Abstract I will re-open Sophocles’ Antigone for: (1) offering a psycho-social reading of the play’s tensions between the legal and the legitimate, showing how Antigone and Creon attempt to, respectively, legitimize an (illegal) action and a new law; (2) Discussing how these tensions can help understand today’s conflicts around new EU biodiversity laws. Regarding the first goal, I will explore how the play’s tensions demonstrate how the legitimate and the legal are constructed in different universes: the consensual universe of shared, but also heterogeneous and dilemmatic values; and the reified universe of state institutions, which reify only some of the values of the former. Second, I will show how the play, as Moscovici has noted, also illustrates two different political options: “politics as necessity”, appealing to the reified for legitimacy, and “politics as contingency”, appealing to the consensual. As a second goal, I will explore how both tensions and options help understand public contestation of the legitimacy of the new EU biodiversity laws, and how the play stimulates re-imagining an ecological governance more capable of integrating both universes.

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