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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Tina Chanter
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In Glas, Derrida focuses his attention on a question regarding the family, on the unintelligibility of familial love for which Hegel makes Antigone representative. The account of the emergence of self-consciousness in the family differs in several crucial ways from the standard account of how Hegelian self-consciousness is constituted in the master–slave dialectic. Most notably, the achievement of self-consciousness through familial love involves no risk of life, no struggle to the death, no conflict. While Derrida refrains from interrogating the relation between the master–slave dialectic and sexual difference directly, he interrogates the peaceful recognition that Hegel says occurs between Polynices as brother and Antigone as sister. I explore the silences that punctuate Derrida's discussion of Antigone, especially his silence on Hegel's twofold elision of the master–slave dialectic with the husband–wife relation, and of Antigone with the figure of the wife. By symbolically marrying her off, Hegel subordinates Antigone to a symbolic husband.
Author(s): Chanter T
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Paragraph
Year: 2016
Volume: 39
Issue: 2
Pages: 202-219
Print publication date: 01/07/2016
Acceptance date: 02/04/2016
ISSN (print): 0264-8334
ISSN (electronic): 1750-0176
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2016.0195
DOI: 10.3366/para.2016.0195
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