This document provides an analysis of Antigone from the perspective of her acting as a human rights activist. It discusses how Antigone disobeys the law created by King Creon forbidding the burial of her brother Polynices. While Antigone appeals to the unwritten laws of the gods to justify her actions, her struggle can be seen as fighting for universal human rights and dignity. The document then examines the dynamics of Antigone's resistance and disobedience as a form of counter-hegemonic struggle against unjust laws and domination of one set of values over others. However, it also notes the problematic nature of human rights discourse in claiming universality while promoting particular values and moralities.

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Arianna Jacqmin - Law, Obedience, Disobedience: Socio-Legal Perspectives
“If Antigone Were a Human Rights Activist” 1
Abstract - The present essay offers an interpretation of the character of Antigone in today’s world, as a human rights
activist. Through the analysis of her act of disobedience to State law, it is possible to understand the dynamics of counter-
hegemonic mobilisations and the arguments used to support their claims. Nevertheless, the example of Antigone helps
understanding the ambiguity of the human rights discourse, which arises from the presumption to struggle for universal
and incontestable moral values.
The right to bury one’s own relative as natural right
The Greek tragedy of Antigone reminds the actual tragedy of thousands of Antigones in the
world who, mothers, sisters, or daughters of disappeared persons, look for the bodies of their missing
beloved and ask institutions for the restitution of the corpses. The drama of Antigone is that of a
woman who wants to bury her deceased brother, Polynices, but who is prevented in doing so by State
law. Indeed, the King Creon has adopted a proclamation that forbids the burial of the traitors of
Thebes, among which there is Polynices. In view of this law, Antigone opposes her own moral
commitment toward honouring her brother, regardless of his behaviour during his lifetime. Following
her will, she disobeys the law and buries the body. However, when discussing with her sister and
when judged by Creon, the protagonist never refers to her own morality to justify her action: rather,
she appeals to the law of gods, a law that is intrinsic in the nature of things and beyond human control,
that asks men to respect the body of the dead, as part of nature, to mourn their relatives, and to honour
the sacred relation among family members. The origin of these rituals is lost in the mists of time:
ceremonies, burials, and prayers have always been present in the history of humanity. They are mostly
related with religious believes, as anthropologists testify (Malinowski, 1948), since religions try to
provide the meaning of death to make sense of life. Antigone claims that her duty, and right, to bury
the body is prescribed by divine norms.
According to the main monotheistic religions, death happens in reason of God’s will, while
funerals are sacred moments not only to dispose of the corpse, but also to enable the soul of the dead
to move to a new dimension. The narrative of afterlife requires the living to respect, bury, and honour
the dead. Also in animist religions, death covers a crucial role: the spirit of the dead is usually the
medium between the community and the god, or gods; thus, disrespecting the former means irritating
the latter. Antigone does not refer to any specific religion: rather, she talks about a broader law of
1
I borrow the title from Sousa Santos, B. (2009). If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the
Challenge of Political Theologies. Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal, 1(March), 1–42.

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gods, which has always been able to direct and affect human life. In her words, “Nor did I deem /
Your ordinance of so much binding force, / As that a mortal man could overbear / The unchangeable
unwritten code of Heaven; / This is not of today and yesterday, / But lives for ever, having origin /
Whence no man knows.”2
In modern terms, we could call the law she appeals to as “Natural Law”, a
law that is valid for everybody since it is not based on the specific policy of a State, but on the shared
nature of all human beings. Based on the Christian idea of cosmic order, this law is embedded in the
universe: being men part of it, they cannot and should not escape from its rules. The violation of such
a law, the denial to bury the corpse, is thus contra naturam. The translation of Natural law, which
was the expression of God’s will in the human world, into the secularistic terms of modern Europe
led to the development of a series of natural rights, which are “plural, subjective, and possessive” and
which belong to every human being inasmuch he is part of humanity (Moyn, 2010: 21). The respect
for human dignity and the consequent deference to the body, alive or dead, find legitimation in this
discourse. In effect, we do not need to refer to religion to understand the value that death rituals have
been playing in past and present societies. The current tendency to recede from religion within
Western culture does not coincide with the disappearing of practices to mourn the deceased, nor of
the sacred respect for the corpse. Funerals and procedures of commemoration change but do not die.
In the misbelief of the existence of an afterlife, the family mourns the dead as a sign of deference and
gratitude for his life. The corpse seems to have a sacred nature that not even secular laws are able to
deny. Evidence of this is the fact that national and international legislations have been guaranteeing
the integrity of the body, by prohibiting its harassment, in order to protect the interests either of the
family members or of the deceased person. Death rituals play a relevant role at the psychological,
anthropological, and social level. The performance of the ceremony helps the relatives becoming
aware of the loss, and thus achieving cognitive closure: studies have enlightened a primitive capacity
to “let the dead go” in strict connection with the physical presence of the remains, since the corpse
stimulates the grieving. Rituals enable next of kin to symbolically bid farewell to their beloved and
to take a new role within the family and the society. Finally, burials may cover a cathartic effect by
freeing the relatives from feelings of sorrow and fear with regard to death and unknown afterlife.
Antigone does not fulfil any specific provision that her religion requires: rather, she is struggling
for the recognition of a necessity, the mourn of the dead body, that seems to belong to every human
person, being he loyal to the State or traitor. As such, her fight for honouring the dead is not any more
an individual mobilization: she does not fight for her particular case, being she the sister of the traitor,
but for all the sisters and the relatives of dead people. Even though her claim moves from a personal
2
The present and the following quotes come from Sophocles. (1993). Antigone. (S. Appelbaum, Ed.) (Dover Thri.).
New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

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situation – the family bond –, it is not based on individualistic reasons; rather, it arises from the
universal principle that accords (and enforces) the right (and the duty) to bury one’s own relatives. In
this sense, if we move her struggle into the contemporary world, we can identify her as an activist of
human rights. A woman who fights for the recognition of a universal right that is based on a shared
morality: in this case, the supreme values that are at stake are those protecting the family bond even
after death and the sacred nature of the body. These principles, which seem to be universally shared,
have been legitimized along history by appealing to “the law of gods” in ancient Greece, to Natural
Law in modern Europe, or to Human Rights in the global world nowadays.
The dynamics of the struggle
Antigone fights for the triumph of a morality based on family values, which is denied by the law
of Creon, the law of the State. Through her act of disobedience, she takes a position against this
normative system, which claims to reflect the will of the population, since it is the dominant and the
legitimate one. Antigone supports a counter-hegemonic struggle that fights not only against an unjust
harm to dead human bodies, but also against an uncontested set of values. In her act of resistance, we
find the essence of human rights mobilizations, as identified by Sousa Santos: “counter-hegemonic
human rights struggles are very often high-risk, sometimes life-threatening, struggles against very
powerful and unscrupulous enemies. They have, therefore, to be grounded on strongly motivated
political will, a will that has to be both collective and individual, since there is no collective activism
without individual activists. Without non-conformist, rebellious, insurgent will no meaningful social
struggles against institutionalised injustice and oppression can succeed. No such will may be built
without both radical and destabilising critical visions of current injustice and credible visions of an
alternative better society” (2015: 27). According to this interpretation of human rights struggles, the
acts of disobedience to the law and rebellion to an established set of norms and values are necessary
to grant an effective change. However, Antigone seems not to have the consciousness of human rights
mobilization; her action is rather an individual natural reaction to what she perceives as an injustice.
Neither there is any political strategy under her activism, nor collective organisation. Nevertheless,
her struggle is not just a private battle: Antigone wants the population of Thebes to be aware of her
action (Antigone: “Tell it, tell it! / You’ll cross me worse, by far, if you keep silence – / Not publish
it to all”), while she never denies it before Creon. Her act is public and political, and it stands for a
moral belief, the justness of burying one’s own family members, that the whole population shares but
that nobody else is able to pronounce (Antigone: “They too discern; they but refrain their tongues /
At your behest”) (Etxabe, 2013: 51; Dietz, 1985: 29). Antigone embodies a martyr that accepts the
risk of dying to be coherent with her principles. The nobility of the cause she is fighting for lessens

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the concern for the death penalty. Her act seems to be desperate and her sister, who embodies the
values of rationality and of obedience to authority, addresses her as “senseless”: she carries and buries
the corpse of her dead brother secretly, she assumes the responsibility for her act and her different
view of what is “just”, and she challenges Creon, the authority as king, uncle, and, eventually, man.
How does she dare to disobey the law of the State? Is she a deviant? Certainly, in a Foucauldian
perspective, by undermining authority and the normative world, she represents a threat to order and
to legality. Her act of burying can be perceived as mere disobedience, but the choice to politicise it
and the consequences it entails – the failure of her future marriage and her alive entombment,
paradoxical retribution for her deed – leads her to a state close to madness, and to deviance from a
reasonable behaviour for a woman in ancient Thebes (Ismene: “to exceed / Is madness, and not
wisdom”; Creon: “And you are not ashamed / That you deem otherwise?”). Antigone brings her claim
from the private to the public field: she becomes a rebel. Furthermore, by refusing to follow a legal
provision, she contests a whole normative system that does not comply with the law of gods, which
promotes the values of family and of respect for the soul and the body of the dead. By opposing her
morality, which finds legitimation in divine law, but which shares humanitarian principles with
contemporary human rights mobilizations, she represents something more than a social enemy: the
challenge for a new legal discourse that is counter to the hegemonic one, mere product of those in
power. Even though Antigone seems to be alone in her fight, she raises sympathy in her sister
(Ismene: “You go on a fool’s errand! / Lover true / To your beloved, none the less, are you!”), in the
chorus (Chorus: “I too, myself, am carried as I look / Beyond the bounds of right; / Nor can I brook /
The springing fountain of my tears, to see / My child, Antigone, / Pass to the chamber of universal
night”), and, ultimately, in the audience of the tragedy. Indeed, her claim is founded on a humanitarian
morality that finds broad, although silent, sharing. Against a legalized injustice by the State, she
stands up for her right and duty to mourn her brother. The mechanism of claiming and achieving new
rights starts from an act of disobedience that degenerates into a mission at the limit of madness.
Could we address human rights supporters as deviant, as well? Maybe claiming it would mean
going too further. Sure enough, they promote a counter-hegemonic discourse that through political
debate, judicial contestation, but also disobedience, challenges an authority, a political ideology, and
a dominant set of values. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the families of the disappeared
in Zimbabwe and in Nepal, who ask for the restitution of the missing bodies by national institutions,
are nothing but contemporary Antigones fighting against State legal and illegal injustices, and
opposing their human claims. The return of the bodies, their burial, and their proper farewell are
values that belong to divine, natural and human rights law, and that no State law should be able to
deny.

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The problematic discourse of human rights
Divine law, natural law, and human right law seem to accord to human being a natural dignity,
from which rights automatically derive. These three philosophical trends share a common strategy to
prove the validity of their arguments: they base themselves on a moral rather than political reasoning.
By insisting that the rights they are struggling for should be recognised because “Gods want so”,
because “the Nature of every human being requires so”, or because it is a “moral self-evidence that
common sense assumes” (Moyn, 2010: 9), Antigone and her human rights fellows claim not to fight
for a specific group or a specific interest. Thus, they cannot be blamed for being partisan, ideological,
and eventually political. However, scholars have enlightened some of the contradictions of such a
discourse. To understand them, it is worth to recall the dialogue between Antigone, who represents
human rights activism, and Creon, who stands for the ideology of the State. The former holds that the
law of Heaven requires her to bury the corpse (Antigone: “But had I borne to leave the body of him /
My mother bare unburied, then, indeed, / I might feel pain”); however she does not furtherly argue
the reasons why divine law should ask human beings for the burial: the will of gods is just in itself,
without further explanations. Nevertheless, we can perceive some hidden values that found this divine
provision: family cohesion, care for one’s own beloved, and respect for the dignity and integrity of
the person also after his death. On the other side, Creon claims his law to be legitimate in reason of
the role he covers: he is the king of Thebes. In a Weberian perspective, he founds his authority toward
the population on traditional grounds: the legitimacy of his provisions comes from his upper
hierarchical position. Nevertheless, again, the decision of Creon is not devoid of any moral
explanation. The King has not enforced the law in reason of personal hate toward Polynices, or at
least not only, but for deeper reasons. The provision is not morally unfounded, as we could identify
in it some of the following principles: loyalty, national unity, safeguard of national population, praise
of country protectors, and condemnation of traitors. Thus, in the arguments of both characters we find
a double legitimation of the law they are willing to respect or enforce. The formal legitimation
descends from the authority that provides the law. In the case of Antigone, the norm is valid since it
comes from gods; in the case of Creon, he is the legitimate legislator since he is the king. However,
behind these arguments, there is a substantive legitimation, which is based on moral values: on the
one hand, the respect for the family and the dead, on the other, the deference to national loyalty and
the contempt for betrayal. Both systems of law, the divine and the State one, found themselves not
on personal interests but on ethical grounds, which, although supported by a specific character, can
be potentially shared by everybody. If we focus on the substantive legitimation of the normative
systems, it is hard to claim one being more valid than the other, since they found on two distinct
moralities. How, thus, to establish the “more just” one? Eventually, what substantially differentiates

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natural/divine law from State law is the claim of the former of being “more universal”, since it asserts
to promote rights that belong to every individual as part of humankind. However, the critics toward
human rights arguments by contemporary scholars move from the inconsistency between what they
claim to be – universal – and what they finally are – particularistic and contradictory. The human
rights discourse is based on their alleged universal validity, regardless of the specificities of the socio-
political context where they work, in reason of their belonging to the human being as such (Sousa
Santos, 2015: 3). They are not created with a political aim; rather they are “discovered” in the human
nature, a concept that developed within the ius naturale doctrine, and then established through their
translation in national and international norms. As Michael Ignatieff sustains, movements in support
of human rights assert to struggle for “universal moral claims” (2003: 292), which appear to be
deprived from any political and ideological justification since they belong to every human being. By
adopting the language of “human rights”, activists back out of the political debate and introduce
themselves as the supporters of shared and undeniable values. As previously seen, the strategy is the
same adopted by Antigone: she does not contest the arguments of Creon, but she disobeys his law to
comply with a higher set of values, those coming from the law of gods of yesterday, or the law of
human rights of today. However, if we look at the plethora of human rights that have been legally
recognised, or at least claimed, until today, the contradiction of their discourse jumps out: the plurality
of ways of understanding human dignity, which reflects not just into the variety of human rights but
also in the multiplicity of their interpretations, cannot fit with one single and universal conception of
human nature. The uniqueness of the concept of human dignity, upon which human rights are based,
is biased by the number of ways of interpreting it and by the contingency of human rights. The rise
and the institutionalization of certain of them instead of others can be explained in terms of a
particular morality prevailing over another through mechanisms of power. In today’s world, the
human rights that are commonly recognised as valid are those belonging to the Western dominant
ethics. In effect, scholars have enlightened the ambiguity of the discourse of human rights as a
narrative to face State crimes, as well as to “export” them, along with democracy and freedom, to
third countries, through the use of violence. In other words, human rights have become a “moral way
for conducting politics” (Douzinas, 2007: 12). Yet, by looking at their historical development and at
the specific socio-political contexts where they arose, human rights mobilisations, even though
adopting a universalistic and moral language, are not above politics, since they pursue particularistic
human causes, those of a specific group in opposition to the rest of the population. As such, the
conflict between Antigone and Creon, which originally seemed to be between a citizen and the State,
between natural and positive law, and between morality and legality, ends up to be a clash between
two political ideas, based on different conceptions of the values of family, State, religion, and,

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ultimately, justice. How to identify between them the “more just” and the “more universal” morality?
And then, how to claim one normative system being substantially “more valid” than the other?
Basically, the answer to these questions could support or demolish the philosophy of divine, natural,
and human rights law.
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