The Phoenician Women, Euripides’ peculiar retelling and refashioning of the Theban myth, offers a portrait of Antigone before she becomes the actor we mostly know today from Sophocles’ play. In this under-studied Greek tragedy, Euripides portrays the political and epistemological dissolution that allows for Antigone’s appearance in public. Whereas Sophocles’ Antigone appears on stage ready to confront Creon with her appeal to the universal unwritten laws of the gods and later dissolves into the female lamenting a lost womanhood, Euripides’ Antigone (...) experiences the opposite journey, thereby offering insights into the conditions that allow for her exposure in the political arena. A speech by Eteocles at the center of the play questions the existence of absolutes, calls injustice beautiful, and opens the door for Antigone’s entrance into the public sphere. With this speech Eteocles challenges us to consider the conditions of political openness in the modern age. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on the mutually implicated structures of tragedy and self-formation found in Hegel’s use of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology. By emphasizing the apparent distinction between particular and universal in Hegel’s reading of the tragedies in Antigone, I propose that a tragedy of action (which particularizes a universal) is inescapable for subjectivity understood as socially constituted and always already socially engaged. I consider universal/particular relations in three communities: Hegel’s Greek polis, his community of conscience, and my (...) reading of certain feminist communities. The position I propose establishes a ground from which to approach subjects, and implies that all subjects may be understood as the result of relations embodying potential tragedy. This speaks to contemporary concerns about marginalization, identity articulation, and relations of recognition. (shrink)

: The slogan "the personal is political" captures the distinctive challenge to the public-private divide posed by contemporary feminists. As such, feminist activism is not necessarily congruent with civic engagement, which is predicated on the paradoxical need to both bridge and sustain the public-private divide. Lee argues that rather than subverting the divide, the politics of the personal offers an alternative understanding of civic engagement that aims to reinstate individuals' dignity and agency.

The slogan “the personal is political” captures the distinctive challenge to the public-private divide posed by contemporary feminists. As such, feminist activism is not necessarily congruent with civic engagement, which is predicated on the paradoxical need to both bridge and sustain the public-private divide. Lee argues that rather than subverting the divide, the politics of the personal offers an alternative understanding of civic engagement that aims to reinstate individuals’ dignity and agency.

The slogan “the personal is political” captures the distinctive challenge to the public-private divide posed by contemporary feminists. As such, feminist activism is not necessarily congruent with civic engagement, which is predicated on the paradoxical need to both bridge and sustain the public-private divide. Lee argues that rather than subverting the divide, the politics of the personal offers an alternative understanding of civic engagement that aims to reinstate individuals’ dignity and agency.

Isaiah Berlin viewed value conflict as tragic, as it requires the sacrifice of some values for others. It is a mark of maturity, he thought, to accept this tragic truth. This view raises certain conceptual problems that can be attributed to Berlin’s subtle departures from the German authors (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) who originated the doctrine of tragic maturity—figures who had, in turn, transformed the earlier idea that enlightenment is a natural and morally neutral process of maturation. Kant moralized the (...) notion of enlightened maturation by portraying it as contingent on our courage to bring it about, such that we are responsible if we remain immature. This theory of maturity rested on the idea, which would have been uncongenial to Berlin, that we are intelligible creatures inhabiting the noumenal realm, duty bound to exercise moral freedom, even though this duty surpasses our ability to carry it out, as we also inhabit the phenomenal realm, where our natural inclinations tend to make us resist laboring to fulfill our duties. However, according to Kant, the metaphysical limitations we face as individuals can be transcended to an extent, allowing us to make moral progress as a species—so long as we do not lazily persist in our immaturity. Schelling built upon Kant’s notion of freedom to bring out the tragic and heroic dimension of individual moral life, where the tragedy is our doomed but noble struggle to exert moral freedom in a world of natural necessity. Hegel turned these metaphysical notions in a more recognizably Berlinian direction by extending Schelling’s account of tragic conflict to conflicts of values. But he identified the ultimate tragic hero as an ethical totality that enacts eternal justice by reconciling such conflicts, while Berlin attempted to repudiate both the notion of a historical totality and the possibility of reconciliation on empirical grounds, even though these are metaphysical claims. Thus, Berlin asserted the absolute, trans-historical necessity of tragic value conflict, while the evidence for this assertion was merely his personal conviction that in his particular time and place, specific values were, as a matter of empirical fact, tragically irreconcilable. In this manner he illicitly portrayed Cold War value pluralists (such as himself) as courageously accepting the tragic inevitability of value conflict, while Marxists, the legatees of Hegel and thus German Idealism, immaturely shrank from this reality by embracing the fantasy of total reconciliation. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the philosophical underpinnings of the human-animal distinction among political theorists, suggesting a possible sea change in how relationships between animals and humans are understood. Yet despite this interest, Aristotle’s famous dicta that “man is a political animal” and that only “beasts and gods” might live without politics persist as the best-known statements on humans and animals and how they relate politically. This essay draws on Aristotle’s biological writings in order (...) to qualify these statements, outlining two opposing threads in Aristotle’s thought: one where humans are seen to be similar to other political animals and hence capable of sharing in political community, and the second where humans are seen to be unlike other animals by virtue of their relation with the divine. I argue that the problems that inform Aristotle’s way of understanding the similarities and differences between humans and animals and between members of.. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate the tyrannical similarity between Antigone and Creon through Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. As Arendt claimed, tyranny firstly signals the end of the political through which men can share their natality. The very meaning of tyranny is the domination by absoluteness that ends deliberation among mortal beings. Antigone only focuses on the divine law, which is seen as absolute righteousness that precedes the law of the city, and so, she tends to ignore any (...) other option on rightfulness. This article aims to show that not only Creon but also Antigone can be regarded as a tyrant, since Antigone tends to sublime her dedication to an infallible justice, causing her to deny any other claim on justice. (shrink)