Hegel Reading Antigone

Hannes Charen
New School for Social Research, New York

Antigone reaches the purity of her crime. But the ethical plenitude is not accom-
plished in the crime. The crime is pure as crime because it reveals more purely
the split, the oppositions of laws that constitutes the ethical. But this constitution
is achieved only the moment its negativity, essential here, is totally relieved. No
doubt Antigone’s ‘recognition’ of the crime has worked towards that, it corre-
sponds indeed to the birth of ethical consciousness, to disposition (Gesinnung),
in the ethical sense. But Antigone remains in the middle of the ascent, at the
stage of ‘disposition’: in any case, caught between two laws, she disobeys. She
falls back down, entombs again. Impotent in her action, she returns to the chasm
(zugrunde), toward the hell and the subterranean world that is her fundamental
place, her own proper place. She is the figure of the fall (Untergang), of the
decline; she marches toward the bottom and entrains with her her whole family,
even including Haemon who awaits her and kills himself over her corpse. All
individuality ‘consumes’ itself in culpability. The victory of one law or the other
is always a catastrophe for Sittlichkeit, since it opens in Sittlichkeit a colpos in
which everything is regularly engulfed, each border of which, rather, rhythmi-
cally caves in.1
The ‘ought to be’ [das Sollen] is a result of that operation of thinking which
persists in dissociating the essential simultaneity of being and non-being, con-
signing them to a relation of succession: first being, then non-being, and so on
unto infinity.2
The identity which ought to be Absolute is incomplete.3
If the opposition that Antigone is said to reenter in the first quote—this exit
from the purity of her crime, her simultaneous recognition of civic law and
fidelity to the pure (sibling) relation4, to the (re)occupation of a position, back
onto one side of the split, is also the act of “dissociating the essential simulta-
neity of being and non-being” expressed by the second quote, what then can be
taken as the function of the ‘ought’—the core of rational as opposed to divine
morality5 in catastrophizing the integrity of Sittlichkeit? Following Derrida’s
text, the denial of the possibility of two brothers, Antigone rejecting one, the

Monatshefte, Vol. 103, No. 4, 2011 504

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© 2011 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Hegel Reading Antigone 505

community the other, the claim to singular universal law of rationality cannot
be held by two equal powers, by two logoi as Derrida puts it.6 So, on one hand
it is the inheritance of the community to carry on the destiny of the antinomy
of brotherhood, on the other, human law cannot preserve itself without the
function of the immediate site of ethical action, that of the divine law and in-
ner experience which by asserting the familial both destroys and preserves the
ethical order. But if, as Derrida points out, Antigone does indeed remain, and
remains in the middle, isn’t this because she initiates absolute ethical action
and as such, in her recognition, fails to take a position despite her initial call
to action (das Sollen) that breaches a legal prohibition (das Sollen)? Doesn’t
she assume at the same time, through this chasmatical return, her own omis-
sion from both the divine and ethical substances precisely through relieving
the impossible contradiction from negative judgment? Through her intuition
she attains the insight that reveals
the contradiction of those powers into which the substance divided itself and
their mutual downfall, as well as the contradiction between its knowledge of the
ethical character of its action, and what is in its own proper nature ethical, and
thus finds its own downfall . . . [T]he ethical substance has developed through
this process into actual self-consciousness; in other words, this particular self
has become the actuality of what it is in essence; but precisely in this develop-
ment the ethical order has been destroyed.7
Ethical plenitude can neither be accomplished in the crime nor, despite
Hegel’s initial assertion, in the sphere of the human law. What appears at the
outset as a catastrophe performed by Antigone on the true ethical substance re-
veals what was taken as the ethical to be nothing more than a moral imperative
that remains, through determinate reflection, on one side of the breach. While
Antigone in one sense preserves the breach, in another sense she remains out-
side of it. She refuses a position by both refusing to exchange her brother and
refusing to fight the consequences of the human law. She is not pitting the
divine substance against that of the human but upholding their unity, which
constitutes the Spirit that cannot be sundered into either sphere. Perhaps then
she is not only consumed in culpability but exits the economy of exchange
altogether and thereby escapes consumption (determination) by the reflec-
tive intellect. By withdrawing, she abandons the system rather than becoming
absorbed by it. The figure of Antigone disappears and since consciousness (of
the unconscious) appears to be favored, is what for Hegel, on an explicit level,
constitutes a higher stage of Sittlichkeit (than Oedipus reached for example),
the text as conscious expression also withdraws something, in a sense, buries
the unconscious in its presence. If the Phenomenology of Spirit does then favor
consciousness it is not without its own dialectical consequences. Antigone is
present in being repressed and returns, again, unscathed, bringing with her,
again, laws of unknown origin.
506 Hannes Charen

Family as Divine Substance

This moment which expresses the ethical sphere in its element of immediacy or
[simple] being, or which is an immediate consciousness of itself, both as essence
and as this particular self, in an ‘other’, i.e. as a natural ethical community—this
is the Family. The Family, as the unconscious, still inner Notion [of the ethical
order], stands opposed to its actual, self-conscious existence; as the element of
the nation’s actual existence, it stands opposed to the nation itself; as the imme-
diate being of ethical order, it stands over against that order which shapes and
maintains itself by working for the universal . . .8
It is in the sphere of the ethical community that the action of the familial,
the divine, immediate, Sittlichkeit consciously manifests itself, and in so do-
ing exposes the immediate relations of the family by rupturing them—the
dissolution of the family. The community, in this moment, acts as the only
true universal relationship for Spirit, it is the conscious site of ethical action
(Sittlichkeit). The natural relationship, that of mother / father / sister / brother etc.
constitutes the immediate, unconscious relation, the divine substance. The in-
scription of the individual into the community is facilitated by the individual
manifesting a relation to the family as a whole rather than through the un-
conscious, immediate relations. Only insofar as the individuals as such have
relations with others—in the sense that they can be in the community as in-
dividuals, can they become truly ethical members, and can the family as such
be represented in the human law. This is initiated through need and desire.9
Inherent in this notion is the function of the prohibition, the taboo of incest
which sustains the possibility of ethical action and prevents the family from
collapsing in on itself—in Hegelian terms, remaining absolutely for-itself,
subjective. This recalls Bataille’s understanding of potlach which functions by
contributing the actual members of the family, in their relations outside of the
family, to the community, which in turn constitutes the familial power (under
the paternal signature) within the community.10 The familial then facilitates
exchange. But doesn’t Antigone’s family (Oedipus’s family) in particular fail
this ethico-economic action while simultaneously slipping under it by occupy-
ing universal positions of (the highest) power within the community? This will
be taken up below.
The family in mediating immediate relation simultaneously rescues the
individual from ‘pure being’ (death).
Blood relationship supplements, then, the abstract natural process by adding to
it the movement of consciousness . . . Through this it comes about that the dead,
the universal being, becomes a being that has returned into itself, a being-for-
self, or, the powerless, simply isolated individual has been raised to universal
individuality.11
The duty then of kinship, Hegel goes on, is to add to this “irrationality”.
“The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonoring him by unconscious
Hegel Reading Antigone 507

appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and wed
the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable
individuality”12 The function of divine law now, in the domain of the ethi-
cal community, is for the blood relation to lift the individual member out of
the natural— ‘merely food for parasites’—in order to allow inscription into
the community. The initiation that the familial facilitates frees the individual
from immediate death through the recognition of their work; the testimony of
the name after death—remembrance and mourning. Recall that in Antigone’s
much cited second explanation for her action she appeals to the inexchange-
ability of her siblings,13 her defeated brother specifically as opposed to other
family members. What is left out of the communal and the divine substances,
what relation cannot be replaced, but rather is only displaced? The sibling rela-
tionship is then one that can neither be reduced to incestuous desire nor aban-
don desire altogether and what, furthermore, remains only in order to return,
failing to succumb to moral economy. The relation that Antigone assumes with
Polyneikes is one of both immediate familiarity and particular membership.
She both chooses and does not choose her brother. There is a suspension of
both the divine and the human laws.
The particular family, which Hegel uses to expose the development of
ethical action in the structure of the family relation, is, significantly, Oedipus’.
The community lives within the shadowed destiny of this failed family. It is the
Oedipal family which remains at the heart of both the communal and divine
substances. The trajectory of the family, for a family of incest, for the family
of Oedipus, results necessarily in a sort of vacuous extirpation, for they fail
to submit to the proper dissolution, they fall short of the expected relational
becoming of ethical individuality (to the family as substance) required to en-
ter the communal sphere and thus remain both totally within itself, “caving
in” and, paradoxically (or paralogically14), encompassing the community. Not
only is each member of the Oedipal family not restricted to one natural / divine
relation towards each other member but, because they never properly inscribed
themselves as individuals within the communal substance there are no (or
only) remains for the Oedipal family. Because of this, because nothing (all)
remains it becomes the family upon which all families rely on completing, on
fixing, on burying. For Hegel, the family, which is used to model the sunder-
ing of the divine and human substances, is precisely the family which fails
that separation and therefore, according to Hegel’s speculative gesture comes
to recognize in true ethical action the simultaneity of two laws, a simultaneity
that any “properly” moral family would fail.

War—Displacing Antinomies
For Hegel the rupture of war is a rupture of particular individuality, of natural
relation (the divine law) by the universal but it also appropriates the particular
508 Hannes Charen

into a new particular. It is essential to understand the antinomic structure of

war for Hegel. If we go back to Kant’s first critique, for example, we see that
neither side can be taken.15 These are the limits of reason, the limits of rational-
ity lie before the antinomic moments, before war. For Kant then, war would
be a forcing of reason outside of its proper domain. In war for Hegel the par-
ticular, the individual who is torn out of her familial context, is shown that two
sides exist but does not necessarily come to the speculative awareness through
which the prohibition of opposition is suspended. It implies though that it is
not a matter of the outcome of war but of sustaining it, of preventing one side
from dominating. It is in this sense that Hegel remains true to Kant.
But for Hegel this leads to a further split, both in the communal and in
the familial substances. Each, for Hegel can be taken in its manifestations of
individuality. For the community this is the government as the facilitator of
war. War functions not only as an assault on the family but, more precisely, as
a breach of the dialectical relation between the family and community, which
betrays their inherent unity. “In order not to let them become rooted and set in
this isolation, thereby breaking up the whole and letting the [communal] spirit
evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to their core by
war.”16 This is not simply community enacting violence on the family, it is the
communal spirit sundering itself and on one side embodying a singular guise
in the identity of the government which then uproots the embedded systems
that emerged from the unified relation of the two spheres, the community and
family. It appears that war then functions on two levels. First, it is an action
that pits two logoi, one unified nation against another external force (nation)
and second it disrupts the relation of the community and the family, which, in
the meantime, seems to have been (prematurely) realizing their unity. War is a
sundering force which seems only to abandon the familial and deteriorate the
communal. But the truth of war becomes the revelation of death as universal
master. “The community therefore possesses the truth and the confirmation
of its power in the essence of the Divine Law and in the realm of the nether-
world.”17 With this turn away from the divine, war simultaneously hands true
authority over to death, the immediate power of the divine. This comes about
only by the communal spirit exiting the relation to the divine by doubling
itself. It becomes in a sense a parasite of the relation that it still remains a part
of. The relation of war, on the level of nations, then, upholds the opposition of
two powers, but in a new realm, mutually recognizing the simultaneity of two
opposing truths. In the now internal level it acts as a rupture, which prohibits
the antinomic relation of the communal and divine laws from identity, bury-
ing them both. In this double act war only truly reaches its speculative gesture
when it finally confirms its power to the netherworld, and, like Antigone, goes
under and caves.
The two powers articulate two competing truths, two structures. But
what are we to make of the immediate, the divine law, and what is left over
Hegel Reading Antigone 509

of its inherent relation to the communal? Either war as such must fall into
abstraction for Hegel or we must admit of an excess, that (other opposition)
which war leaves behind. There is something excessive in the familial from the
standpoint of war. War cannot tolerate divine law. The prohibition (or absence)
of divine law carries with it the threat of war.18 It lies outside of the opposition
that war sustains. Wouldn’t it be then the mutual recognition of failure rather
than a fulfillment of synthetic unity? This articulates the complex paradox
of Aufhebung. The excess of itself, which it projects, does not disappear and
reappear, it remains and it haunts presence, yet it is already there, always im-
mediate and always becoming exterior to itself.

The Cunning of Reason and Kreon’s Prohibition

KREON: Must I rule this land for someone else, not myself?
HAIMON: There is no city that belongs to one man only.
KREON: Isn’t the city held to be his who rules?
HAIMON: You’d do well as the single ruler of some deserted place.19

If we understand Kreon’s prohibition on burial and mourning as an act which

prevents the end of war, which prolongs the state of war because it forbids the
divine law from returning to the family, then Haimon is in essence not dis-
obeying his father at all. War ends (according to Hegel) only when the divine
law is given back to the family (when the particular members return to a rela-
tion with the family as a whole and through this become ethical members of a
society). Haimon is both fulfilling and acknowledging his father’s command
all the more through his act of self-destruction, through rupturing and annihi-
lating the bonds of kinship, of the divine law. Isn’t this Kreon’s command, his
moral imperative? The familial remains are not returned and therefore they are
prevented, according to Hegel, from properly reentering (in an ethical relation,
Sittlichkeit), via the divine law, the realm of human law. Kreon’s real author-
ity (one he was unaware of ) over Haimon seems to have been obeyed all too
effectively. The universal moral imperative that Kreon seeks to enforce is the
law which prevents the divine substance from actualizing authority. It forces
the familial down, into the unconscious leaving only a self consumed, barren
land. Kreon becomes the ruler of an abandoned city, for the human law does
not allow the body to escape the parasites and natural forces that devour the
corpse.

Ludwig
In Glas Derrida cites a letter that mentions Hegel’s two sons, Karl and Im-
manuel. Hegel in these dispatches is considering the significance of the second
son’s name—the middle name that mediates in “friendship and philosophy.”20
510 Hannes Charen

Earlier in Derrida’s text another letter is quoted, that almost imperceptibly

moves through the name Ludwig.
‘. . . I learned . . . that you had showed a little more hope than when Roth left
of further upgrading the University of Erlangen this fall, and that you no longer
found yourself obliged to send Ludwig elsewhere, i.e., to Heidelberg.
‘Heidelberg however brings me to Fries and his Logic. Stein’s bookstore
knew nothing of a copy ordered for you but let on that it would receive a copy
in three weeks. I have since received one from another bookstore. But my feel-
ing in connection with it is one of sadness. I do not know whether as a married
man I am mellowing, but I feel sadness that in the name of philosophy such a
shallow man attains the honorable position he holds in the world, and that he
even permits himself to inject such scribblings with a tone of importance. On
such occasions one can become angry that there is no public voice to speak with
integrity on such matters, for certain circles and persons would greatly benefit
from it.’21
Immediately Hegel’s note turns from Ludwig to Heidelberg, to the both
unknown and missing book; Fries’ Logic (a work “devoid of spirit . . . the
most slovenly disconnected explanatory lecture hall twaddle.”22) Who is Lud-
wig here? Which Ludwig? “[C]alled Louis as a lad, at first embraced by his
father, later compelled to assume his mother’s maiden name, and ultimately
disowned: Ludwig Fischer, the bastard son of spirit.”23 Not only are there two
brothers but there is a third, an illegitimate brother, born to Hegel’s landlady
as he was finishing the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)—a repressed son in-
termittently occupying Hegel (and Derrida). It was not until 1817 though that
Ludwig, after Hegel’s belated insistence, joined the family. After this long
series of letters Derrida, never explicitly mentioning Ludwig, remarks: “Isn’t
there always an element excluded from the system that assures the system’s
space of possibility? . . . a transcategorical. . . .” “The system’s vomit.”24 Do
we acknowledge the third brother? If so what place would he occupy? If he is
associated with the familial, divine law, then would he have been ejected from
the Hegel family and denied the opportunity to represent the Hegel surname?
Because of this he can equally not be properly inscribed into the conscious
site of universal human law, at least not as a representative in the community
of Hegel’s family. So, there can be no relation to the family as a whole for
Ludwig, only perhaps a transrelation; he could not possibly represent the He-
gel family in the community even though he is brought back into its domain,
even though he is not and is an immediate member of the family. Hegel was
then contending with the excesses and secrets that are lost to, invisible to ei-
ther the familial or the communal substances. His own ambivalence towards
Ludwig and then his striking preoccupation with the name’s of his “proper” or
“legitimate” sons, the concern to properly synthesize them, which betrays the
possibility of their own interior, antinomic split, might simply be an attempt
to conceal the possibility that no matter what care or love he might possess
Hegel Reading Antigone 511

for Ludwig, there is simply no place for him, conscious or unconscious. What
happens then to the status of Ludwig, the first son of Hegel? What becomes
of the clean split into the familial and communal substances? The son who
arrives, who is brought into the circle of the family last is also the first son,
the one that preceded the family altogether and in a sense was immediately
inscribed into the community. It could be said, then, that the initiation of the
familial adventure for Spirit is precisely rooted in such a secret.
Hegel chose to bring Ludwig back into the family against the human
law, which forbids extra marital children. There were conditions, contigencies,
the choice already exited the given unconditional characterizing the natural
familial relationship. Isn’t it from this perspective, that it must be, from an
exception that the system can constitute itself, so that in effect the system itself
becomes the “transcategorical” (Derrida), perhaps the parasite which hangs
on, which circles in order to convey, in order to express, that which cannot, in
order to get outside of itself, in order to become a parasite of itself, in order?

Antigone
[T]he moment of the individual self, recognizing and being recognized, can here
assert its right, because it is linked to the equilibrium of the blood and is a rela-
tion devoid of desire. The loss of the brother is therefore irreparable to the sister
and her duty towards him is the highest.25

The sister, as feminine, both unconscious and aware, acts, in the sibling rela-
tion, as the intuitive and therefore speculative site of ethical action (Sittlich-
keit). Antigone not only ruptures the mere human law, which cannot sustain the
unconscious, but through exceeding the distribution of these two substances,
unifies them. Since it is only through the divine that the corpse of Polyneikes
can be returned to the community, it must become memorialized, that which
can be owed but no longer itself indebted. It must not remain a merely wasting
corpse, but become the entirety of its corpus as a human individuality in rela-
tion to both human and divine law and in that sense in between. The “bosom
of the earth”26 for Hegel then is not simply the site of unrestrained animal or
natural forces. It is precisely the return to the Idea itself. For Hegel, animal life
and natural forces are not formless. They are simply negating, when left un-
mediated by the divine law. When the community is exposed directly to them
it cannot survive because the community, value in the community, requires an
economy of exchange. The formless for Hegel describes instead, the gesture
of speculation.
To get a hold of transcendental intuition in its true formlessness it was neces-
sary to abstract from this character of subjectivity; speculation had to detach
this form from its subjective principle in order to raise this principle. Instead,
transcendental intuition as it pertains to philosophical reflection, and transcen-
512 Hannes Charen

dental intuiting as being neither subjective nor objective, still remain one and
the same.27
Hegel is referring here to Fichte’s identity philosophy, which he accuses of
failing to return to itself. For Hegel, Fichte remains within the limits of Kant-
ian critical philosophy. Fichte inadvertently reintroduces Kant’s inaccessible
noumena by asserting an infinite separation of the self from itself, as intrac-
table object. Not-I, the infinite untenability of the in-itself, enacting the error
of what Hegel deems the appropriation of intuition by the understanding, fails
to tolerate the conscious expression of difference—contradictory movements
into and out of consciousness. This gesture out of which his entire work pro-
poses to depart and into which it proposes to return is the impossible symmetry
of identity philosophy. Antigone’s power in the Phenomenology of Spirit lies
in her withdraw and return, as a facilitator of the return of the corpse but also
as a return to an alien text. “In love with the impossible.”28 The relation that
Hegel seeks to unravel, is accomplished in literature and remains outside the
system. Antigone is being read by Hegel, by the Phenomenology of Spirit—
one text reading another. It returns the system to the bosom of the earth. As a
figure Hegel can call on implicitly or explicitly, Antigone is a shadow that he
can withdraw and at times, forget. She returns suddenly, unchanged, from the
cave, anticipating the Oracle of the cult, a prophet of the future:
The further developed self which rises to become a being-for-self is master over
the pure ‘pathos’ of substance, over the objectivity of the Light of Sunrise, and
knows that simplicity of truth as essential being which does not have the form of
continuous existence through an alien speech, knows it as the sure and unwritten
law of the gods, a law that is ‘everlasting and no one knows whence it came.’29
Antigone is given. As a text and a figure Antigone is immediate. From outside
of the system Antigone already faced the ordeal which shapes her. Antigone
becomes the antinomy around which the system constructs itself.
This new notion, which Hegel calls the Thing Itself, plays a vital role in the
literary undertaking. No matter that it has so many different meanings; it is the
art which is above the work, the ideal that the work seeks to represent, the World
as it is sketched out in the work, the values at stake in the creative effort, the
authenticity of this effort . . .30
This is why Antigone is neither surpassed nor subsumed. She is already a
figure of speculation that is employed from time to time (von Zeit zu Zeit) to
catastrophize the lines of fracture that force thinking to take sides.31 She, like
Ludwig, haunts the borders that demarcate and define and repeatedly exposes
the ought (das Sollen) to will (das Wollen). The Phenomenology of Spirit reads
Antigone.
The failure that Derrida cites, the failure of Antigone to sustain Sittlich-
keit in its plenitude, is the failure of the system itself to contain it. As failure
then Antigone precisely accomplishes ethical plenitude.
Hegel Reading Antigone 513

Identity Which Ought to Be

The Absolute is not in its appearance, they are themselves opposites.32
What we have to show, then, is that reflection does not have a subordinate
place in the system, and that [on the contrary] the two standpoints, that of
speculation and that of reflection, are absolutely necessary and without union
at the center of the system.—In other words, Ego = Ego is the absolute prin-
ciple of speculation, but the system does not display this identity . . . The
essence of the ego and its positing do not coincide: Ego does not become
objective to itself.33
In expression the Absolute withdraws. The system is that which appears as
opposed to the Absolute. The system then requires, in order to avoid dogmatic
insularity, its own exterior. If it forgets the connection with what is not present
it falls into a bad infinity.
According to Hegel there is no speculative moment, rather it arrives in
every moment in different guises, abstracted and arrested, only to be glimpsed
when the oppositions of reflective understanding are both brought together
and suspended. It is not that the reflective intellect, that quasi-philosophical
gesture which limits itself at the point of opposition, is subordinate to specula-
tion; it is a necessary step within the speculative process always on the way
to philosophy, so long as it does not ossify in its own limit.34 For Hegel, An-
tigone remains significant. Oedipus’ family remains. Like Kant’s antinomies
the incestuous family lies fixed within its own impossible relation. It cannot
apprehend its own inner contradictions but is conscious of them and when left
alone, when subject to movement, attempts instead to pit itself against itself,
to split and project itself, to unravel and to parasitize itself. The husband is
then also the son to the wife (e.g. Oedipus and Jocasta), the daughter is also
the sister to the father (e.g. Antigone and Oedipus), and so on. Each relation is
antinomic, each relation is undecidable, but must be decided upon.35 The fam-
ily repeats itself with each relation and so the communal and divine substances
are irretrievable, inseparable and in a strange sense express (by exceeding)
their inherent unity.

Positions
Whereas the Absolute appears in art, taken in its true scope, more in the form of
absolute being, it appears more in speculation as begetting itself in its infinite
intuition . . . Both art and speculation are in their essence divine service—both
are living intuition of the absolute life and hence being at one with it.36
Spurned by history, literature plays a different game. If it is not really in the
world, working to make the world, this is because its lack of being (of intelli-
gible reality) causes it to refer to an existence that is still inhuman. Yes, it rec-
ognizes that this is so, that in its nature there is a strange slipping back and forth
between being and not being, presence and absence, reality and nonreality.37
514 Hannes Charen

In a sense the speculative is precisely what is invisible, what then does not
occur in the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is both as the prime mover and as
the absent upon its absence which allows the expressive becoming of Spirit.
In the introduction of the English translation (A. V. Miller) J. N. Findlay re-
marks, that as a mere ‘forepiece’ to the philosophical system it is meant to “be
dropped and discarded once the student, through deep immersion in its con-
tents, has advanced through confusions and misunderstanding to the properly
philosophical point of view.”38 This confusion is not only to be discarded but to
be performed. To undergo the transformative performance of thinking as both
concealing and containing the entirety, the reader is to bring forth a develop-
ment, a change occurs not only consciously but outside of the text—to the text,
unconsciously. The misunderstandings, the confusions at once revealing and
concealing philosophy cannot be dissociated from its texture. It is always only
what this can move into or out of, presenting itself only through reflection,
through withdrawing speculation, its own necessary suspension. The specula-
tive rather becomes present to itself, always left out of the process to observe
itself, to live its catastrophic reflections, not to become arrested in them.
Insofar as the ‘ought’ constitutes judgment, and as ‘ought’ is the limit
of the completion of the absolute, the absolute is prohibited from judging.
Judgment precludes speculation, but also constitutes an abstract quantum. The
system itself is the taking of positions. It is the movement through positions
ending at the (non)point where positions end. The system pits positions but
also works to contain them.
Speculation is outside of, but facilitates, the cycling, the circling of op-
positions that constitute the system. Speculation from the perspective of the
system is external and irrational. Yet, it is the suspension of the negative judg-
ment of reflection that propels the system; the suspension of the negative rela-
tion to opposition as such that allows movement and prevents a standstill in
Fichtean dogmatism. This is precisely Antigone’s role in the Phenomenology
of Spirit. The point at which she speculates is the point at which she with-
draws, and caving in brings along not only Ismene and Haemon, but leaves
Kreon as a ruler of only a wasteland, deserted by the divine, deserted by the
familial signature required for communal membership. Kreon is left only with
the vacuity of his own imperative. Antigone marks what the system cannot
sustain, the failure of the position, the failure of judgment. Antigone is too
much. She exceeds but she also returns to mark another excess, an external that
enters. She reminds the system of its judgment. The law she brings cannot be
understood, and only appears as law to that which can only judge. It appears
as an alien law, from where nobody knows. The law that is not law, cannot be
law, only speculation.
Finally in a modest gesture, one, not insignificantly, of literature, the
system ends and finally, in its plenitude, like Antigone, it can be discarded.
Hegel Reading Antigone 515

“[T]he two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and
the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne,
without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only
from the chalice of this realm of spirits
foams forth for Him his own infinitude.”39

1
Derrida, Jacques, Glas. New York: U. of Nebraska, 1990, 174.
2
Malabou, Catherine, The Future of Hegel. New York: Routledge, 2005, 121.
3
Hegel, G. W. F., The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy.
New York: SUNY UP, 1988. 115.
4
“The relationship in its unmixed form is found, however, in that between brother and
sister.” Hegel, G. W. F., Trans. A. V. Miller. Phenomenology of Spirit (Galaxy Books). New York:
Oxford UP, 1979. 274.
5
”Hence no imperatives hold for the divine will and in general for a holy will: the ‘ought’
[das Sollen] is out of place here, because volition [das Wollen] is of itself necessarily in accord
with the law.” Kant, Immanuel. Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 4:414.
An alternate translation reads, “The moral ‘ought’ is entirely out of place, here, since the willing
(is of itself necessarily in agreement with the law.” Kant, Immanuel. “Fundamental Principles of
the Metaphysics of Morals.” Kant’s Foundations of Ethics. Agora Pub, 1995. 4:414.
6
Derrida. Glas. 176
7
Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. 266.
8
Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. 268.
9
“[B]ecause the ethical principle is intrinsically universal, the ethical connection between
members of the Family is not that of feeling, or the relationship of love. . . . The acquisition
and maintenance of power and wealth is in part concerned only with needs and belongs to the
sphere of the appetite; in part, they become in their higher determination something that is only
mediated.” Ibid. 269.
10
Cf. Bataille, Georges, “The Gift of Rivalry: Potlach.” Accursed Share, Vol. 1. Consump-
tion. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
11
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 271.
12
Ibid. 271.
13
“For I would have never have assumed this burden, defying the citizens, if it had been
my children or my husband who had died and had been left to rot away out there. In deference
to what law do I say this?— were my husband dead, there could be another, and by that man,
another child, if one were lost. But since my mother and my father are hidden now in Hades,
no more brothers could ever be born . . .” Sophocles. Antigone, Trans: Reginald Gibbons, and
Charles Segal. (Greek Tragedy in New Translations). New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 95.
14
“. . . though single in all respects, has the appearance of an absolute unity of the condi-
tions of thought in general, thus stretching far beyond the limits of possible experience.” Kant,
Immanuel. ‘Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. F. Max Mueller.
London: The Macmillan Company, 1911. 327.
15
Kant, Immanuel, ‘The Antinomy of Pure Reason’ Critique of Pure Reason. Trans.
F. Max Mueller. London: The Macmillan Company, 1911. 328–378.
16
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 272.
17
Ibid. 273.
18
“They [other communities] rise up in hostility and destroy the community which has
dishonored and shattered its own power, the sacred claims of the family.” Hegel. Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit. 267.
19
Sophocles, Antigone, 85.
20
Derrida, Glas. 177.
21
Ibid. 160–161.
22
Ibid. 161.
516 Hannes Charen
23
Krell, David Farrell, Son of Spirit a Novel. Albany: SUNY UP, 1997. vii.
24
Derrida, Glas. 162.
25
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 275.
26
In order to raise the body above the work of parasites and forces of nature, which oth-
erwise remain superior by merely living or by force of negation, respectively, it must wed “the
blood relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality.” (Hegel.
Phenomenology of Spirit. 271.)
27
Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. 133.
28
Sophocles, Antigone, 57.
29
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 431.
30
Blanchot, Maurice, “Literature and the Right to Death.” Station Hill Blanchot Reader:
Fiction & Literary Essays. Barrytown, N.Y: Station Hill / Barrytown, Ltd., 1999. 366.
31
“For in its highest synthesis of the conscious and the non-conscious, speculation also
demands the nullification of consciousness itself. Reason thus drowns itself and its knowledge
and its reflection of the absolute identity, in its own abyss.” Hegel, G. W. F. The Difference Be-
tween Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. 103.
32
Ibid. 115.
33
Ibid. 123.
34
Cf. Ibid. 121.
35
Antigone for example chooses Polyneikes as her brother, while he is equally and just
as immediately, her uncle (as he is also the son of Jocasta, who is simultaneously Antigone’s
father’s mother). Her choice of Polyneikes (as her inexchangable brother), however, is no longer
a strictly immediate, unconscious relation and therefore radically ruptures the separation of the
divine and human substances.
36
Hegel, G. W. F. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philos-
ophy. 121.
37
Blanchot. “Literature and the Right to Death.” 394.
38
Hegel, G. W. F., and A. V. Miller. Findlay, J. N., “Foreword” to the Phenomenology of
Spirit (Galaxy Books). New York: Oxford UP, 1979. V.
39
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 493.
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