Summary: | Why Antigone over again? Whence her authority (like that of other Greek myths) in the imaginary of the Western world? Wherefrom her return with an almost obsessive intensity in 20th-century art and thought? Antigone, a woman, but of royal descent, with her regal nature and weakness, takes upon herself – and becomes the symbol of – a ‘series of contradictions’, which continue to torment humanity and history. Our questions originate here: how to act when the law of the particular community one lives in contrasts with a universal order of justice? How to handle the confl ict that consequently arises between those who detain power and those who decide to retain a different and more ample form of justice? And why and how do human beings – weak and strong nature in one – live these confl icts? After having dealt with some philosophical readings, the present paper tackles the ethical and the political problems, re-interrogating Antigone on one of the central topics: the individual faced with a more or less authoritarian state and more or less authoritarian institutions. A new and improved way of conceiving ethics and politics can originate from Antigone, due to a kind of moral and anthropological revolution, which justifi es our hypothesis of presenting Antigone as a fi gure of diversity and a paradigm of conflict, in view of a different political practice, which we will see exemplified in the philia.
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