The legal and the legitimate: re-opening Antigone for revisiting the climate change and biodiversity debates Sophocles’ Antigone is one of humanity’s best loved texts, and its potentialities for illuminating the human condition have been amply highlighted. I will re-open it with two goals: (1) offering a psycho-social reading of the play’s tensions between the legal and the legitimate by bringing Antigone’s and Creon’s voices across time for exploring how they, respectively, argue for attempting to legitimize an (illegal) action and a new law; (2) Discussing how the play’s tensions can put into perspective today’s tensions around biodiversity and climate change governance and laws. Regarding the first goal, I will explore three ideas. First I will defend that the play illustrates a tragic tension arising from the fact that the legal and the legitimate are not equivalent, and are constructed in and help constitute, two different although intersecting spheres; one is the public sphere, guided by shared, but also heterogeneous and dilemmatic values – of what some call the great reservoir of common sense - that have to be prioritized by choice. The other is the political sphere of state institutions, which incorporates and reifies only some of the values existent in the former, and only in certain priority orders. My second argument is that Antigone demonstrates that failing to take both spheres into account when seeking to legitimize new laws has tragic consequences. My third claim is that the play also illustrates two different political paths: “politics as necessity” and “politics as contingency”; it consequently interrogates us on the possible consequences of politics and governance being exercised through appeals to necessity (and to what is “outside” humanity), or through assuming contingency, and with it the heterogeneity of values and inter-subjective agreements around them. Finally, as a second goal, I will discuss how Antigone’s tensions and questions are today productive for understanding public contestation of (some of) the new climate change and biodiversity laws and regulations. I will namely explore whether climate change – a huge political experiment in humanity constructing a global legislative order – is primarily being legitimated by appeals to contingency (seeking support in shared values), or to necessity (seeking support on what is “outside” humanity). For concluding I will discuss the paths for, and some of the consequences of, re-imagining climate change governance as relying more on politics as contingency, more fully integrating both spheres.

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