Nature and rescuing the blood-relation from destruction” (PhS: 271; PhG: 322).[8] This supplementary structure indicates that the ethical character of burial will never completely surpass the family’s natural aspect—or the law of sexual difference that assigns to femininity familial tasks. Another law, unarticulated by Hegel, has also emerged from this discussion, the law that assigns free individuals to the family, while excluding slaves, casting doubt on the alleged natural aspect of the family. Nevertheless, for Hegel, this naturalness is said to remain.

So too, the fact of death is natural—that we die is an unavoidable necessity (see PhS: 270; PhG: 321)—but how and when death comes is in part, for the citizen-soldier, at the whim of the government, who shakes things up through war, in order to allay the tendency for isolated and “independent” interests (PhS: 272; PhG: 324) to disrupt the good of the whole. In doing so, the government makes individuals (individual soldier-citizens) “feel death as their lord and master” (PhS: 273; PhG: 324). It is through war, which reduces ethical life to “strength and luck,” that the “ethical nation” remains determined by “nature,” and thus the “ethical shape of Spirit . . . vanishe[s] and another takes its place” (PhS: 289; PhG: 341-2). At this point in Hegel’s narrative, the immediate ethical Spirit that finds its expression in individuality, through the commission of a deed, and which is split into the two separate laws of human and divine, gives way to legal right, which emerges out of the “ruin of ethical Substance” (PhS: 289; PhG: 341). It is, then, through war, that the natural aspect of the ethics of the nation emerges, and it is war that results in the demise of this shape of ethical spirit. The contingency of nature asserts itself, such that ethics must be resolved into the higher shape of law, or legal right. This resolution ushers in the subject of modernity, a male, European subject, whose morality and freedom is bought at the price of the exclusion of women from legal and moral subjectivity, and the slavery and colonialism of subjects excluded from Hegel’s understanding of world history.

I have focused in this essay on how far Hegel’s master-slave dialectic implies that women have a duty to become symbolic slaves to their husbands, and on the fact that Antigone’s efforts to differentiate herself from slavery embroil her in a symbolic affirmation of slavery for others—for those whose blood would not qualify them, for her, as recognizable family members. In emphasizing that Antigone draws the line at violating Creon’s edict for the burial of a slave, I am calling for vigilance in feminist reclamations of Antigone. In order not to inadvertently provide new iterations of Hegel’s European, colonialist account of Antigone, I am suggesting that the significance of Antigone’s differentiation of Polynices from a slave must be taken seriously. I am also suggesting that the difference between the ethical and the political is not a boundary that is clearly drawn by Sophocles’s Antigone. In the rich, international tradition of plays inspired by Antigone, but also critically engaging the tradition in which Greek tragedy is ensconced, such as Osofisan’s Tegonni, we can discern Antigone’s complicated legacy. It is not a legacy that is liberatory in any straightforward way, but one that is mired in racist assumptions of European supremacy, colonialism and slavery.

Biography

Tina Chanter has a permanent appointment as Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago. Currently, she holds a one year visiting appointment at the University of West England, in the United Kingdom. She is author of Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (SUNY Press, 2011), The Picture of Abjection: Film Fetish and the Nature of Difference (Indiana UP, 2008), Gender (Continuum Press, 2006), Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford UP, 2001), and Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Re-writing of the Philosophers (Routledge, 1995). She is also the editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (Penn State UP 2001), and co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (SUNY Press 2005), and of Sarah Kofman’s Corpus (SUNY Press, 2008). She is co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, The Returns of Antigone, and her book, Art, Politics and Rancière: Seeing Things Anew, will appear with Continuum Press. In addition, she edits the Gender Theory series at SUNY Press.

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janvier / juin 2013  -janeiro / junho 2013