The best books on Antigone and feminist ethics

Who am I?

I’ve always searched for personalities – mythological, literary, or real – affirming the highest ethical claims for justice. Sophocles’s Antigone is, without doubt, the preeminent example of this ethical demand, based on ancient unwritten laws and related demands for human dignity. As a woman, Antigone also presents the forgotten and suppressed orders of femininity, which were present in all archaic religions and mythologies, but later repressed and fully replaced with exclusively male Gods. I’m therefore interested in books that guide us in this search for the power of ethics and femininity and hope this list will give you an idea of the rich ethical potentials that we possess.  


I wrote...

Antigone's Sisters

By Lenart Škof,

Book cover of Antigone's Sisters

What is my book about?

An original and innovative exploration of Antigone, femininity, and love. In Antigone’s Sisters, Lenart Škof explores the power of love in our world—stronger than violence and stronger even than death. Focusing on Antigone, Savitri, and Mary, the book offers an investigation into various goddesses and feminine figures from a variety of philosophical, mythological, theological, and literary contexts. 

Drawing on Bracha M. Ettinger’s concept of matrixiality, Škof proposes a new matrixial theory of philosophy and theology of love. With its new interpretation of Antigone and related readings of Irigaray, Kristeva, and Ettinger, Antigone’s Sisters aims to identify some of the reasons for this forgetting of love and to show that it is only love that can bring peace to our ethically disrupted world.

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The books I picked & why

Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism

By S.E. Wilmer (editor), Audrone Zukauskaite (editor),

Book cover of Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism

Why did I love this book?

This excellent collection of essays brings some of the key readings of Sophocles’ Antigone in an ethical and feminist key. It includes, among others, interpretations by Tina Chanter, Luce Irigaray, and Bracha L. Ettinger. In the fascinating lineup of chapters, the book guides us through political, psychoanalytical, and sexual genealogies and classical interpretations of this Greek myth, thus providing the authoritative scholarship on a female figure of Antigone.  

By S.E. Wilmer (editor), Audrone Zukauskaite (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Antigone has become a major figure in current cultural discourse thanks to the late twentieth-century interpretations by such controversial theorists as Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray, Zizek, and Judith Butler. This collection of articles by distinguished scholars from a variety of intellectual disciplines (including philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, theatre, and the classics) provides a postmodern perspective on the ethical and political issues raised by this ancient
text and recent theatrical productions. The contributors provide an array of perspectives on a female figure who questions the role of the patriarchal state.


In the Beginning, She Was

By Luce Irigaray,

Book cover of In the Beginning, She Was

Why did I love this book?

Luce Irigaray’s book includes her powerful interpretation of Antigone but also brings a mature account of her on the role of the feminine within Western thought. In the Beginning, She Was, Irigaray guides us back to the Presocratics in order to reinstate the Goddess which was absent in the Western philosophical and religious discourses until the 20th century.       

By Luce Irigaray,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked In the Beginning, She Was as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this new book, crucial for understanding her journey, Luce Irigaray goes further than in Speculum and questions the work of the Pre-Socratics at the root of our culture. Reminding us of the story of Ulysses and Antigone, she demonstrates how, from the beginning, Western tradition represents an exile for humanity. Indeed, to emerge from the maternal origin, man elaborated a discourse of mastery and constructed a world of his own that grew away from life and prevented perceiving the real as it is. To recover our natural belonging and learn how to cultivate it humanly is imperative and needs…


Feminist Readings of Antigone

By Fanny Soderback (editor),

Book cover of Feminist Readings of Antigone

Why did I love this book?

This book is a fascinating collection of essays on Antigone, written by key contemporary thinkers, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Bracha L. Ettinger, and Adriana Cavarero. Hegel daringly compared Antigone to Socrates and Jesus and this book shows the full range of ethical questions and consequences, related to Antigone and her highest ethical demand. Through this book, the fictitious woman from Sophocles’ drama written 2,500 years ago, incarnates in front of us as a living figure of contemporary feminine ethics.

By Fanny Soderback (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Feminist Readings of Antigone as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

New and classic essays on Antigone and feminist philosophy.


The Matrixial Borderspace

By Bracha Ettinger,

Book cover of The Matrixial Borderspace

Why did I love this book?

In her work, Bracha L. Ettinger proposes to depart in our thinking from a difference that is feminine and argues for the “matrixial” sphere as a corporeal locus that incarnates in our various human becomings toward the other – such as through compassion or empathy. This book has a Foreword written by Judith Butler and navigates through some of the key phenomena in ethics of femininity, including the original Ettingerian concept of prematernal and prenatal compassion.

By Bracha Ettinger,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Matrixial Borderspace as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan's late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience.

Concerned with collective…


Antigone

By Jean Anouilh,

Book cover of Antigone

Why did I love this book?

Jean Anouilh wrote his Antigone during WW2 and it was first performed in 1944 in occupied Paris. This book is one of the most powerful interpretations of the Greek myth of Antigone and her unsurpassable ethical deed. The statement of Anouilh’s Antigone – to say “No!” to whatever she would not be willing to affirm, is the sign of an ultimate and universal ethical demand for justice. 

By Jean Anouilh,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Antigone as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Full Length, Tragedy / 8m, 4f Produced in modern dress in New York with Katherine Cornell and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the Galantiere version of the Greek legend comes from a Paris that suffered under the heel of tyranny. The play's parallels to modern times are exciting and provocative. "Its dimensions are noble, its intentions uncompromising."-Southwestern University, Texas


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