The Feminine in Hegel. Between Tragedy and Magic

This paper will take its starting point at the figure of Antigone taken up by Hegel at various moments of his reflection. For Hegel, the Greek tragedy in general is the terrain from which to draw emblematic figures, not so much of heroes and heroines, but of moments of passage. Antigone is a sister, rebellious against the tyrant’s law, a symbol of the passage from one symbolic universe to another. Indicating the tragedy on one side and the magic on the other, this paper aims to focus on the resistance in the unconscious of a symbolic translated/ betrayed in the cultural becoming: the magic of the spirit. The relationship between nature and culture intersects with the individual psychic structure in which the hierarchy between male and female is rooted. It is not the “best of all possible worlds”, but the place where to find – also through Antigone – the clues of a dissonance, of an outside that has its incidence in the Hegelian dialectic.