Event overview
As part of the Visual Cultures Guest Lecture Series, Mary C. Rawlinson will be speaking on feminist readings of Antigone.
If psychoanalysis firmly installs the Oedipal narrative as the template of identity in the West, it is a reappropriation of Hegel’s reading of Antigone that forms a central theme in feminist political theory. Through an evaluation of Antigone’s action, both Hegel and feminist political theorists address the question of the political status of women and determine the relationship between the family and the state.
Feminist readers such as Butler or BenHabib, I argue, regularly, misread and underestimate Hegel’s reading. Far from devaluing Antigone, it is through her character that Hegel launches his attack on the “moral insolence” of reason. Arguing for the necessity of a phenomenological starting point in ethics, Hegel demonstrates that we are “claimed by the right” without regard to any arguments of reason.
On the other hand, while feminist commentators almost universally cast Antigone as a heroic figure, Hegel criticizes her for the “hardheadedness” and “hardheartedness” that is distinctive of nearly the entire Cadmean clan. This analysis forms the core of his critique of both virtue and law. By privileging an abstract principle and the virtue of her own act over living relationships, Antigone, like her father before her, sticks stubbornly to her own position, rather than displaying the mobility that is required to negotiate among the complex and inevitably conflicting claims of the right.
Interrogating the gender division of labor that founds Hegel’s own account of social life, I demonstrate that Antigone is an agent of fraternity, and no friend to feminism. Far from transgressing the norms of gender, as is often claimed, she reinforces them and sides with man’s deadly abstractions against the claims of a living sister. Ismene, on the other hand, so regularly derided by feminist commentators as a caricature of the feminine, is the true feminist heroine of the plays. She fearlessly transgresses gender norms, as well as the gender division of labor and embodies a moral imagination focused on the future and sustaining life. Against the discourse of the rights of man, founded in the law of property and the fear of death, Ismene embodies an ethics of life and provides a new model of moral and political agency.
Mary C. Rawlinson
Dept. of Philosophy, Stony Brook University; Editor, 'International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics' (IJFAB). Publications: 'Thinking with Irigaray' (SUNY, 2010), 'The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine & Bioethics' (Springer, 2006), Derrida & Feminism (Routledge, 1997); Co-director, The Irigaray Circle and US Representative, International Network of Feminist Bioethics.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 May 2011 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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