Speaker
Description
This talk argues that Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone can help our times respond to ecological destabilization and the associated injustices between generations. I suggest that the play centrally revolves around civil disobedience in the face of a political power that that does not fully recognize obligations to non-present generations despite its constitutive dependence on ancestors and descendants as well as on ecological conditions. Scholars have often remarked upon the contrast between monarchy and democracy in the play, especially in view of Creon’s authoritarian lack of counsel, which democracy should have been able to prevent. This lack of counsel, I suggest, also extends to Creon’s inability to grasp the democratic significance of rotation among governed and governing, which Aristotle would soon argue is central to democratic constitutions. Aided by phenomenological accounts of time, I then seek to show that democratic rotation entails fair turn-taking among generations. In the Capitalocene, governments similarly disrespect fair turns, rendering them liable to climate disobedience.