Hegel's Antigone as young-Hegel reconciliation
example · Hegel ·
retold in 4 talks
Žižek cites Hegel's reading of Antigone, Antigone neglects the state (Creon's domain), Creon neglects private divinities, each should recognise in the other their own oppressed truth, as an example of the 'young Hegel' model of reconciliation that mature Hegelian dialectics actually transcends.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 4
“antigone neglects the public aspect, the state, creon neglects this private divinities... each should recognize in the other the oppressed truth”
“Hegel returned to Antigone in his lessons of philosophy history, history of philosophy, phenomenology four five times always giving a different reading.”
“the Chorus... steps forward... arrests them both. Like you are ruining our country for your feudal conflicts, both Antigone and Creon are arrested and revolutionary committee... establishes people's democracy.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
dialectics
×1
Versöhnung (reconciliation)
×1
political suspension of the ethical
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Léon Brunschvicg1David Pearce1Craig Venter1Helmut Reichelt1John Kenneth Galbraith1Karl Löwith1Antigone2Vladimir Mayakovsky1
alongside works
Every retelling 4
Žižek cites Hegel's reading of Antigone, Antigone neglects the state (Creon's domain), Creon neglects private divinities, each should recognise in the other their own oppressed truth, as an example of the 'young Hegel' model of reconciliation that mature Hegelian dialectics actually transcends., illustrating pseudo-Hegelian reconciliation,young Hegel,dialectics
Hegel returned to Antigone repeatedly, in the Phenomenology, in the lectures on history of philosophy, and elsewhere, each time offering a different reading. Žižek uses this to defend his own practice of returning to the same problems, arguing this is what serious systematic philosophy looks like., illustrating systematic philosophy as repetition,Hegel's method
Žižek sketches three versions of Antigone: (1) the original, Creon wins; (2) Antigone wins but causes civil war and is told 'fuck you, your love destroyed the city'; (3) the Chorus stages a Jacobin coup, arrests both Antigone and Creon, and establishes a people's democracy, this last is what Žižek calls the genuinely Hegelian Versöhnung., illustrating Versöhnung,Hegel's Antigone,Jacobins,dialectical reconciliation
Žižek extends Kierkegaard's thought-experiment of a modern Antigone (who cannot share her destructive secret about Oedipus) into a postmodern-Stalinist Antigone who publicly denounces her father out of unconditional love, an act no one would understand as love, leaving her utterly alone., illustrating teleological suspension of the ethical,inhuman dimension of ethical acts,Stalinist confession