Hegel"s primary concern in his discussion of Antigone of the Phenomenology of Spirit is the ethical order(Sittlichkeit) of the ancient Greek society. It is, according to Hegel, divided and balanced between two kinds of laws and spheres, i.e., the human and the divine law, the polis and the family, and man and woman. While the human law is related to the state which only man belongs to, the divine law belongs to the family which woman resides in and guards. For Hegel, these two laws and spheres are brought into its highest ethicality in the ‘pure’ brother-sister relation. And Antigone’s act of burial is portrayed as representing the supreme ethical act for family members. Both Derrida and Irigaray reread and deconstruct Hegel’s Antigone and Hegelian woman as “the eternal irony of the community,” mainly concentrating on the issues of sexual difference in this utopian brother-sister relation and the divided gender roles allotted to each sex. Derrida in his deconstructive reading sexualizes the Hegelian asexual relation between brother and sister, while Irigaray denounces Hegel’s Antigone as a mirror of the self-same, describing it the “Hegelian dream” to expect such a utopian balance between brother and sister. This paper examines this on-going philosophical debate on Antigone, particularly focusing on Hegel, Derrida, and Irigaray.
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