Continental Philosophy Research Group Talk (Gregor Moder, Ljubljana)

The Continental Philosophy Research Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Gregor Moder, a senior research associate at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He co-founded Aufhebung—International Hegelian Association, based in Ljubljana, and served as its first president (2014–2020). His works include Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern UP 2017), an edited volume on The Object of Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and most recently Antigone. An Essay on Hegel’s Political Philosophy (FDV 2023, in Slovenian; German translation forthcoming with Turia+Kant in 2024).

Talk Title

Hegel’s Antigone: Brothers and Sisters

Talk Abstract

In her final monologue, Sophocles’s Antigone delivers a surprising justification of the law that guided her to defy Creon’s decree and bury her brother Polyneices. She claims that she risked her life only for her brother’s body, and that she would leave a husband’s or a child’s body to molder unburied. These words have always puzzled interpreters. In this talk, we shall claim that Hegel’s chapter on ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the Phenomenology of Spirit can be read precisely as an attempt to give a metaphysical and ethical account of Antigone’s last words, which is why the relationship between brother and sister becomes the pivotal relationship not only of Hegel’s understanding of the family, but also of the polity and the substance of ethical life itself. This is a major difference that sets the understanding of Antigone in Phenomenology apart from the ones in Philosophy of Right and Aesthetics. Furthermore, we shall argue that the way in which Antigone formulates her demand to bury her brother becomes the paradigmatic example of how a historical transformation of the world is possible.

About the Continental Philosophy Group

One of six departmental research interest groups, the Continental Philosophy Group works in the traditions of textual interpretation of human consciousness, phenomenology, and post-structuralist critical theory, among other related traditions of thought.