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Does Antigone stand or fall in relation to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic? A Response to Derrida’s Glas

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Tina Chanter

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Abstract

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.


Publication metadata

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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