Pour une relecture de l'Antigone comme tragédie du nomos

Fabio Ciaramelli

pp. 201-215

in: Pierfrancesco Biasetti, Ferdinando G. Menga (eds), Human rights in a plural ethical framework, Metodo 2 (1), 2014.

Abstract

This paper would like to suggest that Antigone’s distance from moral, law and politics – in different ways implicating a necessary reference to the universal – comes from the peculiar stress on Antigone’s desire. In its singularity and uniqueness, in its one-sidedness, and therefore in its very conflict with law and politics, Antigone’s desire reveals itself as the last source of rights that social order cannot negate without injustice. Because nomos can emerge only from this conflict, Sophocle’s Antigone makes evident the instituted – and therefore contingent – character of symbolic order, giving voice to its always possible alteration and stressing the impossible elimination of conflict in human institutions.