"The Purity of Her Crime"-Hegel Reading Antigone

Hannes Charen

Monatshefte, Volume 103, Issue 4, Winter 2011, pp. 504-516 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: 10.1353/mon.2011.0100

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Hegel Reading Antigone

Hannes Charen New School for Social Research, New York

Antigone reaches the purity of her crime. But the ethical plenitude is not accomplished in the crime. The crime is pure as crime because it reveals more purely the split, the oppositions of laws that constitutes the ethical. But this constitution is achieved only the moment its negativity, essential here, is totally relieved. No doubt Antigones recognition of the crime has worked towards that, it corresponds indeed to the birth of ethical consciousness, to disposition (Gesinnung), in the ethical sense. But Antigone remains in the middle of the ascent, at the stage of disposition: in any case, caught between two laws, she disobeys. She falls back down, entombs again. Impotent in her action, she returns to the chasm (zugrunde), toward the hell and the subterranean world that is her fundamental place, her own proper place. She is the gure of the fall (Untergang), of the decline; she marches toward the bottom and entrains with her her whole family, even including Haemon who awaits her and kills himself over her corpse. All individuality consumes itself in culpability. The victory of one law or the other is always a catastrophe for Sittlichkeit, since it opens in Sittlichkeit a colpos in which everything is regularly engulfed, each border of which, rather, rhythmically caves in.1 The ought to be [das Sollen] is a result of that operation of thinking which persists in dissociating the essential simultaneity of being and non-being, consigning them to a relation of succession: rst being, then non-being, and so on unto innity.2 The identity which ought to be Absolute is incomplete.3

If the opposition that Antigone is said to reenter in the rst quotethis exit from the purity of her crime, her simultaneous recognition of civic law and delity to the pure (sibling) relation4, to the (re)occupation of a position, back onto one side of the split, is also the act of dissociating the essential simultaneity of being and non-being expressed by the second quote, what then can be taken as the function of the oughtthe core of rational as opposed to divine morality5 in catastrophizing the integrity of Sittlichkeit? Following Derridas text, the denial of the possibility of two brothers, Antigone rejecting one, the

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community the other, the claim to singular universal law of rationality cannot be held by two equal powers, by two logoi as Derrida puts it.6 So, on one hand it is the inheritance of the community to carry on the destiny of the antinomy of brotherhood, on the other, human law cannot preserve itself without the function of the immediate site of ethical action, that of the divine law and inner experience which by asserting the familial both destroys and preserves the ethical order. But if, as Derrida points out, Antigone does indeed remain, and remains in the middle, isnt this because she initiates absolute ethical action and as such, in her recognition, fails to take a position despite her initial call to action (das Sollen) that breaches a legal prohibition (das Sollen)? Doesnt she assume at the same time, through this chasmatical return, her own omission from both the divine and ethical substances precisely through relieving the impossible contradiction from negative judgment? Through her intuition she attains the insight that reveals
the contradiction of those powers into which the substance divided itself and their mutual downfall, as well as the contradiction between its knowledge of the ethical character of its action, and what is in its own proper nature ethical, and thus nds its own downfall . . . [T]he ethical substance has developed through this process into actual self-consciousness; in other words, this particular self has become the actuality of what it is in essence; but precisely in this development the ethical order has been destroyed.7

Ethical plenitude can neither be accomplished in the crime nor, despite Hegels initial assertion, in the sphere of the human law. What appears at the outset as a catastrophe performed by Antigone on the true ethical substance reveals what was taken as the ethical to be nothing more than a moral imperative that remains, through determinate reection, on one side of the breach. While Antigone in one sense preserves the breach, in another sense she remains outside of it. She refuses a position by both refusing to exchange her brother and refusing to ght the consequences of the human law. She is not pitting the divine substance against that of the human but upholding their unity, which constitutes the Spirit that cannot be sundered into either sphere. Perhaps then she is not only consumed in culpability but exits the economy of exchange altogether and thereby escapes consumption (determination) by the reective intellect. By withdrawing, she abandons the system rather than becoming absorbed by it. The gure of Antigone disappears and since consciousness (of the unconscious) appears to be favored, is what for Hegel, on an explicit level, constitutes a higher stage of Sittlichkeit (than Oedipus reached for example), the text as conscious expression also withdraws something, in a sense, buries the unconscious in its presence. If the Phenomenology of Spirit does then favor consciousness it is not without its own dialectical consequences. Antigone is present in being repressed and returns, again, unscathed, bringing with her, again, laws of unknown origin.

506 Family as Divine Substance

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This moment which expresses the ethical sphere in its element of immediacy or [simple] being, or which is an immediate consciousness of itself, both as essence and as this particular self, in an other, i.e. as a natural ethical communitythis is the Family. The Family, as the unconscious, still inner Notion [of the ethical order], stands opposed to its actual, self-conscious existence; as the element of the nations actual existence, it stands opposed to the nation itself; as the immediate being of ethical order, it stands over against that order which shapes and maintains itself by working for the universal . . .8

It is in the sphere of the ethical community that the action of the familial, the divine, immediate, Sittlichkeit consciously manifests itself, and in so doing exposes the immediate relations of the family by rupturing themthe dissolution of the family. The community, in this moment, acts as the only true universal relationship for Spirit, it is the conscious site of ethical action (Sittlichkeit). The natural relationship, that of mother / father / sister / brother etc. constitutes the immediate, unconscious relation, the divine substance. The inscription of the individual into the community is facilitated by the individual manifesting a relation to the family as a whole rather than through the unconscious, immediate relations. Only insofar as the individuals as such have relations with othersin the sense that they can be in the community as individuals, can they become truly ethical members, and can the family as such be represented in the human law. This is initiated through need and desire.9 Inherent in this notion is the function of the prohibition, the taboo of incest which sustains the possibility of ethical action and prevents the family from collapsing in on itselfin Hegelian terms, remaining absolutely for-itself, subjective. This recalls Batailles understanding of potlach which functions by contributing the actual members of the family, in their relations outside of the family, to the community, which in turn constitutes the familial power (under the paternal signature) within the community.10 The familial then facilitates exchange. But doesnt Antigones family (Oedipuss family) in particular fail this ethico-economic action while simultaneously slipping under it by occupying universal positions of (the highest) power within the community? This will be taken up below. The family in mediating immediate relation simultaneously rescues the individual from pure being (death).
Blood relationship supplements, then, the abstract natural process by adding to it the movement of consciousness . . . Through this it comes about that the dead, the universal being, becomes a being that has returned into itself, a being-forself, or, the powerless, simply isolated individual has been raised to universal individuality.11

The duty then of kinship, Hegel goes on, is to add to this irrationality. The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonoring him by unconscious

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appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and wed the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality12 The function of divine law now, in the domain of the ethical community, is for the blood relation to lift the individual member out of the natural merely food for parasitesin order to allow inscription into the community. The initiation that the familial facilitates frees the individual from immediate death through the recognition of their work; the testimony of the name after deathremembrance and mourning. Recall that in Antigones much cited second explanation for her action she appeals to the inexchangeability of her siblings,13 her defeated brother specically as opposed to other family members. What is left out of the communal and the divine substances, what relation cannot be replaced, but rather is only displaced? The sibling relationship is then one that can neither be reduced to incestuous desire nor abandon desire altogether and what, furthermore, remains only in order to return, failing to succumb to moral economy. The relation that Antigone assumes with Polyneikes is one of both immediate familiarity and particular membership. She both chooses and does not choose her brother. There is a suspension of both the divine and the human laws. The particular family, which Hegel uses to expose the development of ethical action in the structure of the family relation, is, signicantly, Oedipus. The community lives within the shadowed destiny of this failed family. It is the Oedipal family which remains at the heart of both the communal and divine substances. The trajectory of the family, for a family of incest, for the family of Oedipus, results necessarily in a sort of vacuous extirpation, for they fail to submit to the proper dissolution, they fall short of the expected relational becoming of ethical individuality (to the family as substance) required to enter the communal sphere and thus remain both totally within itself, caving in and, paradoxically (or paralogically14), encompassing the community. Not only is each member of the Oedipal family not restricted to one natural / divine relation towards each other member but, because they never properly inscribed themselves as individuals within the communal substance there are no (or only) remains for the Oedipal family. Because of this, because nothing (all) remains it becomes the family upon which all families rely on completing, on xing, on burying. For Hegel, the family, which is used to model the sundering of the divine and human substances, is precisely the family which fails that separation and therefore, according to Hegels speculative gesture comes to recognize in true ethical action the simultaneity of two laws, a simultaneity that any properly moral family would fail. WarDisplacing Antinomies For Hegel the rupture of war is a rupture of particular individuality, of natural relation (the divine law) by the universal but it also appropriates the particular

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into a new particular. It is essential to understand the antinomic structure of war for Hegel. If we go back to Kants rst critique, for example, we see that neither side can be taken.15 These are the limits of reason, the limits of rationality lie before the antinomic moments, before war. For Kant then, war would be a forcing of reason outside of its proper domain. In war for Hegel the particular, the individual who is torn out of her familial context, is shown that two sides exist but does not necessarily come to the speculative awareness through which the prohibition of opposition is suspended. It implies though that it is not a matter of the outcome of war but of sustaining it, of preventing one side from dominating. It is in this sense that Hegel remains true to Kant. But for Hegel this leads to a further split, both in the communal and in the familial substances. Each, for Hegel can be taken in its manifestations of individuality. For the community this is the government as the facilitator of war. War functions not only as an assault on the family but, more precisely, as a breach of the dialectical relation between the family and community, which betrays their inherent unity. In order not to let them become rooted and set in this isolation, thereby breaking up the whole and letting the [communal] spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to their core by war.16 This is not simply community enacting violence on the family, it is the communal spirit sundering itself and on one side embodying a singular guise in the identity of the government which then uproots the embedded systems that emerged from the unied relation of the two spheres, the community and family. It appears that war then functions on two levels. First, it is an action that pits two logoi, one unied nation against another external force (nation) and second it disrupts the relation of the community and the family, which, in the meantime, seems to have been (prematurely) realizing their unity. War is a sundering force which seems only to abandon the familial and deteriorate the communal. But the truth of war becomes the revelation of death as universal master. The community therefore possesses the truth and the conrmation of its power in the essence of the Divine Law and in the realm of the netherworld.17 With this turn away from the divine, war simultaneously hands true authority over to death, the immediate power of the divine. This comes about only by the communal spirit exiting the relation to the divine by doubling itself. It becomes in a sense a parasite of the relation that it still remains a part of. The relation of war, on the level of nations, then, upholds the opposition of two powers, but in a new realm, mutually recognizing the simultaneity of two opposing truths. In the now internal level it acts as a rupture, which prohibits the antinomic relation of the communal and divine laws from identity, burying them both. In this double act war only truly reaches its speculative gesture when it nally conrms its power to the netherworld, and, like Antigone, goes under and caves. The two powers articulate two competing truths, two structures. But what are we to make of the immediate, the divine law, and what is left over

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of its inherent relation to the communal? Either war as such must fall into abstraction for Hegel or we must admit of an excess, that (other opposition) which war leaves behind. There is something excessive in the familial from the standpoint of war. War cannot tolerate divine law. The prohibition (or absence) of divine law carries with it the threat of war.18 It lies outside of the opposition that war sustains. Wouldnt it be then the mutual recognition of failure rather than a fulllment of synthetic unity? This articulates the complex paradox of Aufhebung. The excess of itself, which it projects, does not disappear and reappear, it remains and it haunts presence, yet it is already there, always immediate and always becoming exterior to itself. The Cunning of Reason and Kreons Prohibition KREON: Must I rule this land for someone else, not myself? HAIMON: There is no city that belongs to one man only. KREON: Isnt the city held to be his who rules? HAIMON: Youd do well as the single ruler of some deserted place.19 If we understand Kreons prohibition on burial and mourning as an act which prevents the end of war, which prolongs the state of war because it forbids the divine law from returning to the family, then Haimon is in essence not disobeying his father at all. War ends (according to Hegel) only when the divine law is given back to the family (when the particular members return to a relation with the family as a whole and through this become ethical members of a society). Haimon is both fullling and acknowledging his fathers command all the more through his act of self-destruction, through rupturing and annihilating the bonds of kinship, of the divine law. Isnt this Kreons command, his moral imperative? The familial remains are not returned and therefore they are prevented, according to Hegel, from properly reentering (in an ethical relation, Sittlichkeit), via the divine law, the realm of human law. Kreons real authority (one he was unaware of ) over Haimon seems to have been obeyed all too effectively. The universal moral imperative that Kreon seeks to enforce is the law which prevents the divine substance from actualizing authority. It forces the familial down, into the unconscious leaving only a self consumed, barren land. Kreon becomes the ruler of an abandoned city, for the human law does not allow the body to escape the parasites and natural forces that devour the corpse. Ludwig In Glas Derrida cites a letter that mentions Hegels two sons, Karl and Immanuel. Hegel in these dispatches is considering the signicance of the second sons namethe middle name that mediates in friendship and philosophy.20

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Earlier in Derridas text another letter is quoted, that almost imperceptibly moves through the name Ludwig.
. . . I learned . . . that you had showed a little more hope than when Roth left of further upgrading the University of Erlangen this fall, and that you no longer found yourself obliged to send Ludwig elsewhere, i.e., to Heidelberg. Heidelberg however brings me to Fries and his Logic. Steins bookstore knew nothing of a copy ordered for you but let on that it would receive a copy in three weeks. I have since received one from another bookstore. But my feeling in connection with it is one of sadness. I do not know whether as a married man I am mellowing, but I feel sadness that in the name of philosophy such a shallow man attains the honorable position he holds in the world, and that he even permits himself to inject such scribblings with a tone of importance. On such occasions one can become angry that there is no public voice to speak with integrity on such matters, for certain circles and persons would greatly benet from it.21

Immediately Hegels note turns from Ludwig to Heidelberg, to the both unknown and missing book; Fries Logic (a work devoid of spirit . . . the most slovenly disconnected explanatory lecture hall twaddle.22) Who is Ludwig here? Which Ludwig? [C]alled Louis as a lad, at rst embraced by his father, later compelled to assume his mothers maiden name, and ultimately disowned: Ludwig Fischer, the bastard son of spirit.23 Not only are there two brothers but there is a third, an illegitimate brother, born to Hegels landlady as he was nishing the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)a repressed son intermittently occupying Hegel (and Derrida). It was not until 1817 though that Ludwig, after Hegels belated insistence, joined the family. After this long series of letters Derrida, never explicitly mentioning Ludwig, remarks: Isnt there always an element excluded from the system that assures the systems space of possibility? . . . a transcategorical. . . . The systems vomit.24 Do we acknowledge the third brother? If so what place would he occupy? If he is associated with the familial, divine law, then would he have been ejected from the Hegel family and denied the opportunity to represent the Hegel surname? Because of this he can equally not be properly inscribed into the conscious site of universal human law, at least not as a representative in the community of Hegels family. So, there can be no relation to the family as a whole for Ludwig, only perhaps a transrelation; he could not possibly represent the Hegel family in the community even though he is brought back into its domain, even though he is not and is an immediate member of the family. Hegel was then contending with the excesses and secrets that are lost to, invisible to either the familial or the communal substances. His own ambivalence towards Ludwig and then his striking preoccupation with the names of his proper or legitimate sons, the concern to properly synthesize them, which betrays the possibility of their own interior, antinomic split, might simply be an attempt to conceal the possibility that no matter what care or love he might possess

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for Ludwig, there is simply no place for him, conscious or unconscious. What happens then to the status of Ludwig, the rst son of Hegel? What becomes of the clean split into the familial and communal substances? The son who arrives, who is brought into the circle of the family last is also the rst son, the one that preceded the family altogether and in a sense was immediately inscribed into the community. It could be said, then, that the initiation of the familial adventure for Spirit is precisely rooted in such a secret. Hegel chose to bring Ludwig back into the family against the human law, which forbids extra marital children. There were conditions, contigencies, the choice already exited the given unconditional characterizing the natural familial relationship. Isnt it from this perspective, that it must be, from an exception that the system can constitute itself, so that in effect the system itself becomes the transcategorical (Derrida), perhaps the parasite which hangs on, which circles in order to convey, in order to express, that which cannot, in order to get outside of itself, in order to become a parasite of itself, in order? Antigone
[T]he moment of the individual self, recognizing and being recognized, can here assert its right, because it is linked to the equilibrium of the blood and is a relation devoid of desire. The loss of the brother is therefore irreparable to the sister and her duty towards him is the highest.25

The sister, as feminine, both unconscious and aware, acts, in the sibling relation, as the intuitive and therefore speculative site of ethical action (Sittlichkeit). Antigone not only ruptures the mere human law, which cannot sustain the unconscious, but through exceeding the distribution of these two substances, unies them. Since it is only through the divine that the corpse of Polyneikes can be returned to the community, it must become memorialized, that which can be owed but no longer itself indebted. It must not remain a merely wasting corpse, but become the entirety of its corpus as a human individuality in relation to both human and divine law and in that sense in between. The bosom of the earth26 for Hegel then is not simply the site of unrestrained animal or natural forces. It is precisely the return to the Idea itself. For Hegel, animal life and natural forces are not formless. They are simply negating, when left unmediated by the divine law. When the community is exposed directly to them it cannot survive because the community, value in the community, requires an economy of exchange. The formless for Hegel describes instead, the gesture of speculation.
To get a hold of transcendental intuition in its true formlessness it was necessary to abstract from this character of subjectivity; speculation had to detach this form from its subjective principle in order to raise this principle. Instead, transcendental intuition as it pertains to philosophical reection, and transcen-

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dental intuiting as being neither subjective nor objective, still remain one and the same.27

Hegel is referring here to Fichtes identity philosophy, which he accuses of failing to return to itself. For Hegel, Fichte remains within the limits of Kantian critical philosophy. Fichte inadvertently reintroduces Kants inaccessible noumena by asserting an innite separation of the self from itself, as intractable object. Not-I, the innite untenability of the in-itself, enacting the error of what Hegel deems the appropriation of intuition by the understanding, fails to tolerate the conscious expression of differencecontradictory movements into and out of consciousness. This gesture out of which his entire work proposes to depart and into which it proposes to return is the impossible symmetry of identity philosophy. Antigones power in the Phenomenology of Spirit lies in her withdraw and return, as a facilitator of the return of the corpse but also as a return to an alien text. In love with the impossible.28 The relation that Hegel seeks to unravel, is accomplished in literature and remains outside the system. Antigone is being read by Hegel, by the Phenomenology of Spirit one text reading another. It returns the system to the bosom of the earth. As a gure Hegel can call on implicitly or explicitly, Antigone is a shadow that he can withdraw and at times, forget. She returns suddenly, unchanged, from the cave, anticipating the Oracle of the cult, a prophet of the future:
The further developed self which rises to become a being-for-self is master over the pure pathos of substance, over the objectivity of the Light of Sunrise, and knows that simplicity of truth as essential being which does not have the form of continuous existence through an alien speech, knows it as the sure and unwritten law of the gods, a law that is everlasting and no one knows whence it came.29

Antigone is given. As a text and a gure Antigone is immediate. From outside of the system Antigone already faced the ordeal which shapes her. Antigone becomes the antinomy around which the system constructs itself.
This new notion, which Hegel calls the Thing Itself, plays a vital role in the literary undertaking. No matter that it has so many different meanings; it is the art which is above the work, the ideal that the work seeks to represent, the World as it is sketched out in the work, the values at stake in the creative effort, the authenticity of this effort . . .30

This is why Antigone is neither surpassed nor subsumed. She is already a gure of speculation that is employed from time to time (von Zeit zu Zeit) to catastrophize the lines of fracture that force thinking to take sides.31 She, like Ludwig, haunts the borders that demarcate and dene and repeatedly exposes the ought (das Sollen) to will (das Wollen). The Phenomenology of Spirit reads Antigone. The failure that Derrida cites, the failure of Antigone to sustain Sittlichkeit in its plenitude, is the failure of the system itself to contain it. As failure then Antigone precisely accomplishes ethical plenitude.

Hegel Reading Antigone Identity Which Ought to Be

The Absolute is not in its appearance, they are themselves opposites.32

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What we have to show, then, is that reection does not have a subordinate place in the system, and that [on the contrary] the two standpoints, that of speculation and that of reection, are absolutely necessary and without union at the center of the system.In other words, Ego = Ego is the absolute principle of speculation, but the system does not display this identity . . . The essence of the ego and its positing do not coincide: Ego does not become objective to itself.33

In expression the Absolute withdraws. The system is that which appears as opposed to the Absolute. The system then requires, in order to avoid dogmatic insularity, its own exterior. If it forgets the connection with what is not present it falls into a bad innity. According to Hegel there is no speculative moment, rather it arrives in every moment in different guises, abstracted and arrested, only to be glimpsed when the oppositions of reective understanding are both brought together and suspended. It is not that the reective intellect, that quasi-philosophical gesture which limits itself at the point of opposition, is subordinate to speculation; it is a necessary step within the speculative process always on the way to philosophy, so long as it does not ossify in its own limit.34 For Hegel, Antigone remains signicant. Oedipus family remains. Like Kants antinomies the incestuous family lies xed within its own impossible relation. It cannot apprehend its own inner contradictions but is conscious of them and when left alone, when subject to movement, attempts instead to pit itself against itself, to split and project itself, to unravel and to parasitize itself. The husband is then also the son to the wife (e.g. Oedipus and Jocasta), the daughter is also the sister to the father (e.g. Antigone and Oedipus), and so on. Each relation is antinomic, each relation is undecidable, but must be decided upon.35 The family repeats itself with each relation and so the communal and divine substances are irretrievable, inseparable and in a strange sense express (by exceeding) their inherent unity. Positions
Whereas the Absolute appears in art, taken in its true scope, more in the form of absolute being, it appears more in speculation as begetting itself in its innite intuition . . . Both art and speculation are in their essence divine serviceboth are living intuition of the absolute life and hence being at one with it.36 Spurned by history, literature plays a different game. If it is not really in the world, working to make the world, this is because its lack of being (of intelligible reality) causes it to refer to an existence that is still inhuman. Yes, it recognizes that this is so, that in its nature there is a strange slipping back and forth between being and not being, presence and absence, reality and nonreality.37

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In a sense the speculative is precisely what is invisible, what then does not occur in the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is both as the prime mover and as the absent upon its absence which allows the expressive becoming of Spirit. In the introduction of the English translation (A. V. Miller) J. N. Findlay remarks, that as a mere forepiece to the philosophical system it is meant to be dropped and discarded once the student, through deep immersion in its contents, has advanced through confusions and misunderstanding to the properly philosophical point of view.38 This confusion is not only to be discarded but to be performed. To undergo the transformative performance of thinking as both concealing and containing the entirety, the reader is to bring forth a development, a change occurs not only consciously but outside of the textto the text, unconsciously. The misunderstandings, the confusions at once revealing and concealing philosophy cannot be dissociated from its texture. It is always only what this can move into or out of, presenting itself only through reection, through withdrawing speculation, its own necessary suspension. The speculative rather becomes present to itself, always left out of the process to observe itself, to live its catastrophic reections, not to become arrested in them. Insofar as the ought constitutes judgment, and as ought is the limit of the completion of the absolute, the absolute is prohibited from judging. Judgment precludes speculation, but also constitutes an abstract quantum. The system itself is the taking of positions. It is the movement through positions ending at the (non)point where positions end. The system pits positions but also works to contain them. Speculation is outside of, but facilitates, the cycling, the circling of oppositions that constitute the system. Speculation from the perspective of the system is external and irrational. Yet, it is the suspension of the negative judgment of reection that propels the system; the suspension of the negative relation to opposition as such that allows movement and prevents a standstill in Fichtean dogmatism. This is precisely Antigones role in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The point at which she speculates is the point at which she withdraws, and caving in brings along not only Ismene and Haemon, but leaves Kreon as a ruler of only a wasteland, deserted by the divine, deserted by the familial signature required for communal membership. Kreon is left only with the vacuity of his own imperative. Antigone marks what the system cannot sustain, the failure of the position, the failure of judgment. Antigone is too much. She exceeds but she also returns to mark another excess, an external that enters. She reminds the system of its judgment. The law she brings cannot be understood, and only appears as law to that which can only judge. It appears as an alien law, from where nobody knows. The law that is not law, cannot be law, only speculation. Finally in a modest gesture, one, not insignicantly, of literature, the system ends and nally, in its plenitude, like Antigone, it can be discarded.

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[T]he two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own innitude.39

Derrida, Jacques, Glas. New York: U. of Nebraska, 1990, 174. Malabou, Catherine, The Future of Hegel. New York: Routledge, 2005, 121. Hegel, G. W. F., The Difference Between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy. New York: SUNY UP, 1988. 115. 4 The relationship in its unmixed form is found, however, in that between brother and sister. Hegel, G. W. F., Trans. A. V. Miller. Phenomenology of Spirit (Galaxy Books). New York: Oxford UP, 1979. 274. 5 Hence no imperatives hold for the divine will and in general for a holy will: the ought [das Sollen] is out of place here, because volition [das Wollen] is of itself necessarily in accord with the law. Kant, Immanuel. Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 4:414. An alternate translation reads, The moral ought is entirely out of place, here, since the willing (is of itself necessarily in agreement with the law. Kant, Immanuel. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kants Foundations of Ethics. Agora Pub, 1995. 4:414. 6 Derrida. Glas. 176 7 Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. 266. 8 Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. 268. 9 [B]ecause the ethical principle is intrinsically universal, the ethical connection between members of the Family is not that of feeling, or the relationship of love. . . . The acquisition and maintenance of power and wealth is in part concerned only with needs and belongs to the sphere of the appetite; in part, they become in their higher determination something that is only mediated. Ibid. 269. 10 Cf. Bataille, Georges, The Gift of Rivalry: Potlach. Accursed Share, Vol. 1. Consumption. New York: Zone Books, 1991. 11 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 271. 12 Ibid. 271. 13 For I would have never have assumed this burden, defying the citizens, if it had been my children or my husband who had died and had been left to rot away out there. In deference to what law do I say this? were my husband dead, there could be another, and by that man, another child, if one were lost. But since my mother and my father are hidden now in Hades, no more brothers could ever be born . . . Sophocles. Antigone, Trans: Reginald Gibbons, and Charles Segal. (Greek Tragedy in New Translations). New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 95. 14 . . . though single in all respects, has the appearance of an absolute unity of the conditions of thought in general, thus stretching far beyond the limits of possible experience. Kant, Immanuel. Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. F. Max Mueller. London: The Macmillan Company, 1911. 327. 15 Kant, Immanuel, The Antinomy of Pure Reason Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. F. Max Mueller. London: The Macmillan Company, 1911. 328378. 16 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 272. 17 Ibid. 273. 18 They [other communities] rise up in hostility and destroy the community which has dishonored and shattered its own power, the sacred claims of the family. Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. 267. 19 Sophocles, Antigone, 85. 20 Derrida, Glas. 177. 21 Ibid. 160161. 22 Ibid. 161.
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Krell, David Farrell, Son of Spirit a Novel. Albany: SUNY UP, 1997. vii. Derrida, Glas. 162. 25 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 275. 26 In order to raise the body above the work of parasites and forces of nature, which otherwise remain superior by merely living or by force of negation, respectively, it must wed the blood relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality. (Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. 271.) 27 Hegel, The Difference between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy. 133. 28 Sophocles, Antigone, 57. 29 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 431. 30 Blanchot, Maurice, Literature and the Right to Death. Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays. Barrytown, N.Y: Station Hill / Barrytown, Ltd., 1999. 366. 31 For in its highest synthesis of the conscious and the non-conscious, speculation also demands the nullication of consciousness itself. Reason thus drowns itself and its knowledge and its reection of the absolute identity, in its own abyss. Hegel, G. W. F. The Difference Between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy. 103. 32 Ibid. 115. 33 Ibid. 123. 34 Cf. Ibid. 121. 35 Antigone for example chooses Polyneikes as her brother, while he is equally and just as immediately, her uncle (as he is also the son of Jocasta, who is simultaneously Antigones fathers mother). Her choice of Polyneikes (as her inexchangable brother), however, is no longer a strictly immediate, unconscious relation and therefore radically ruptures the separation of the divine and human substances. 36 Hegel, G. W. F. The Difference Between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy. 121. 37 Blanchot. Literature and the Right to Death. 394. 38 Hegel, G. W. F., and A. V. Miller. Findlay, J. N., Foreword to the Phenomenology of Spirit (Galaxy Books). New York: Oxford UP, 1979. V. 39 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 493.