Abstract

[Antigone and the Legitimacy of Resistance to Oppression] This essay discusses the right of resistance through Sophocles’ Antigone, focusing on the tension between legality and legitimacy in the exercise of political power. Rather than treating the tragedy as an origin of contemporary human rights, it examines Antigone as a paradigm of resistance to an order regarded as illegitimate. More specifically, the essay argues that Antigone embodies a form of responsible resistance in which disobedience, personal exposure, and the acceptance of the moral, political, and legal consequences of the act remain inseparable. In this respect, the argument is brought into dialogue with Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha, understood as firmness in truth. Finally, the essay considers the enduring contemporaneity of Antigone in the sense proposed by Giorgio Agamben: a relation to one’s own time that is also untimely and therefore capable of exceeding the immediacy of the present.