"The celestial Antigone, the most resplendent figure ever to have appeared on earth": Hegel's feminism

Feminist Readings of Antigone

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 111-130

  Bernstein, J M ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

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EID: 84898563502     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (29)

1. George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 40-41.
2. Apart from the works mentioned in the following, I have been most challenged and inspired by: Seyla Benhabib, "On Hegel, Women and Irony", in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills (University Park: Penn State Press, 1996), pp. 25-44;
3. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
4. Adriana Cavarero, Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender, trans. Robert de Lucca and Deanna Shemek (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002);
5. Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1995);
6. Kimberly Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003) - chap. 4 presents a fine critical engagement with the readings of Irigaray, Butler, and Mills;
7. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, "Hegel's Antigone", in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, pp. 59-88-an essay I have used for teaching since its first publication in 1986;
8. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Sophocles' Antigone: conflict, vision, and simplification", chap. 3 in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
9. Heidi M. Ravven, "Has Hegel Anything to Say to Feminists?" in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel;
10. Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
11. Broadly speaking, I take this to be the social metaphysical scheme whose categorial structuring, history and social reproduction is analyzed in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1954). For what it is worth, I also take Beauvoir's feminism to provide the essentials of a Hegelian feminism.
12. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 216-217, emphasis in the original.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977), §§ 446, 464. Hereafter all references to the Phenomenology refer to this edition; they will be placed in parentheses in the text, with the paragraph (§) number from Miller's edition. I have also made use of G. W. F. Hegel, Spirit: Chapter Six of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Hegel Translation Group (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2001), which if sometimes less elegant is for the most part more accurate. A paragraph number followed by TT marks those places where I have followed the Toronto translation fully. Some translations are my own.
14. I am here disagreeing with Joseph C. Flay, Hegel's Question for Certainty (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984), pp. 164-167;
15. Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 134-145.
16. H. S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770-1801 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1972).
17. Sophocles, Antigone, in The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), lines 891-929. All references in the text are to the line numbers in the Greek text, which appear at the top of the page in Fagles' translation.
18. My preferred interpretation of these lines is offered by Bernard M. W. Knox in The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 103-107.
19. Knox, "Antigone 1" and "Antigone 2", chaps. 3-4 in The Heroic Temper;
20. Charles Segal, "Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus", chap. 6 in Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
21. Allen Speight, "Tragedy and Retrospectivity: Hegel's Antigone", chap. 2 in Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
22. Christoph Menke, Tragödie im Sittlichen: Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996).
23. Jeffrey A. Gauthier, "Historically Emergent Agency: Antigone and Creon", chap. 1 in Hegel and Feminist Social Criticism: Justice, Recognition and the Feminine (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997).
24. H. S. Harris, Hegel's Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997), p. 214. Harris' account provides a compelling documenting of how thoroughly Hegel is tracking his Greek sources. My reading is throughout indebted to his.
25. J. M. Bernstein, "Conscience and Transgression: The Exemplarity of Tragic Action", in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal, ed. Gary K. Browning (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 79-88.
26. I am here agreeing with Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 94.
27. I defend this thesis in detail in J. M. Bernstein, "Evil and Forgiveness: Hegel's Poetics of Action", in Beyond Representation, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 34-65.
28. Markell, Bound by Recognition, pp. 99-102.
29. Harris, Hegel's Ladder II, p. 498.