Volume 38, Issue 1/2, Fall/Spring 2006/2007
Shannon Hoff
Pages 77-99
Restoring Antigone to Ethical Life
Nature and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Many feminist and other interpreters of the Phenomenology of Spirit have misconstrued the motive behind Hegel’s representation of ethical life and his assessment of Antigone’s agency in its downfall. Upon developing an alternative interpretation, based on Hegel’s challenge of ethical life’s purportedly immediate reading of the meaning of sexual difference, this paper assesses several prominent feminist interpretations in its light. Hegel’s critique of the unstable and unsustainable relationship between nature and law, or sexual difference and legal identification, is shown to constitute a valuable resource for contemporary feminist and legal approaches to the politically volatile negotiation of nature and culture and the critique and elaboration of law.