On May 20, 2025, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of French Language and Literature, held a talk titled “One Corpse, Two Laws: Antigone’s Resistance in the Tension Between Conscience and Power.”
The event began at 1:30 PM in the Tahsin Yücel Lecture Hall, A Block, of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. It featured a comparative discussion of Antigone by Sophocles—one of the foundational works of ancient Greek tragedy—and the 20th-century adaptation by French playwright Jean Anouilh.
The speakers were Associate Professor Dr. Şevket Kadıoğlu (faculty member of the Department of French Language and Literature) and Deniz Öztekin (Master’s student in the same department). Among the attendees were faculty members, students from the French Language and Literature Department, as well as students from other departments and art enthusiasts with an interest in literature and theatre.
The talk explored key dualities such as conscience and law, freedom and authority, and the individual and the state through the lens of the two versions of Antigone by Sophocles and Anouilh.
In Sophocles’ Antigone, tragic submission guided by divine command and fate takes center stage, whereas in Anouilh’s version, the emphasis shifts to individual rebellion shaped by the absurdist atmosphere of the 20th century.
Concepts such as “grave,” “earth,” and “boundary” were interpreted in both texts as points of conflict between the sacred and the political. While Sophocles confronts the audience with catharsis, Anouilh foregrounds the tragic solitude of the individual and the search for meaning. Thus, Antigone was interpreted as a persistent voice of conscience against oppression across the ages.
The speakers emphasized that the event aimed to enhance students’ critical thinking skills, strengthen their ability to make intertextual connections, and offer new perspectives on how tragedies can be interpreted in a contemporary context.