I will re-open Sophocles’ Antigone 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, try 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 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 constructed in and help constitute, two different although intersecting spheres; one is the consensual universe of common sense, where shared, but also heterogeneous and dilemmatic values exist, that have to be prioritized for action and decision in certain orders. The other is the reified universe of institutions, of which some are state institutions which incorporate - and thus reify - 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 preparing new laws has tragic consequences. My third claim is that the play’s tensions, as Moscovici (1977) has noted, also illustrate two different political paths: “politics as necessity”, appealing to the reified as the source of legitimacy, and “politics as contingency”, appealing to the consensual. Finally, as a second goal, I will discuss how Antigone’s tensions are today productive for understanding public contestation of (some of) the new biodiversity laws and regulations in EU member-states. I will namely explore whether they are 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 ecological governance as relying more on politics as contingency, more fully integrating both spheres.

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