Does Antigone Stand or Fall in

Relation to Hegel’s Master–Slave

Dialectic? A Response to Derrida’s Glas
TINA CHANTER

Abstract:
In Glas, Derrida focuses his attention on a question regarding the family,
on the unintelligibility of familial love for which Hegel makes Antigone
representative. The account of the emergence of self-consciousness in the
family differs in several crucial ways from the standard account of how Hegelian
self-consciousness is constituted in the master–slave dialectic. Most notably, the
achievement of self-consciousness through familial love involves no risk of life,
no struggle to the death, no conflict. While Derrida refrains from interrogating
the relation between the master–slave dialectic and sexual difference directly, he
interrogates the peaceful recognition that Hegel says occurs between Polynices
as brother and Antigone as sister. I explore the silences that punctuate Derrida’s
discussion of Antigone, especially his silence on Hegel’s twofold elision of the
master–slave dialectic with the husband–wife relation, and of Antigone with
the figure of the wife. By symbolically marrying her off, Hegel subordinates
Antigone to a symbolic husband.

Keywords: sexual difference, feminist, Antigone, master–slave dialectic,

Derrida, Hegel, Glas, self-consciousness

As is well known, Hegel invokes a community of readers he imagines

to have followed the sequence of logical consequences he draws from
the contradictions consciousness encounters, contradictions in which
it becomes mired, and from which it finally rescues itself. A feminist
reader of Hegel might ask: how does the ‘we’ of this imagined
community, those who follow the journey of Spirit throughout the
Phenomenology of Spirit, stand with regard to sexual difference?1 Is self-

Paragraph 39.2 (2016): 202–219

DOI: 10.3366/para.2016.0195
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/loi/para
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 203
consciousness sexualized? Are such questions legitimized or outlawed
by Hegel’s trajectory, or by how Derrida cuts and plays the deck of
cards Hegel has dealt him, and which he stands up in two columns of
obelisks in a series that he entitles Glas?2
One could ask how the Hegelian passages concerning master and
slave that Alexandre Kojève has famously celebrated shed light on the
‘second sex’.3 How should Hegel’s master–slave dialectic be read in
the light of feminist theory? To put my cards on the table, I think, as
a woman and as a philosopher reading Hegel and Derrida, one has a
stake in asking such questions, particularly given Hegel’s views on the
incompatibility of women and philosophy. Women, says Hegel — and
Derrida quotes him (E191/D214) — ‘are not made for’ the universality
of ‘philosophy’.4
These questions about philosophy and sexual difference, about sex,
gender, race, mastery and slavery are not exactly Derrida’s questions,
but neither are they entirely removed from his questions. In Glas,
Derrida focuses his attention on a question regarding the family. Why
does he choose this particular ‘thread’, the thread of the ‘law of the
family’ (E4/G12), to follow through the works of Hegel, and how does
it speak to the questions a feminist theorist reading Hegel might pose?
What questions does Derrida allow to resound, and what questions
remain mute in his approach to Hegel? Whose voices does he allow
to speak, and to be heard, to ring out, and how does reading Derrida
make them sound differently?
‘[N]o longer mute, but not yet speaking (nur Klang und nicht Sprache)’
(E3/G9), Derrida says of the ‘huge Memnon statues at Thebes’ that,
for Hegel, ‘had a human form’ and were thought to refer to the
memorial of a king.5 These Memnon statues, one of which ‘gave a
sound at sunrise’, and to which Hegel also compares the sphinxes to
be ‘found in Egypt’ (A643), can be regarded, says Hegel, as ‘the pages
of a book which (. . . ) arouse in mind and heart, as the notes of a bell
do, vague astonishment, meditation, and thought’ (A643–5). Already,
from the opening pages of Glas, through Derrida’s mute references to
Thebes and to sphinxes, which he will make explicit in his closing
pages, Sophocles’ Antigone is in the air.
The operation Derrida undertakes in Glas is a picking over of
what remains of Hegel, a ‘critical displacement’ (E5/G11) of the
Hegelian ‘law of the family’ (E4/G10). Derrida lingers with the family,
usually passed over in favour of the moments into which the family
resolves itself in bringing Sittlichkeit (ethical life) to completion in the
Philosophy of Right, namely civil society and the state, which concern
204 Paragraph
the rights of citizens and the institutions of laws. What detains him?
The unintelligibility of the affect that love is, love — that to which the
institution of the family is devoted (E18/G25), and of which Antigone
becomes the representative par excellence. Resistant to the powers of
formal logic that Hegel brings to bear on all that he encounters, love
is unintelligible.
Hegel’s thought is structured by a series of determinate negations,
the eventual effect of which is to return us to the beginning, to
the origins, to Spirit itself, but to Spirit thought differently, thought
in a highly differentiated, reflective, mediated, self-conscious and
conceptual way. The task of philosophy is to track its return, to follow
the path of its deviation from itself and its return to itself as other
than it was. ‘In becoming an object for itself, spirit issues from, goes
out of, itself. But it does so in order to remain (in) itself, to return
to and become equal to itself ’ (E15/G12). It is against this context
that Derrida’s focus on the family should be considered. As soon as ‘it
posits itself as such’, the family also ‘ceases’ to be itself, says Derrida.
It ‘speaks and does not speak (. . . ) passing from Klang, if one likes, to
Sprache, from resonance to language (langue)’ (E8/G14). Something of
the family is lost in the self-positing that the family undergoes, and it
is this loss, which refuses to be, or cannot be, cashed out in terms of
dialectical logic, that is of concern to Derrida.
Love, for Hegel is a ‘monstrous contradiction’ (E18/G26). Love
characterizes the family, understood as ‘the immediate substantiality of
spirit’ (E16–17/G24; Derrida’s italics). In love, consciousness is formed
in and through the family; consciousness ‘is destined (Bestimmung) to
have self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity (. . . ) as
a member-participant (Mitgleid)’ (E17/G24). To love is to have self-
consciousness not as an independent being, but through the unity that
the family is. Derrida comments that considered solely as affect, love
would prevent the family from undergoing negation — and thus from
realizing its own proper essence as the people of a state. ‘But what
permits the family to constitute itself, to hold on to itself is also what
keeps it in naturalness and would prohibit it, by itself alone, to proceed
toward bourgeois society and the state. By itself alone, the affect would
prevent the family from denying itself as family, then of relieving itself ’
(E17/G24). Since the journey of Spirit Hegel tracks consists of the
constant and incessantly renewed overcoming of itself as nature, the
status of affect as natural presents a problem to be overcome. In so far
as love is ‘affect (Empfindung)’, says Derrida, it ‘still belongs to nature’
(E17/G24), and as such its value will always be limited for Hegel.
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 205
The general meaning of love, Hegel tells us, is ‘the consciousness of
my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my
self-consciousness as the renunciation of [Aufgebung, the dispossession
of] my being-for-self and through knowing myself [Mich-Wissen] as the
unity of myself with another and the other with me’ (E17/G24–5).
Even as he specifies love as self-renunciation, as the renunciation of
being-for-self, Hegel already signals how the family will pass beyond
itself into the rationality of the state, where unity takes the form
not of familial love but the form of law, where ‘we are conscious
of unity as law’ (E18/G25). There are two moments of love. In stark
contrast to the dialectic of the master–slave relation, where establishing
independence is precisely what is at stake, in the first moment of love
‘I do not wish to be (. . . ) independent’, while in the second moment
‘I attain myself in another person’ (E18/G25). ‘I count for what (. . . )
the other finds in me. I am only as much as I count for something (ich
gelte)’ (E18/G25), and the same is true for the other.
This account of the emergence of self-consciousness in the family
differs, then, in several crucial ways from the standard account of how
Hegelian self-consciousness is constituted in the master–slave dialectic.
The encounter that issues in mastery or slavery is one in which
two free and independent consciousnesses confront one another in
order to prove their independence, whereas, in love, I give up any
claim to independence. Unlike the master–slave relation, it is not
recognition (Anerkennung) as such that is at stake in love; rather, I
count (ich gelte) for the other. There is no risk of life in counting
for the other, as there is in the encounter that issues in mastery and
slavery, no struggle, no conflict, no war, no violence. Love is pacific, a
movement of renunciation, in which I renounce my independence.
Although Derrida does not here explicitly draw attention to these
divergences concerning independence, recognition and struggle, they
inform and guide his discussion in Glas. His initial focus is on the
contradictory character of love, that is, on how love fares in relation
to the architectonics of the system as a whole, on whether it is capable
of sustaining a meaning that can be ultimately cashed out in terms of
absolute knowledge. One might say that, in so far as the path to this
culminating point privileges logic, the die is cast against love — at least
familial love — from the beginning.
Love is contradictory because it is resistant to intellect, to
understanding (Verstand). The understanding ‘cannot resolve it’
(E18/G26). As Derrida says, it inhabits the ‘gap [écart] between
understanding and reason’ (E18/G25). Love, not understanding, both
206 Paragraph
produces contradiction and resolves it. Its resolution occurs as ethical
unity: ‘As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type’
(E18/G26). Derrida glosses this ethical unity (die sittliche Einigkeit) with
the words: ‘the appeasing [apaisée] concord’ (E18/G26). He thereby
signals, with the word ‘appeasing’, the approach of Antigone.
Refusing to be delayed by anything as prosaic as chronological
sequence, Derrida casts aside any fidelity to ‘temporal or narrative
unfolding’ (E5/G11) while also remaining agnostic with regard to
‘teleological necessity’, which he stipulates can be neither avoided nor
accepted. At the same time, perhaps taking account of the ‘threat’ of
teleology, which ‘cannot be reduced’ (E6/G12), he promises that he
is ‘going to try not to transform love and the contradiction of the
family affect into a privileged guiding thread [fil], verily into a telos’
(E19/G26).
Taking my cue from Derrida’s disdain for the serial temporality of
Hegel’s narrative, and equally from his abstention from imposing an
alternative telos to that of Hegel, my intervention is premised on an
abiding obsession with Antigone, the Sophoclean figure marshalled
by Hegel to encapsulate the law of the family and the law of the
divine. Antigone, who comes from a mythical Thebes, and whose
story is implicated in a riddle, in the Sophoclean ‘hieroglyphics’
(A645) of a sphinx, half beast, half woman; Antigone, embedded,
buried, embalmed in the family by Hegel. Approaching indirectly
the initial question I posed regarding the relationship between the
master–slave dialectic and sexual difference, Derrida asks about the
peaceful recognition that Hegel says occurs between Polynices as
brother and Antigone as sister, a recognition without conflict, without
a struggle and without desire: ‘Is this possible? Does it contradict
the whole system?’ (E149/G169).6 Derrida has prepared for such a
question by drawing attention to the monstrous contradiction that
Hegel says love is.
What does Antigone have to do with the family? Everything, is
Hegel’s answer. Antigone is dedicated to the family, never allowed to
leave the family. Her immobility in the family, the way it enchains
and inhibits her, fascinates Derrida (see E151/G171, E166/G187).
Destined to remain where she is, Antigone’s overcoming is notable
for its lack of transformation. Whereas the brother overcomes the
naturalness of sexual difference by leaving the family, overcoming
for the sister or the wife consists precisely in remaining in the
family (see E167/G188–89). In stark contrast to the overriding
dynamism of Hegel’s speculative, dialectical philosophy, the figure of
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 207
Antigone stands out as peculiarly static, Derrida emphasizes. She is
the remnant, the remains, that which resists being swallowed up by the
sublation (Aufhebung) which is the hallmark of Spirit’s relentless onward
progression through dialectical thinking. She is a residue of the system
she facilitates and enables, but by which she is left behind. ‘Supporting
it from outside’, as excluded, she ‘organizes the ground to which [she]
does not belong’ (E166/G187).
How does Antigone get stuck, immovable, immobilized? Antigone,
says Derrida, in a formulation that acknowledges both fixity and
change, ‘never becomes citizen, or wife, or mother. Dead before
being married, she fixes, grasps, transfixes, transfigures herself in this
character of eternal sister taking away with her womanly, wifely desire’
(E150/G169). Antigone will never become a citizen — not for Hegel,
and not for the Greeks. Moreover, not only does her sex exclude her
from the political but she becomes neither wife nor mother; she never
marries, the very thing, the only thing, for which, as a woman, she is
destined in Hegel’s eyes: marriage is the form that a girl’s love ‘shall
take’ (PR263). Antigone never submits to the moral imperative of
marriage. Consequently, according to the Philosophy of Right, she never
makes the transition from Moralität (morality) to Sittlichkeit (ethical life)
since ‘the ethical and the political are reached only on condition of one
being married’ (E192/G216).
We therefore, says Hegel, have a duty to marry (PR111). Whereas
a man ‘has a field for ethical activity outside the family’ (PR263),
there is no such field other than the family for a woman. ‘A girl is
destined in essence for the marriage tie and for that only’ (PR263).
Quoting from Hegel’s Aesthetics, Derrida comments that Hegel finds
Antigone ‘very appeasing’ (E150/G169). Hegel’s observation occurs
after he has provided a gloss on Antigone that Derrida describes as
distinctively “‘Hegelian”’ (E150/G170). In effect, Derrida reads the
relation between Antigone and Creon as a master–slave relation, by
highlighting Hegel’s references to ‘war’, ‘carnage’, ‘fighting,’ ‘injury’
and ‘struggle’ — this is a struggle in which Antigone dies but in which
‘Creon too is punished by the voluntary deaths of his son and his
wife’ (E150–51/G170–71). A struggle to the death, then? A struggle
in which Antigone capitulates to Creon’s mastery? In Sophocles’ text,
although neither Derrida nor Hegel acknowledge this, in the contest
of words between Antigone and Creon, and between Haemon and
Creon, the question of who is slave and who is master is constantly
reiterated, and thoroughly tied to the question of who is man and
who is woman.
208 Paragraph
One might object that since Creon does not risk his life, the risk
of death in the case of Antigone and Creon is not reciprocal, and thus
unlike the master–slave dialectic. Yet for Hegel, as representatives of
Sittlichkeit, Creon and Antigone are equal to one another, and it is
uncertain whether Creon’s dominance in the form of his kingship can
survive the death of his family, given his dejection at the end of the
play. Creon’s commitment to punish Antigone for violating the law of
the community condemns him to the living death of one who loses all
that is dear to him when both Eurydice and Haemon take their own
lives.
To be sure, Creon prevails while Antigone dies, though she dies
by her own hand. In this respect it is perhaps not coincidental that
Derrida emphasizes the salience of suicide to the master–slave relation.
The struggle between Antigone and Creon, as Hegel explicates it in
the Aesthetics, ends in precisely the dénouement in which the Hegel
of the Phenomenology professes to be supremely uninterested, since
if a slave capitulates to death, there is nothing to drive forward the
dialectic, nothing more to be said: death ‘does away with the truth
which was supposed to issue from it (. . . ). Death certainly shows that
each staked his life and held it of no account, both in himself and in the
other; but that is not for those who survived the struggle’ (PhS114).
‘Nothing should be able to survive Antigone’s death’, says Derrida,
which ‘should sound the absolute end of history’ (E166/G187).
Antigone functions as a script for separating Hegel’s struggle to the
death for recognition into two different scenarios. The recognition for
which each combatant risks life, and which occurs in the paradigmatic
master–slave scenario for the emergence of self-consciousness of the
Phenomenology, takes place here not between Antigone and Creon, but
between Antigone and Polynices. Antigone gains recognition through
her cementing of the familial bond to her brother in death. It is as if
the various elements of the master–slave dialectic were parcelled out,
distributed to various familial relationships. Recognition goes to the
brother–sister relation, and is registered in the language of love, while
the warlike struggle to the death is apportioned to the uncle–niece
relation.
One might say then that Derrida’s parcelling out of the various
elements of the master–slave scenario among members of the family is
consistent with his emphasis that consciousness cannot be approached
empirically outside the family. ‘Once the family is constituted, as a
power of consciousness, the struggle [to death for recognition] can
break out only between consciousnesses, and not between empiric
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 209
individuals. (. . . ) Consciousness does not relate to itself (. . . ) except as,
except in the family’ (E135–36/G153). The ‘struggle for recognition
(. . . ) is played out between bodies (. . . ) first of all the family’s’
(E137/G156), says Derrida.
In the Aesthetics Hegel finds this all very appeasing: ‘Of all the
masterpieces of the classical and the modern world — and I know
nearly all of them and you should and can — the Antigone seems to
me from this viewpoint to be the most magnificent (vortrefflichste)
and appeasing [apaisante] (befriedigendste) work of art’ (E150/G170).
Derrida comments on the unconventionality of the self-referential
language Hegel employs here, underlining the fact that when Hegel
says it ‘seems to me’ he is uncharacteristically speaking ‘in the first
person’ (E150/G170).
What is it that is so appeasing for Hegel? For Derrida, it is
above all the relation between brother and sister, one that ‘does not
know the horizon of war’, that is peaceful; it constitutes recognition,
yet is without desire. Derrida notes that this is a ‘unique example’
(E150/G170) of peaceful recognition, of recognition without conflict
or struggle, which points towards the question of how Antigone’s
recognition relates to that of mastery and slavery, without quite tipping
over into it. Derrida’s text incessantly circles around this question,
without posing it directly. His text is organized by this question, which
silently resonates throughout Glas, even if the question itself is never
posed as such. The question remains mute, yet it is made to resound,
reverberating throughout the family, whose fate Derrida makes his
explicit concern.
Let us remark that Derrida has prepared us for Hegel’s appeasement,
for noticing the strategic importance of what appeases Hegel, and
he has prepared us to put it in question. In the first few pages
of Glas, he writes that ‘teleology does not only or always have
the appeasing [apaisant] character one wants to give it. It can be
questioned as a lure or an effect, but its threat cannot be reduced’
(E6/G12). What does Derrida do with the appeasement Antigone
offers Hegel, and specifically her appeasing relation to her brother?
He designates it as inassimilable, and turns it into a pivot around
which he organizes his text, breaking off his commentary on the
Phenomenology of Spirit and the Aesthetics — and picking it up again after
his digression (E151–62/G170–83). Consistent with the irruption of
the first person into Hegel’s text, for ten pages or so Derrida suspends
his philosophical commentary in order to insert some biographical,
epistolary, personal considerations regarding Hegel’s sister. By inserting
210 Paragraph
these passages on Hegel’s life, and specifically on his love for his sister,
into his philosophical commentary, Derrida makes family life irrupt
into the abstractions of the philosopher. In choosing the family as his
guiding thread in Glas, Derrida acknowledges that his choice is ‘far
from (. . . ) innocent’, while conceding that it no doubt results from
‘some unconscious motivations’ (E5/G11). Derrida thereby aligns
himself with the feminine, the familial, with Antigone, with the life of
love to which Hegel confines women. At the same time, he signals the
insertion of the unconscious, Hegel’s unacknowledged desire, into the
rational, conscious concerns of the philosopher.
Antigone becomes the occasion for Derrida to insinuate into his
commentary on Hegel the suggestion that there was something of
the incestuous at stake in Hegel’s relation to his own sister, just as
some have suggested there is between Antigone and Polynices, whose
father Oedipus was, after all, as son of Jocasta, also Antigone’s brother.
Antigone becomes both the ‘inadmissible in the system’ (the kinship
system as much as the system of logic to which Hegel tries to subject
her), and that which plays ‘a fundamental role in the system, an abyssal
role’ (E151/G171).
As sister, Antigone is the ‘almost-transcendental’ (E151–62/G183),
or more specifically it is the ‘brother/sister relation’ that is almost
transcendental (E162/G183). She thus becomes the occasion for
Derrida to bring into question — ‘just a bit’ (E163/G184) — his own
remark that Hegel’s concept of the family provides a critique of Kant’s,
and a rebuttal of phenomenology’s, transcendental ego. In Hegel,
says Derrida, there is ‘no pure consciousness, no transcendental ego
into which the family kernel might be reduced. Here is situated the
principle of a critique of transcendental consciousness as the formal
I think (thinking is always said of a member of the family), but also
a critique of the concrete transcendental consciousness in the style of
Husserlian phenomenology’ (E135/G154). There is no transcendental
ego in Hegel; instead, there is consciousness as family. There is
Spirit understood as the ethics of family. There is the concreteness of
Sittlichkeit, of ethical life as it is played out in terms of the unconscious
law of family unity, not yet raised to the level of the conscious unity
of law in the state. Antigone functions not as I think, but as I love, an
I love that dedicates itself to upholding the institution of the family to
the point of denying the proper development of the family in relation
to the state. This is a love that unifies consciousness under the sign
of the feminine as the divine and familial law to the point of refusing
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 211
to accommodate the becoming-other of the family as the state, as the
people, as the citizens.
Sometimes Derrida’s strategy of dismantling Hegel’s corpus from
the inside out is uncomfortably close to reiterating Hegel’s impulse
to constrain Antigone, to confine her to the family, and even to
restrict her still more narrowly by making her adhere to the role of
the sister. Derrida emphasizes the uniqueness of the sister and brother
bond for Hegel with good textual reason. In the Phenomenology of
Spirit Hegel claims that the sister–brother relationship is privileged
above the other familial relationships he considers, the husband and
wife, and the parent–child bond. This is, as Derrida says, ‘because
the brother and sister do not receive from each other their for-self
and nevertheless constitute themselves as “free individualities”. These
for-self ’s [sic] recognize, without depending on, each other; they no
more desire each other than tear each other to pieces’ (E149/G168–9).
Without desire and without struggle, their relation is pacific. Derrida
comments that Hegel gets the irreplaceability of the brother for the
sister straight from the ‘mouth of Antigone’ (E165/G186).
There is no doubt, then, that Hegel emphasizes Antigone’s bond
with her brother Polynices, but there is also a countervailing force
in Hegel, one that assimilates Antigone to all women, and the sister
to all the other kinship roles available to women, to the wife, and to
the mother. In a passage in the Phenomenology in which Hegel seems to
elide sister and wife — which Derrida quotes, without commenting on
the elision — Hegel says the ‘sister becomes or the wife remains (bleibt)’
guardian of the household and divine law (E167/G189 [PhS274]).
The sister becomes or the wife remains — any generic female can
be slotted into the feminine role, it would seem. In the Philosophy
of Right, Hegel calls on the name of Antigone, who remains unwed
in Sophocles, in the context of his discussion of marriage, disciplining
her, perhaps, according to his imperative that all women must marry.
He thus eclipses the difference between Antigone as sister, and all the
other familial roles that women occupy when he invokes the name of
Antigone to stand for the ‘family piety’ that should imbue women’s
ethical consciousness in marriage (PR114–15).
Hegel subsumes Antigone into the family, and into the proper name
of Antigone he subsumes all the feminine roles: sister, mother, wife —
Antigone stands for them all. He identifies her name, the name of
a mythical, legendary character, the product of a male playwright,
with the ethical act par excellence of the family, with burial, with
the consecration of the dead. Antigone, who for Sophocles remains
212 Paragraph
forever barren, cut off in her prime, unwed, unsung, who has to sing
her own funeral dirge, which she does with aplomb, calling up Niobe,
who is turned to stone in her grief, not unlike the memnons of which
Hegel speaks in the Aesthetics, and which Derrida transforms into the
graphic motif of Glas. This is resonant of the sculptures of divinity
into which Hegel construes tragic playwrights such as Sophocles to
have breathed life, transforming the rigidity of these statues into ethical
fixity, sublating them into tragic figures (see A1195), whose ethical
substance is destined to play itself out in the subjective commitment
to the objective values of Sittlichkeit. In her femininity, however,
Antigone ‘does not attain to consciousness of [the ethical], or to the
objective existence of it, because the law of the Family is an implicit,
inner essence which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness’
(PhS274).
In Sophocles, Oedipus embodies the confusion between brother and
father, an irremediable confusion he confers upon his children/siblings.
Moreover, it is the substitutability of soldiers — whose hoplite phalanx
formations in war lent themselves to the indistinguishability of soldiers,
and whose anonymity in burial underlined the same — that Antigone
seeks to redress in her burial of Polynices, an honouring that treats
him as a singular member of the family, not as a representative of the
city. In Hegel’s narrative, Antigone is both sister of Polynices and the
metaphorical wife that all women must become in order to preserve
the normative balance that Hegel imposes on men and women via
marriage, a regulatory norm that infuses his philosophical system,
keeping women in the family while men rule the state.
It is not that Derrida fails altogether to acknowledge this assimilatory
impulse. It is rather a question of emphasis, or, as Derrida puts it in
Spurs, a question of style.7 Quoting Hegel, he says: ‘the feminine (das
Weibliche), as sister, has the highest presentiment of what is ethical
(des sittlichen Wesens).’ Derrida then goes on: ‘If she does not go
beyond presentiment, that is not in order to be sister, but in order
to remain feminine’ (E149/G169). As feminine, she lacks a concept of
the ethical: she can only have a presentiment of it. In underlining that
as feminine, Hegel attributes to Antigone not conceptual clarity, but
mere presentiment when it comes to ethics, Derrida acknowledges that
Hegel identifies Antigone with women as such, rather than specifying
her uniqueness as a sister. This is in keeping with Hegel’s view that
the ‘principle that underlies’ women’s development is a ‘rather vague
unity of feeling [Empfindung]’ rather than the ‘technical exertion’ of
men’s ‘thought’ (PR263–4).
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 213
For Hegel, a woman achieves self-consciousness, freedom and
recognition only through marriage, and marriage comes into its own,
becomes properly what it is, only through the child. The family passes
out of itself into the people, and it does so by assuring the rights of
its (male) citizens. The terms ‘child’ and ‘citizens’ in Hegel function
in a way that is rigorously determined by the law of sexual difference,
which assigns women to the private realm of the family, and men to
the public sphere of the state. It is the son who is educated, inherits
the family property, becomes a citizen endowed by the state with rights
and leaves the family in order to enter the public realm and go to war.
A very clear economy thus emerges, which organizes Hegel’s
assignation of Antigone to familial piety. Hegel aligns one sex with self-
diremption, free universality, power, activity, learning, labour, struggle
and fighting, and the other with unity, concretion, individuality,
feeling, passivity, subjectivity and family. The ‘one sex’, that is, man,
‘is mind in its self-diremption’ while the other sex, woman, is
‘mind maintaining itself in unity’. Man is ‘knowledge and volition
of free universality’, woman is ‘knowledge and volition in the form
of concrete individuality and feeling’; man is ‘powerful and active’,
woman ‘passive and subjective’; man has ‘his actual substantive life in
the state, in learning, and so forth, as well as in labour and struggle
with the external world and with himself so that it is only out of his
diremption that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself.
(. . . ) Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the
family’ (PR114). The power of thought is reserved for man, while
feeling/affect is the province of the woman.
It is precisely in failing to see what Antigone sees — that the state
cannot survive without the loyalty of the family — that Creon fails
to be the world-historical figure Antigone is. Antigone might be
the ‘prophet’ of her epoch, as Daniel Shannon puts it, the one who
propels Reason in the epochs that follow her appearance as embodying
Sittlichkeit, as her ‘inherent fault’ becomes ‘Original Sin’, but she will
never become a citizen. As such, her rights will never be protected.
The ‘reconciliation between king and citizen, between the spiritual
and temporal powers of the state’ will exclude her. She will not
become a ‘person’ in her own right. For the woman is ‘sublated’ into
the family. Thus the ‘reunification’ of the ‘human and divine sides of
Reason’ which Morality accomplishes will be a reunification in which
woman remains sublated in the family, in marriage, in the person of
her husband.8 ‘The family as a legal [rechtliche] entity (. . . ) must be
represented by the husband as its head’, says Hegel (PR116).
214 Paragraph
For Hegel, the immediacy that characterizes Sittlichkeit in the
ancient Greek world comes on to the historical scene in such a
way as to usher in the notion of individuality. This is a notion that
Hegel does not presuppose, but sees as developing out of a context
in which two consciousnesses, which he characterizes as feminine
(Antigone) and masculine (Creon), do nothing more than express their
ostensibly natural allegiances to the social customs in which they find
themselves embedded. The deeds of Antigone and Creon turn out
to constitute divergent and competing aspects of cultural value. In
committing themselves respectively to divine and human law through
their respective deeds, both Antigone (in burying her brother) and
Creon (in condemning to death anyone who defies his prohibition
of burying a traitor) open the laws they espouse to interrogation.
In acting, each consciousness lays bare the partiality of their ethical
attachments, thereby making it possible to see the divine and human
laws as reciprocally bound up with one another, a possibility that was
not available to either consciousness prior to the execution of the deed.
The trouble is that the process of coming to self-knowledge, which
is grounded in an encounter with another consciousness capable of
contesting what is taken for reality, is one that, on Hegel’s account, is
reserved for male subjectivity, since he considers women incapable of
the conceptual thinking in which coming to know oneself properly
consists (PR263–4). Even though for Hegel ‘the divine law has its
individualization (. . . ) in the woman’, the ‘union of man and woman’
constitutes the ‘active middle term of the whole’ through which ‘the
unconscious Spirit rises out of its unreality into actual existence, out
of a state in which it is unknowing and unconscious into the realm
of conscious Spirit’ (PR278). Not only are Hegel’s women marked
as incapable of cognizing Spirit’s journey to its end, but they are also
incapable of realizing their individuality or self-consciousness outside
the family.
When it comes to drawing the consequences that ensue, the
reciprocity with which family and state are invested gives way to a
hierarchy that subordinates the family (marked as feminine) to the state
(marked as masculine). While citizens have recourse to civil rights,
women are deprived of such recourse, a deprivation underwritten by
the conceptual incapacity with which Hegel invests women. In order
to protect that hierarchy, Hegel sees it as imperative to contain, manage
or control the threat that women’s potential divisiveness might assume
through the institution of marriage, in which men are invested with
legal status.
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 215
In the matter of the woman’s consciousness, as far as Derrida is
concerned, it is no longer a question of individual consciousness,
but rather a question of familial consciousness. Perhaps this accounts,
at least in part, for Derrida’s neglect of the passage in The System
of Ethics in which Hegel seems to effect an elision between the
husband–wife and master–slave relationships.9 Thus, Christopher J.
Arthur makes the following observation: ‘Hegel makes connections
between lordship and marriage (. . . ) to legitimate the subordination
of women.’10 Yet Derrida does not mention this conflation. Does
he see it? Does he fail to see it? No matter. He leaves it aside. His
pretext: he is following the thread of the family. Of all the texts
that treat of the master–slave relation, the only one to treat it within
the context of the family, Derrida tells us, is the Philosophy of Spirit
(E135/G153). Indeed, he specifically points out that the ‘philosophy
of spirit’ never states ‘anything at all about sexual difference between
spouses’ (E124–5/G143). This may be true, but The System of Ethics
clearly relates the relationship of master–slave to the husband and
wife. Not only does Derrida quote Hegel as saying that ‘lordship
and bondage are (. . . ) natural’ (E125/G143), but he understands this
relation as the ‘[patriarchal] family’ (E127/G145) in the ethical order.
Underlying his analysis is the inequality of the two in terms of their
‘power [Potenz] of life’. One ‘is caught up in difference, fixed, and
determined in some way in which the other is not, but free’, and the
one that is free is the ‘cause’ of the other, its ‘life and soul or spirit’
(E125/G143). One is the slave, and also the wife, over whom the
other, the free one, is master and husband.
In so far as women come to stand for the family as a whole, and in
so far as any individuality that might pertain to women is usurped
by their subsumption by the family, in Derrida’s analyses it makes
no sense to entertain the possibility of a struggle between individual
consciousnesses. In Derrida’s analysis, to all intents and purposes, there
are no individual consciousnesses, there are no women as such left:
there is just the family. Yet this leaves some rather crucial issues
unaddressed — not least if you happen to identify as a woman, as an
individual whose identity is not entirely bound up with the familial,
and also as a philosopher who reads Hegel and wants to think through
the implications of his philosophy for women. Derrida goes some way,
but not all the way, towards acknowledging this when he remarks
on the ‘near total silence on the woman, the daughter, the sister’ in
most of Hegel’s texts, and wonders: ‘what happens when that silence
is broken, for example in the Phenomenology?’ (E93/G108). He also
216 Paragraph
acknowledges that the family is embedded in racialized connotations,
saying for example that Geschlechtsverhältnis not only means sexual
relationship but ‘also designates the relationship of genus, species, or
race (family, lineage) or the sex relationship as feminine or masculine
gender (Geschlecht)’ (E110/G126). Or, ‘The eidos, the general form
of philosophy, is properly familial and produces itself as oikos: home,
habitation, apartment, room, residence, tomb [tombeau], hive, assets
[avoir], family, race, and so on’ (E134/G152).
The name Antigone tends to conjure up for Hegel a singularly
ahistorical image of women in general, woman as sister, mother, wife
all rolled into one, as femininity itself. It hardly seems to matter which
familial role one specifies, since women’s role is entirely subsumed by
the family for Hegel. He sees the burial of familial members, which
recognizes them as belonging to human community understood as
‘consanguinity’ (PG279), as the definitive ethical act of the family, with
which he associates femininity. The deed of honouring the dead is the
ethical act per se for the family, and thus for women. In the deed of
burial, the woman gathers up all the fragments of the individual and
consecrates them into a whole. This act, gathering together the entire
significance of the individual, ‘interrupt[s] the work of nature (. . . ) and
takes on itself the act of destruction’ in which death consists (PG271).
This duty of burial is thus the ‘perfect divine law’ (PG271), directed
towards the individual as a whole considered as a family member, not
the individual as citizen, whom the universal will concerns. The act
of burial distinguishes humans from animals in offering recognition of
them as members of a familial community. The recognition Antigone
offers Polynices acknowledges what he is, irrespective of what he
might have done.
Figuratively, how should Antigone’s subsumption by, or embodi-
ment as, the family be read? Can the Hegelian family be accessed
outside, beyond, without this apparently all-encompassing figure of
femininity, this earthly mother of all things familial, this feminine
figure with all but divine status in Hegel’s eyes? Hegel adores Antigone.
He kneels before her. He keeps her safely inside the tomb of his
veneration. Thus ensconced, Antigone is led by Hegel by the hand;
he leads her through the ages, sanctifying her. She is almost a saint.
Saint Antigone. He practically genuflects in her present absence. He
comes to contain her in his system, as family.
Is there any approach to the family without passing through
Antigone? For that matter, we could turn the question around. There
is a principle of general equivalence at stake: it is a matter of currency,
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 217
commodification, of levelling out the values of all things marked as
feminine. If Antigone is reduced to the wife, and comes to stand
for women in general, can we say that all wives, all women become
Antigone? Is there any approach to women outside of Antigone,
without passing through this trope that is Antigone in Hegel, without
passing through the eye of her needle, the storm that Hegel names
Antigone? I am not sure there is. No matter if Sophocles’ Antigone
never married, except on her deathbed, symbolically, to her brother.
So Antigone dies. The wife, the woman dies. All the women are dead.
But Antigone’s spirit lives on. She dies prematurely in Hegel’s narrative.
Just like Sophocles’ heroine. She was only seventeen, or so. Just a baby
really, in the lifespan of Geist.
Let me return in conclusion to the questions I posed at the
beginning about the gendering of self-consciousness. Given women’s
alleged incapacity for conceptual thinking, it would seem that the
‘we’ of Hegel’s observing consciousness, to which Patchen Markell
refers as Hegel’s diagnostic voice, must be masculine through and
through.11 Given that Hegel’s woman, figured as Antigone, never
leaves the family, never becomes a person in her own right, has her
rights represented for her by her husband in the marriage she is obliged
to undertake in order for love to take its proper form, it seems clear
that woman is indeed sublated into the family.
Hegel’s dialectical machine functions as the perfect mechanism
for regulating Antigone’s waywardness. The mythological, literary,
Sophoclean Antigone does not marry, but Hegel marries her off
anyway, by making her stand in for the wife in the Philosophy of Right.
At one and the same time he submits her to her duty as a woman
and inculcates her into his system. He makes her stand for the family,
and nothing else. He allows her to be ethical only in so far as she has
her ethical end in the unity that the family is. Hegel acknowledges
that recognition takes place within the family, but this recognition is
registered as love, not through struggle, consisting not in the struggle to
assert independence by risking life, but in giving up independence in
order to count for the other. Yet in so far as this love remains subjective,
it must be transmuted into marriage as ‘ethico-legal (rechtlich sittliche)
love’ which ‘eliminates from marriage the transient, fickle, and purely
subjective aspects of love’ (PR262). Hegelian marriage firmly installs
the husband as its active representative.
Antigone proves to be such a consummate vehicle for Hegel’s
disciplining because she has already engaged in a struggle with
Creon — and lost. She has already capitulated. She is already dead.
218 Paragraph
She can no longer answer back. Derrida gives voice to Antigone as
she reverberates throughout the Hegelian corpus, creating an echo
chamber of resonances that bounce off the phallic columns of Glas. He
sounds out the language in which she speaks, the truncated, familial
language of love, drawing attention to the unintelligibility of this voice
for Hegel’s system of logic, which is ruled by the intellectual, rational,
cashing out of contradiction. Familial love, dedicated to the family
in and for itself, on its own terms is a contradiction that refuses the
resolution of logic. It is a contradiction, Derrida shows, that the whole
Hegelian system assumes, the condition without which the system
would not be what it is, but which resists incorporation into it as such,
remaining forever outside the categories of logic — until it is tamed by
marriage. Derrida ‘dismantle[s]’ (E17/G24) Hegel’s system from the
inside out, and he makes Antigone into its sticking point.
In this sense Derrida’s reading, insisting as it does on tracking the
development of the family, delegitimizes the question we have assumed
to be a legitimate feminist question, the question of whether Hegelian
self-consciousness can be other than masculine, or, more specifically, as
Sarah Kofman puts it, ‘masculine man’.12 At least it refuses the terms of
the question, since the question of whether there might be a feminine
consciousness only makes sense in Hegelian terms as a question about
consciousness as family.
Yet, as always with Derrida, things are never as simple as they might
first appear. Even in the silences or mute spaces, even the gaps in
Derrida’s discourse speak so much more eloquently than most of those
who write in the name of philosophy, and who do so unequivocally
in the guise of masculine men.13

NOTES
1 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981). Hereafter cited in the text preceded by PhS.
2 Jacques Derrida, Glas, translated by John P. Leavey and Richard Rand
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974).
These editions will hereafter be cited in the text preceded by E and G
respectively.
3 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan
Bloom, translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1986).
 Antigone in Hegel and Derrida 219
4 This is an ‘Addition’ to paragraph 166 of the Philosophy of Right, translated by
T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Hereafter cited in the
text preceded by PR.
5 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, translated by T.M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), II, 643. Hereafter cited in the text preceded
by ‘A’.
6 Derrida follows in the French tradition influenced by Kojève’s reading
of Hegel in thus appearing to assume that the paradigmatic role that
the master–slave dialectic plays for the emergence of self-consciousness
through recognition provides the decisive context for understanding Hegelian
recognition. Critics such as Robert R. Williams dispute that the master–slave
dialectic has the determining significance for Hegel’s concept of recognition
that Kojève gives it. See Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997).
7 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Eperons. Les styles de Nietzsche,
translated by Barbara Harlow (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1979).
8 See Daniel E. Shannon’s commentary in Hegel: Spirit, Chapter Six of Hegel’s
Phenomenology, translated by Hegel Translation Group (Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, 2001), 164–72.
9 G.W.F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part
III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), translated by H.S. Harris
and T.M. Knox (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 125–7.
10 C. J. Arthur, ‘Hegel as Lord and Master’ in Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy:
A Radical Philosophy Reader, edited by S. Sayers and P. Osborne (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 27–45; 38.
11 Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
12 Sarah Kofman, ‘Ça cloche’ in Jacques Derrida: Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers, vol. II, edited by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 45.
13 Although I did not have space here for a more extended discussion of
slavery in relation to Antigone, I have written about it elsewhere. See
my Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2011). I would like to thank Simon Morgan
Wortham for inviting me to contribute this essay, Mairéad Hanrahan and
Michael Syrotinski for their editorial work, and the participants of the LGS
Summer Academy on Glas, especially Etienne Balibar, Andrew Benjamin and
Catherine Malabou whose contributions and questions at the seminar inform
the preceding essay.
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