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Antigone's Transgression: Hegel and Bataille on the Divine and the Human*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Victoria I. Burke
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts at Boston

Abstract

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Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1999

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References

Notes

1 Blanchot, Maurice, The Step Not Beyond, translated by Nelson, Lycette (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 101.Google Scholar

2 Bataille, Georges, Theory of Religion, translated by Hurley, Robert (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 53.Google Scholar

3 Harris, H. S., “Hegel and Adam's Rib,” The European Legacy, 2, 3 (1997): 568.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Hegel, G. W. F., Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Hamberg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1955), p. 155Google Scholar, and Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophy of Right, translated by Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 115.Google Scholar

5 Hegel, G. W. F., Phanomenologie des Geistes (Hamberg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), p. 266Google Scholar, and Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Miller, V. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 242Google Scholar. Further references to this text provide the page number of the English translation first, followed by the page number of the German original in parenthesis.

6 Cixous, Helene, The Newly Born Woman, translated by Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 6364.Google Scholar

7 Chanter, Tina, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 94: “Whatever reciprocity might seem to pertain between the family and the state, between the divine law and the human law, there is a sense in which, in Hegel's account, it is always already decided in advance what law has higher authority.”Google Scholar

8 Benhabib, Seyla, “On Hegel, Women, and Irony,” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 40.Google Scholar

9 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 267 (p. 293).

10 Ibid., p. 267 (p. 293).

11 Ibid., p. 268 (p. 293).

12 Hyppolite, Jean, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Cherniak, Samuel and Heckman, John (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 336.Google Scholar

13 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 280 (p. 306).

14 Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 340.

15 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 270 (p. 295).

16 Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gill, Gillian C. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 215.Google Scholar

17 See Benhabib, , “On Hegel, Women, and Irony,” p. 41, and Luce Irigaray, This Sex which Is Not One, translated by Porter, Catherine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 167.Google Scholar

18 Loraux, Nicole, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, translated by Forster, Anthony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 31.Google Scholar

19 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 274 (p. 299).

20 Feral, Josette, “Antigone, or The Irony of the Tribe,” Diacritics (September 1978): 214Google Scholar, and Pritchard, Annie, “Antigone's Mirrors: Reflections on Moral Madness,” Hypatia, 7, 3 (Summer 1992): 7793.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Antigone, Sophocles, translated by Wyckoff, Elizabeth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 162.Google Scholar

22 Strictly speaking, Antigone's action cannot be conceived as a contestation of Hegelian rational self-consciousness proper since Hegelian rationality is in process (rather than completed) with Sittlichkeit, and since, from Hegel's point of view, her action is constitutive of rationality rather than opposed to it. Nevertheless, her action does resist the course which self-consciousness is to take on the way to its completion in absolute knowing. It thus resists the role allotted to it within the Hegelian narrative.

23 Sophocles, Antigone, p. 190.

24 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 275 (p. 300).

25 Derrida, Jacques, Glas, , translated by Leavy, John P. Jr. and Rand, Richard (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 150.Google Scholar

26 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 275 (p. 300).

27 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 217.

28 Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling, translated by Hannay, Alastair (London: Penguin Books, 1985).Google Scholar

29 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 284 (pp. 309–10).

30 Harris, “Hegel and Adam's Rib,” p. 570.

31 Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, p. 31.

32 An attempt to show the inaccuracies in Hegel's treatment of Antigone has been carried out admirably by Patricia Mills (Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, “Hegel's Antigone,” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, pp. 59'88).

33 Heidegger, Martin, Hoelderlin's Hymn ‘The Ister’, translated by McNeil, William and Davis, Julia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 102.Google Scholar

34 Bataille, Georges, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, translated by Dalwood, Mary (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 19.Google Scholar

35 Foucault, Michel, Preface to “Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, translated by Bouchard, Donald F. and Simon, Sherry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 35.Google Scholar

36 Derrida, Jacques, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Bass, Alan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 263.Google Scholar

37 Kristeva, Julia, “Bataille, Experience, and Practice,” in On Bataille: Critical Essays, edited and translated by Boldt-Irons, Leslie Anne (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 243.Google Scholar

38 Indeed, the most significant point of contention between Hegel and Bataille concerns the nature of the telos of experience; according to Bataille, Hegel's absolute knowledge, the explicit identity of concept and object, would be “definitive non-knowledge” (Bataille, Georges, Inner Experience, translated by Boldt, Leslie Ann [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988], p. 108)Google Scholar. However, a full account of how this could be the case would be the subject of another paper.