Hegel’s interpretation of Sophocles’ play Antigone is central to an understanding of woman’s role in the Hegelian system. Hegel is fascinated by this play and uses it in both the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right to demonstrate that familial ethical life is woman’s unique responsibility. Antigone is revealed as the paradigmatic figure of womanhood and family life in both the pagan and modern worlds although there are fundamental differences between these two worlds for Hegel. In order to situate the (...) interpretation of this play within its wider context I shall begin with a brief outline of the pagan world described in the Phenomenology. I will then consider the interpretation of this play within the analysis of the modern world in the Philosophy of Right. Throughout, the focus will be on woman’s role in Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

One of the founders of modern philosophical thought Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has gained the reputation of being one of the most abstruse and impenetrable of thinkers. This major biography of Hegel offers not only a complete account of the life, but also a perspicuous overview of the key philosophical concepts in Hegel's work in a style that will be accessible to professionals and non-professionals alike. Terry Pinkard situates Hegel firmly in the historical context of his times. The story of (...) that life is of an ambitious, powerful thinker living in a period of great tumult dominated by the figure of Napoleon. The Hegel who emerges from this account is a complex, fascinating figure of European modernity, who offers us a still compelling examination of that new world born out of the political, industrial, social, and scientific revolutions of his period. (shrink)

Hegel and Feminist Philosophy traces the legacy of Hegel in the work of thinkers such as de Beauvoir, Irigaray and Butler, and also in contemporary debates in ...

In Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit, Michael N. Forster advances an original reading of the work.

Three of Aristophanes' eleven extant comedies use the typical comic device of role reversal to imagine worlds in which women are "on top." Freed from the social constraints which keep them enclosed within the house and silent in the public realms of discourse and action, women are given a field and context on the comic stage. They issue forth to lay their plans, concoct their plots, and exercise their power over men.The Lysistrate and the Ecclesiazousae stage of the intrusion of (...) women into the public spaces of Athens, the Acropolis and Agora, respectively, as an intrusion into the political and economic life of the city. The Thesmophoriazousae, however, resituates the battle of the sexes in another domain, that of aesthetics, and, more precisely, that of theatre itself. Instead of the collective confrontation of men and women, the play directs the women's actions against a single male target, the tragic poet, Euripides.Froma I. Zeitlin, an associate professor of classics at Princeton University, is the author of several articles on Greek tragedy and on the ancient novel. Her monograph, Under the Sign of the Shield: Language, Structure, and the Son of Oedipus in Aeschylus' "Seven against Thebes," is forthcoming, and she is presently completing The Divided World: Gender and System in Aescylean Drama. (shrink)

A pivotal figure in critical theory and the modern/postmodern debates, G. W. F. Hegel is the subject of differing feminist critiques. Going beyond and behind Simone de Beauvoir's creative appropriation of Hegel in The Second Sex, the essays gathered together here think both with and against the grain of Hegel's dialectical theory through the lens of gender issues found in his philosophy. Some of the authors focus on prominent passages on woman and the feminine in Hegel's work, while others argue (...) that it is interpretations of the margins of his text that are most telling. Hegel articulates one of the central questions with which political feminists are concerned: how to conceptualize identity and difference. A point of contention among the authors is whether or not Hegel's speculative system, with its &"reconciliation&" of identity and difference, &"answers&" this question. Contributors include the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi, and the Canadian theoretician Mary O'Brien, along with Seyla Benhabib, Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, David Farrell Krell, Frances Olsen, Naomi Schor, Eric O. Clarke, Carole Pateman, Heidi M. Ravven, Alison L. Brown, and Shari Neller Starrett. Read together, the articles stress the transgressive nature of feminist theory as it challenges disciplinary boundaries; they are the articulation of the many different strategies and positions of the &"vigorous debate&" that defines feminist theory today. (shrink)

The celebrated author of _Gender Trouble_ here redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation does nothing less than reconceptualize the incest taboo in relation to kinship -- and open up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's _Oedipus,_ has long been a feminist icon of defiance. But what has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she (...) opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. Moreover, Antigone shows how the constraints of normative kinship unfairly decide what will and will not be a livable life. Butler explores the meaning of Antigone, wondering what forms of kinship might have allowed her to live. Along the way, she considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray. How, she asks, would psychoanalysis have been different if it had taken Antigone -- the "postoedipal" subject -- rather than Oedipus as its point of departure? If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be. (shrink)