Emanuel Levinas on Hegel's Antigone: Levinas and the Problem of Modernity

Abstract

This essay introduces Emmanuel Levinas’s contribution to post-secular human rights discourse. It looks first to Levinas’s reading of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, for an introduction to his thinking about the relationship between the human law and divine law. For his approach to “post-secularity” it compares Levinas to Jurgen Habermas’s critique of the “discourse on modernity” with particular concern for several issues of importance to human rights discourse. Levinas develops a “post-ontological” conception of religion as a part of his account of subjectivity. It suggests that, while flawed in many respects, Levinas’s work illustrates some of the complex issues facing those who seek to articulate a post secular theory of human rights.