Antigone and Human Rights

Kevin P. Lee, Campbell University Law School, has published Emanuel Levinas on Hegel's Antigone: Levinas and the Problem of Modernity. Here is the 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 Jürgen 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.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Antigone, the Whistle-Blower

Alessia Contu, University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, has published Whistle-Blowers’ Acts: Recasting Whistle-Blowing Through Readings of Antigone. Here is the abstract.

"Blowing the whistle" in organizational and public life is akin to speaking out and denouncing wrongdoings. Parrhesia, free speech, is a strongly-held value in western societies, but when manifested in organizations as whistle-blowing it is often seen as troublemaking. Most research on whistle-blowers is based on instrumental knowledge. But time has come to develop new perspectives on whistle-blowing (Wolfe Morrison, 2009). We answer the call to re-energize this research arena by developing a critical knowledge, which fosters reflection (Habermas, 2005: 316). Our discussion is based on exploring the analogy between Antigone, the Sophoclean heroine and whistle-blowers. Specifically, we address the readings of the tragedy by authors such as Hegel, Lacan and Heidegger considering what these offer to our understanding of whistle-blowing. These help us explain why whistle-blowers are often seen as ambiguous figures with ambivalent motives. And why whistle-blowing can be recast as an ethico-political act.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.