Antigone and the Law

Bonnie Honig, American Bar Foundation, has published "Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Future of Humanism," as American Bar Foundation Research Paper No. 09-05. Here is the abstract.

In Sophocles' Antigone there is one speech that attracts the ire and admiration of critics. In what Creon describes as her dirge for herself, Antigone says she would not have violated Creon’s edict against burying her brother on behalf of husband or children because she could always have others, but (with her parents dead) only her brother is irreplaceable. Humanist critics from Goethe to Jebb find the speech abhorrent while anti-humanists like Lacan admire it as a manifestation of Antigone’s monstrous desire. Both sides elide the politics of the speech, and position it as (anti)ethical. This paper argues for a political reading of the speech which is neither humanist not anti-humanist. The speech parodies, cites, and mimics Creon, Pericles, and a story from Herodotus in an effort to find a way to stage the protagonist’s concerns about the status of natal versus conjugal family relations but also the status of the dead in the democratic polis and the quality of authority relations in times of tension between the democratic polis and elites. Read contextually and intertextually, this speech, historically rejected by devotees of Sophocles’ heroine as inauthentic, is actually the key to the play and to developing further an agonistic humanism that is not exclusively ethical nor extra-political in its aspirations.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.