Antigone: An Interruption Between Feminism and Christianity

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.