Antigone’s Liminality: Hegel’s Racial Purification of Tragedy and the Naturalization of Slavery

Abstract

The Sophoclean tragic cycle stands exemplary of Western culture in so many diverse ways, the exemplarity of which has been expounded by various philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary figures, some of whom—G. W. F. Hegel among them—have themselves founded schools of thought. Yet all too rarely have the exponents of Sophocles’ Oedipus or Antigone been willing or able to take on and think through the paradox that these literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic heroes were penned by an aristocratic author whose “leisure” time to conceive, write, and perform his exemplary tragedies was bought at the expense of a system of chattel slavery. The achievements of ancient Athenian society are glorified in a manner that encourages a certain evasion of our own implication in empires built on slavery and colonialism. to carrion birds but would have no such qualms in doing so had he been a slave rather than her brother.