“The Feminine Rebel: Sophocles’ Antigone, Bizet’s Carmen, and Urban Gad’s Die Suffragette”
Adity Singh, IISER Bhopal

In this paper I will analyse three cultural texts separated by time that concern themselves with one common subject: the rebellion of women against the status quo, that is, the laws and customs that their societies attempt to confine them to. All three texts highlight the fraught relation of women to the existing state of affairs by featuring an opposition between the woman who subjects herself to the law and the one who rebels against it. We have Antigone against Ismene, Carmen against Michaela, and the Suffragette, eventually, against herself. This opposition brings out a key aspect of women’s oppression: the compulsion to conform, to give up on one’s desires for a predetermined “economy of goods”, as Lacan would put it, accompanied by an attitude of “voluntary servitude” to one’s oppression. I will argue that the overcoming of this oppression lies in what Badiou calls a torsion of one’s subjectivity, that is, the movement from the initial rebellion to the confident participation in the endeavour to transform the status quo. This movement both inscribes the subject in the old world, the rebellion struggling to not be implicated in that which it is rebelling against, and places her at the edge of a new world, for which she is ready to risk everything. Finally, I will posit that while the “universality” of patriarchy confines her to the private and particular, by endeavouring to inaugurate a novel order, the feminine rebel/hero makes a claim for an alternate conception of the universal, which rather than divide people into particular classes subject to the law, takes into account the singularity of each individual that constitutes the universal, and thus aims for universal human emancipation: the only future where the emancipation of women could hold.

Adity Singh is an Assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal, India. She holds MA and PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Nottingham. Her research interests and publications focus on the philosophy of freedom (‘Alain Badiou and the “Woman Question”, ‘Badiou and the Problem of Freedom’, ‘Kant and the Quest for Freedom’). She teaches Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern European Philosophy, Greek and Roman Literature and Political Theory.

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