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NEWS & LETTERS,
August-September 2002
Woman as Reason by Maya Jhansi
Hegel, Antigone and feminist defiance
Historically, at least since Simone de Beauvoir’s THE
SECOND SEX, women have questioned and many have rejected the importance of
Hegelian philosophy for feminism. While de Beauvoir took up the master/slave
dialectic in THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, many recent feminists are focusing on
Hegel’s reading of Sophocles’ play ANTIGONE to bring out Hegel’s attitude
to women and to assess whether Hegel has any relevance for feminism. In fact,
the most recent issue of OWL OF MINERVA: JOURNAL OF THE HEGEL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
is devoted to the subject of Hegel on Antigone, with some contributors like
Patricia J. Mills rejecting Hegelian philosophy as necessarily sexist, and
others like Philip Kain using Hegel’s view of Antigone to argue for the
possibility of a feminist appropriation of Hegel. Antigone is a beautiful play that has always garnered
interest from philosophers and revolutionaries. Hegel himself called it “one
of the most sublime and in every respect most excellent works of art”
(AESTHETICS). There is much in it and in Hegel’s reading of it that speaks to
the contemporary moment. The play foregrounds the contentious relations between
women and the state and between religion and the state, both of which are
important at a time when we face the redoubling of U.S. military hegemony, as
well as the unprecedented rise in violent religious fundamentalisms around the
world. In the play a brazen and brave woman, Antigone, defies
an ordinance issued by the King of Thebes, Creon, to let the slain body of
Antigone’s brother rot above ground without a proper burial because of his
betrayal of the city of Thebes. Antigone, citing her duties to her family and to
divine law, buries her brother (we assume, though we don’t see her doing so in
the play). When confronted by Creon, she refuses to feel guilty and to repent
for her actions, thereby inflaming the king, who rails: Show me a greater crime in all earth! Antigone’s spirit of defiance has been heralded by
feminists as exemplary of a revolutionary feminist ethos. Judith Butler, in her
book, ANTIGONE’S CLAIM: KINSHIP BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH (Columbia University
Press, 2000), writes that she returned to Antigone because “the legacy of
Antigone’s defiance appeared to be lost in the contemporary efforts to recast
political opposition as legal plaint and to seek the legitimacy of the state in
the espousal of feminist claims.” What Butler finds in her reading is that
Antigone destabilizes not just the state but the family she supposedly
represents, and through her public speech act disrupts the precarious balance of
gender identity. Butler, like other feminists, criticizes Hegel for not
recognizing Antigone’s transgressive radicality. Mills goes a step further in
arguing that Antigone represents Hegel’s neutralization of women’s desire.
“Hegel’s Antigone,” Mills writes, “is a response to the ‘problem’ of
female desire, and as such is an attempt to nullify the persistence of woman as
other as she challenges any simple notion of the rule of reason over passion”
(OWL OF MINERVA, 33:2, p. 217). To Mills, women remain forever the other of Hegel’s
speculative system, cast out by the dominating drive of the abstract and the
universal over the erotic and the sensual. Ironically, Mills recapitulates the
problem many have pointed out in Hegel, namely that in the (few) places where he
takes up women, he relegates them to the family, to emotion outside of reason,
to unreflecting subjectivity. Mills, in associating women solely with their
sensual drives, does the same. While it’s true that Hegel often had a reactionary
attitude to women, Mills fails to satisfactorily answer whether the journey of
consciousness, through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion to Absolute
Knowledge in THE PHENOMENOLOGY is necessarily a male journey. Hegel may have
thought so as a person, but is his PHILOSOPHY limited by his gender POLITICS? This is a real question. It would be wrong to dismiss
out of hand Hegel’s sexism, but it would be equally wrong to assume a complete
identity between Hegel’s politics and his philosophy. Marx himself addressed
this when he delved into Hegel to determine whether Hegel’s accommodation to
the Prussian state flowed necessarily from his philosophy. It’s true, as
Dunayevskaya showed in MARXISM AND FREEDOM, that Hegel dehumanized the Idea
instead of treating it as the dialectic of live men and women. He ended up
resorting to an external determinant--the State--to resolve the contradictions
of society. However, Marx still saw Hegel’s dialectic of negativity as the
movement of history, the algebra of revolutionary transformation, though in
alienated form. This concept, Dunayevskaya argued, transcends the limits of
Hegel’s political outlook. Patricia Mills scoffs at attempts to “read Hegel through the lens of Karl Marx,” but to those of us in search of emancipatory alternatives, it seems rather silly to just erase Marx’s appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic. It isn’t, after all, just about interpreting Hegel’s attitude to women in his reading of Antigone, but about our own search for an emancipatory meaning and direction for feminist defiance today. |
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