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Greek antiquity incarnates for Hegel the ethical substance at the earliest stage of the dialectic of Spirit; it functions within the whole of the Phe-

nomenology as an idealized, antediluvian direct democracy against which all future manifestations of Spirit within European culture are to be compared. Hegel’s references to Antigone appear at the beginning of the large section on Spirit, prior to the discussion of the world of culture in which figures Hegel’s other literary reference, to Diderot’s Rameau’s

Nephew. If the Nephew’s nihilism serves as the emblem of the chaoti- cally unstable culture Hegel saw figured in the ancien régime, the for- gotten beauty of the ethical polis negatively reveals the extent of European culture’s loss of its unmediated moral certainties. For Hegel, Antigone articulates a tragic conflict between political and extrapolitical ethical norms which created conditions under which the instance of public authority was to be experienced as an imposition of an alien will. In this way Greek tragedy inaugurates the introduction of an underlying dishar- mony within the ethical substance which would go on to present, as I have suggested, a dimension of individuated interest at odds with the normative framework of the modern state.

In Hegel’s view, this process begins at the historical moment of the Athenian city-state when the ethical substance breaks off into two com- ponent parts: the public, general, masculine, human law of the collective civic will; and the private, familial, feminine, divine law of the dead. Human law is the law which is conscious of itself; it subsists explicitly in a universal form as the “known law” and “prevailing custom” provid- ing a normative framework for the everyday functioning of public life.4

Human law is a function of the conscious relation of each subject to the collective of citizens; it represents the spontaneous, unmediated identification of the (male) citizen with the will of the polis as a whole. In conflict with this generic feature of human law is the immediate sub- stance of divine law which, in its universal incarnation, substantiates itself in the form of the “natural ethical community” represented by the family (450). Embodied in the Penates, the household gods of the Athenians, the

family represents in Hegel’s analysis an unconscious or noncognitive mode of being which works to connect the individual citizen to an ances- tral community reaching beyond the earthly, pragmatic limitations of political discourse. In contrast to the immediate, but abstract, universal- ity of the political community, within which the citizen recognizes him- self as an entity formally equal to all others, the family embodies the citizen’s belonging to a concrete particularity which eludes the collec- tive interest, deforming and indeed perverting it. “As the immediate being of the ethical order,” writes Hegel, “[the Family] stands over against that order which shapes and maintains itself by working for the univer- sal; the Penates stand opposed to the universal Spirit” (450).

Each of Hegel’s two opposing laws works on its own behalf to real- ize its formative principle. The human law ensures that citizens will immediately identify with the collective interest of the polis, ensuring that they will receive not even an inkling of an interest which threatens to conflict with the general will. The divine law maintains the relation of each citizen to a family matrix within which he appears not simply as a function of the collective’s recognition of his public work, but as an essence worthy of respect merely by virtue of his intrinsic being. From the unified perspective of the ethical substance the two laws appear as a harmonious, mutually complementary whole. “Each of the opposites in which the ethical substance exists,” writes Hegel, “contains the entire substance, and all the moments of its content” (450). But the disconti- nuity between what the ethical laws are for themselves and what they are at the level of their mutual participation in the ethical substance leads to the disintegration of the Greek political ethos; and it is precisely as the narrative of this disintegration that Hegel considered the action of Antigone. Through the act the ethical agent attempts to realize con- cretely in the world what its law upholds. But because the agent in the Greek polis adheres, according to Hegel, only to the law with which it identifies, it remains ignorant of the mutual implication of the laws in the ethical substance. In consequence, the act results in the agent’s confron- tation with what Hegel calls “destiny” (Schicksal)—a certain irreducible negativity in the ethical substance which brings to an end the harmoni- ous interimplication of its human and divine aspects.

Plainly, there is no ambiguity as to which law each of the protago- nists of Sophocles’ tragedy obeys. Creon defends what he considers the public interest in denying burial rights to Polynices, who waged war on the city in the name of the familial order of succession. From Creon’s perspective, the threat Polynices poses to the public order supersedes any right he might have, as Oedipus’s first-born son, to rule over Thebes. In Antigone’s case, however, the precise motivation for her adherence to

the divine law is less clear in Hegel’s interpretation. On one level, insofar as the divine law embodies the recognition of “the blood relation” (451), Hegel suggests that Antigone’s defiance is in part a defense of the purely contingent natural fact of Polynices’ precedence in birth. As a represen- tative of the family, Antigone defends the concrete ordering of subjects as they appear in the familial realm as opposed to the abstract equality of citizens—all male, of course—as they appear in the political sphere. On a deeper level of Hegel’s analysis, however, Antigone’s action ac- quires a more consequential ethical meaning. Rather than defend the rights of her brother as he appears from the perspective of life—as, in other words, a concrete individual inserted by the contingencies of birth into a particular sociosymbolic situation—Antigone draws her motiva- tion from the “nether world” (455), where each subject is granted a supplementary, metaphysical completion, thereby acquiring membership in a whole which extends beyond its existence as a mere biological individual subject to the vagaries of fate.

Because Hegel’s assessment of the import of Antigone’s motivation is the aspect of his interpretation which most resembles Lacan’s, it will be profitable to add further detail to Hegel’s presentation of the divine law’s significance. Hegel states that what is most properly ethical about the family “is not the natural relationship of its members,” including, more specifically, any cultural significance attributed to sibling birth order, but rather the manner in which the family functions as the guard- ian of a certain nonconcrete specificity among its members, whom it insists on considering abstractly, in other words as universals (451). An act performed in the name of the divine law, Hegel explains, must be “related to the whole individual or to the individual qua universal” (451); what appears from the perspective of human law as an illegal particular- ity is abstracted into universality by the function of divine law. With Antigone’s burial of her brother firmly in mind, Hegel adds that the act performed according to this law acquires an attribute of necessity: It may not be determined by any contingent element derived either from its subject or its object. The end of the act, Hegel specifies, cannot be the “education” (Erziehung) of the subject on behalf of whom it is under- taken. Nor is it acceptable to act in such a way that the service provides help to the patient, assists him or her in the reaching of a particular goal (451). Least of all may the act make reference to the merit of the patient, to the extent to which the person in question deserves the service per- formed. We may not intervene, Hegel implies, in such a way that our motivation refers to the Good—be it our own good, or the good of the party on behalf of whom we act. The act performed in accordance with divine law must be purely unconditioned by anything of the order of life

and what Kant would call its pathological interests. Hegel expresses as follows how the ethical act presupposes in the subject who motivates it a serene, holistic, non-phenomenal supplement he associates with death: “The deed no longer concerns the living but the dead, the in- dividual who, after a long succession of separate disconnected experi- ences, concentrates himself into a single completed shape, and has raised himself out of the unrest of the accidents of life into the calm of simple universality” (451).

Hegel’s evocation of the consequences of adherence to Antigone’s divine law emphasizes both the properly morbid quality of the heroine’s position—she acts on behalf of, personifies, death—and the fraternity of the purified, disinterested character of her law with the Kantian cat- egorical imperative, according to which, as is well known, the moral subject may act ethically only if it can first universalize its maxim. Very much anticipating, as we will see later on, Lacan’s appraisal of the mo- tivation of Antigone’s act, Hegel argues that the subject who inspires the divine ethical act transcends its concrete, sensuous existence, and is attributed a supplement of ontological completion which is inconceiv- able within the limited perspective of its biographical life. Divine law confers an act which is therefore performed in the name of death, for the sake of that aspect of the collective ethos, in other words, which remains socially inadmissible, unintelligible. In the Greek polis the di- vine law may not be explicitly acknowledged; it remains, as Hegel puts it, “unconscious” (450). Consequently, the act which attempts to obey this law takes on a transgressive, otherworldly quality which radically questions the public order, uncovering in the process a world of painful abjection jettisoned from public visibility.

An example from the tragedy illustrates the effects of this eminently political violence. When the guard describes to Creon the sight of the heroine attempting to bury her brother for the second time, he refers to the spectacle as a “godsent affliction” and compares Antigone’s anguished cry to “the piercing note of a bird when she sees her empty nest robbed of her young.”5 _{Hegel’s conception of the divine law picks up on that}

aspect of the messenger’s description which qualifies Antigone’s action as one which challenges the limits of what qualifies for representation within the terms of the eminently civic order Creon upholds. Because life in the polis is circumscribed by the communitarian ethical impera- tive of the male citizen, Antigone’s transgression necessarily appears within the public realm as performed on behalf of the dead. The interest on behalf of which Antigone acts is simply inconceivable from Creon’s perspective of public order. As Lacan emphasizes in his seminar, Antigone’s law is unwritten: It cannot be formulated in the objective,

recognizable terms through which the human law is articulated, and the ritual acknowledgment of Polynices’ demise must remain, in consequence, hidden from public view.

It is with respect to this idea of an unrecognized death left to the contingent cruelties of nature that Antigone’s action acquires for Hegel its ethical significance. Antigone breaks Creon’s interdiction in an effort to transform the randomness of his destiny into a consciously assumed choice. For Hegel, the formal quality of the burial ceremony keeps away the “unconscious appetites” and “abstract entities” (452) which cast a disturbing, absurdist shadow over Polynices’ destiny. One has the sense while reading Hegel’s analysis that, had Antigone not performed her sisterly duty, the spirit of Polynices would have remained in a state of unrest, tormenting his survivors with the guilt of their unforgivable oversight. The nature of the ethical act consists therefore in adding to the merely natural phenomenon of death a human, cultural, properly sym- bolic feature whose function is to designate that aspect of each subject which remains immune to any moral qualification one might wish to bring to the events making up its life story. In Lacanian terms, the symbolism of the funeral rite aims at demarcating the limit of the symbolic order itself; the empty place which defines the subject as a subject, where it remains unexpressed, undetermined by its every representation.

As I will further explore below, Hegel and Lacan share this perspec- tive on the ethical significance of death in Antigone. Each interpreter brings to our attention both the absolute, noncognitive, unconditioned nature of Antigone’s defiance of Creon’s edict, and the destructive force this defiance exerts on Creon’s concern for the public good. In contrast to the ponderous rationalizations which characterize Creon’s defense of his actions, Antigone’s decision to defy Creon’s edict distinguishes itself through its exciting spontaneity. Antigone’s speeches are marked by their utter lack of psychological depth. She acts unconditionally, without thinking; without deliberating whether or not her deed will conform to this or that standard of moral action.

Now the difficulty with Hegel’s analysis is surely that the ethical substance he needs to presuppose as a kind of prehistory of the dialectic proper is intimately connected to his problematic sexual differentiation of the two laws. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Hegel’s association of the beautiful ethical world of Antiquity with a presumptive notion of the sexes’ complementarity indexes the thoroughly idealized construc- tion of the Greek polis which characterized Hegel’s generation of Ger- man intellectuals. But insofar as the trajectory of the dialectic deems the destruction of the Greek polis a question of a properly historical neces- sity, it becomes possible to attribute the following, admittedly generous,

reading to Hegel’s ethical narrative: The sociopolitical structure of the polis—its tidy separation of men and women, citizen and noncitizen, public and private, universal and particular—depends on an ideological fantasy veiling a fundamental, traumatic reality intrinsic to the very mo- tion of Spirit. And in the context of the Phenomenology this underlying reality—this element, more exactly, which returns to disrupt both the illusory, pseudonatural complementarity of the sexes and the substance of the beautiful ethical life—is, I wish to suggest, what Hegel in the Antigone passages refers to as destiny, what Sophocles in the tragedy calls fate, and what, in the vocabulary of Lacanian psychoanalysis, is known as the real.