Hegel's antigone and the dialectics of sexual difference

Hegel has been widely criticized for his conservative conception of the fixed social positions assigned to men and women. This critique concerns first of all the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit where he discusses, with reference to Sophocles' Antigone, the conflict between two forms of ethical life characteristic of Greek culture. Philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Patricia Mills have argued that Hegel's reading of Antigone consolidates traditional hierarchical oppositions such as those between nature and culture, the feminine and the masculine, private and public, and body and spirit. Countering Hegel's purportedly masculine view of sexual difference, they picture Antigone as undermining rather than confirming these and similar oppositions.1 It seems to me, however, that these feminist readings tend to ignore that Hegel's analysis of Greek ethical life pertains only to the immediate mode of ethical life, that is, a mode that calls for its dissolution. Moreover, this analysis, although relying on Antigone, is not intended as an interpretation of this tragedy. One cannot, therefore, simply blame Hegel for having misinterpreted this play. It goes without saying that the way in which human beings identify with specific cultural values is not necessarily based on sexual difference. My critique of these philosophers concerns, therefore, not so much their views on sexual difference as their critique of Hegel's conception of sexual difference. This is not to say that I fully endorse Hegel's understanding of the cultural meaning of sexual difference. Given the history of the twentieth century it has become impossible to maintain that physical differences between the sexes determine the relations of human beings to themselves, the relations between human beings, or their position in society as a whole. If, as Hegel maintains, philosophy is to grasp its own time in thought, then our own time demands that we reflect on the history in which sexual differences have lost much of their traditional significance.2 Although Hegel makes clear that the immediate mode of ethical life had to dissolve, he did not give much thought to the ensuing development of the ways in which men and women might identify with values traditionally considered as masculine or feminine. I believe, however, that Hegel's analysis of natural ethical life in the Phenomenology can be used to philosophically reflect on this question. If Hegel's philosophy consists from the outset in countering tendencies, then it should be possible to let one of these tendencies develop into a conception of sexual difference that neither identifies men and women with their physical differences nor completely ignores the significance of these differences.3 Starting out from Hegel's analysis of natural ethical life, I will argue that the way in which the experience of sexual difference became culturally determined in ancient Greece opened up a movement in which the distribution of the private and the public realm over the two sexes is increasingly dissolved. In order to sketch out this movement I will draw on some passages where Hegel reflects on Antigone in a manner that seems to undermine the clear-cut opposition between nature and culture he generally upholds. These passages strongly suggest that Hegel considers sexual difference never to have been merely natural, but to have always already been permeated by cultural significance. If this is the case, then there is no reason why sexual difference should not be submitted to the dialectical principle that forces any historical mode of culture to overcome its onesidedness. Accordingly, one might argue that the history of spirit is also a history in which men and women become increasingly aware that hierarchical oppositions such as those between family and state, emotion and reason, body and mind, receptivity and activity, nature and spirit, are not to be distributed over human beings according to their sex. …