Since Hegel, Oedipus has stood for the project of humanism. Oedipus correctly answered the Sphinx’s riddle -- “Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?” -- with “man.” With this, Hegel says, Oedipus claimed for Greece and the West the quest for self-knowledge that eluded Egypt. True, Oedipus went on to live a tragic life in which he found too late that he was the answer to more than the Sphinx’s riddle. Still, for Hegel, Oedipus inaugurated philosophy’s defining mission: to know thyself.

The humanism once connected to Oedipus’ self-knowledge project is now identified with his daughter, Antigone, whose mourning grounds a new humanism based not on knowing, reflection, and sovereignty but on dying, lamentation, and finitude (e.g., Stephen White [who does not however tether it to Antigone] and Judith Butler [who does]). This lamenting Antigone personifies not the increasingly discredited quest for self-knowledge as redemptive and universal, but the need to mourn what is left of the human after the project of self-knowledge has run its course. Philosophy’s mission is now to teach us how to die, rather than to know (or: to die knowingly, facing death).

The new mourning-based humanism posits three sites of pre- or post-political universality. Death (burial and mourning practices vary but we are all mortal), song, sound, or pain/cry (extra-linguistic sound is more universal than language which is always particular, plural and therefore divisive), and kinship (humans are always members of families, though these vary in structure and significance). Reading Sophocles’ Antigone and its receptions since Hegel, we assess the new humanism’s claims to universality and its impact on democratic theory and politics.

(i) Death: Hegel, Lacan, Butler, White, Drew Faust, and others locate in lamentation or the human condition of finitude a pre- or post-political universality. We consider this in relation to Hannah Arendt’s politics, built around an alternative universality that she called the “fact of natality.” Where death equalizes, natality, for Arendt, singularizes.

(ii) Sound: noting what many of tragedy’s readers miss -- that the chorus sings and Antigone cries -- we look at the remainders of democratic theory’s focus on speech-centered agency or speech-acts, reading work by classicists, feminists, and theorists of language on the (non)universality of sound, song, and pain. (Wittgenstein, Ranciere, Loraux, Cavarero, Cavell, Derrida, Rousseau, Das).

(iii) Kinship: focusing on Antigone’s relationship not only to her much-lamented brother, Polynices, but also to her sister, Ismene, we look at models of political agency that color receptions of Antigone as (un)devoted sister (Hegel, Derrida, Lacan, Butler, Goldhill, Rawlinson) and we discuss debates in psychoanalysis and queer theory on the politics of kinship in the context of Sophocles’ Antigone (Irigaray, Butler, Edelman).

We conclude, looking at tragedy’s role in constituting humanism, philosophy and democratic theory, focusing on the politics of (self-)sacrifice (Arendt, Ellison, Lee Edelman, Rene Girard, Danielle Allen) and consider some more political, less universalist work on death, burial and humanism (Verdery, Faust, Edkins, Walt Whitman, Michael Warner, and Simon Critchley). Some relevant films: Fahrenheit 9-11, The Queen, Saving Private Ryan, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Slumdog Millionaire.

The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular-liberal democracy, one that guarantees the peaceful co-existence of religiously diverse populations. Enshrined in national constitutions and international laws and treaties, the right to freedom of conscience is seen as a key mechanism for ensuring that religious minorities are able to practice their traditions freely. In this seminar, we will examine the conceptual, legal, and political history of how religious difference has been imagined in, and produced by, the discourse on freedom of conscience. Conceptually, we will explore how religious identity becomes an important site for the institutionalization of the modern secular-liberal political order. What normative conceptions of freedom, religion, community, and the individual are encoded in the right to religious freedom? How has religious difference come to be distinguished from racial, ethnic, and linguistic difference? Legally, we will want to know how the right to religious freedom interacts with other kinds of constitutionally ensured liberal freedoms (such as the right to freedom of speech or minority rights)? How does the right to practice one’s religion freely affect the minority and majority communities of a liberal polity differently? What are the national and international laws through which religious difference has been articulated and regulated? In terms of its political history, we will explore how the problem of religious difference in the modern period is crucially informed by the legacy of colonial rule and inequalities of geo-political power. How does the differential status of First World and Third World sovereignty structure the possibility of religious freedom differently? How has the European treatment of religious minorities (key among them Europe’s Jewish and Muslim minority) been central to the shaping of international standards for how religious difference is politically managed? In addressing these questions, we will read widely from debates within political theory, philosophy, anthropology, history, and international law (including works by Antony Anghie, Talal Asad, Nathaniel Berman, Wendy Brown, Peter Danchin, Martti Koskenniemi, Uday Mehta, and Winnifred Sullivan). While authors such as Kant, Locke, Berlin, and J. S. Mill will orient our discussion on liberty and tolerance, significant time in the seminar will be spent examining the legacy of modern international conventions and treaties as well as contemporary political struggles over what it means to practice one’s religion freely in secular-liberal democracies.

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