Ex fabula ius oritur: Antigone and the law which arises from literature

Abstract

In the present essay, we intend to cover, based on the elements extracted from Sofocles’ tragedy Antigone, the guardianship of the right to bury the dead. From the beginning, it is questioned the absence of a legal device – either in the 1988 Constitution, or in the declaration of rights, conventions and international agreements – that ensures the right (fundamental) to bury the dead , relating it to the concept of death valid in the contemporaneity. Taken as a presupposition that the worship to the dead is present in the most different societies independent of the epochal and geographic factors, as well as of its cultural development stage – and that it assumes a social feature, associated to the collective memory, and a a personal feature , inscribing the subject in the familiar tradition, it is problematized the treatment that Brazil has been giving to its notable dead and it is evoked the confl ict about the burying of Jorge Rafael Videla, former Argentinean dictator. With this, it is intended to show that, although it is not supported, the right to bury the dead is inscribed in the occidental tradition and that the reading of Antigone rescues that tradition, illustrating in what ways the right may come from the reading.

Key words: Antigone, law in literature, constitutional rights.