Gregor Moder, Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubjana

“Hegel’s Antigone between Historicity and Subjectivity”

Hegel treated the myth of Antigone not as material for a particular work of art, but as a direct expression of the Greek world, as the shape of the world spirit in the Greek antiquity. If it were possible to capture the entirety of the Greek epoch in all its political, ethical and metaphysical dimensions in a single, finite image, it would very much be the image of Antigone. The principal point of Hegel’s account is that the myth of Antigone encompasses not only the complex paradoxical totality of its world, but also the fact that this paradoxicality could only be resolved through the downfall of said whole and the advent of a new age, an age whose fundamental expressions could no longer be reduced to the expressions of the old regime. So, even though reading Antigone cannot provide advice on how to act in our world today, it can help us understand what it actually means for a human era to end, how a human era can be considered a part of world history, how its demise propels historical change, and finally how expressions of the old world might nonetheless be used to shape a promise of something new. Moreover, a Hegelian account of Antigone intimates that a truly historical change in our world is possible only through transforming what it is that we call the world at all. Our task might not consist of preserving at least the barest remains of our modern civilized humanity but of bidding farewell to it. This is the crucial task for us who set out to read Hegel reading Antigone: is it possible to recognize our own era as already bygone? The claim of the paper is that it is precisely in the gesture of the farewell, articulated on the background of the difference between man and woman, that Antigone represents the historical subject of political change.

Gregor Moder is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He co-founded Aufhebung—International Hegelian Association, based in Ljubljana, and served as its first president (2014–2020). His works include Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern UP 2017), an edited volume on The Object of Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and most recently Antigone. An Essay on Hegel’s Political Philosophy (FDV 2023, in Slovenian, German translation forthcoming with Turia+Kant in 2024).