Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death

By Judith Butler

The celebrated author of Gender Trouble here redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Antigone has long been a feminist icon of defiance. But what has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. Moreover, Antigone shows how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780231518048

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is the author of several books including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, Excitable Speech, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, and The Force of Non-Violence. In addition to numerous academic honors and publications, Butler has published editorials and reviews in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Nation, Time Magazine, the London Review of Books, and in a wide range of journals, newspapers, radio and podcast programs throughout Europe, Latin America, Central and South Asia, and South Africa. They live in Berkeley.

Reviews for Antigone's Claim

[logocentric_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Antigone’s Claim Butler suggests that although the incest taboo works in much the same way that the repressive hypothesis on sexuality constrained variable constructions of sexual alterna-tives, it nevertheless requires an alternative reading, one that not so much reverses itself, (sanc-tioning incest between family members is not what Butler has is mind), but instead Antigone signifies a crisis, a breakdown in signification that occurs when one pushes the very limits of kinship. By placing the very term ‘kinship’ in crisis, Antigone thus makes herself ‘monstrous’ and unrecognizable, and signals the conditions under which a radical deconstitution is the un-avoidable outcome. Butler’s reading of Antigone illustrates a complex unfolding of all the principal concepts of her oeuvre, notions such as ‘abject’ ‘constitutive outside’ ‘melancholia’ all combine to articulate her notion of a ‘new field of the human’. In particular her notion of catachresis and iteration informs one’s understanding of how she develops her postoedipal political framework.Butler argues that the heteronormative Oedipal drama is a forced drama of sorts, established as it is on the foreclosure of the diverse ways of doing kinship that exist outside of the narrow struc-turalist binary frame laid out by Lévi-Strauss and later by Lacan. Antigone commits to pushing the very borders of her very being, and placing into crisis the intelligibility of the Oedipal discursive framework. To this end Antigone’s Claim makes an "imaginative leap" in thinking the pos-sibility of a postoedipal subjectivity. Butler exposes the Lévi-Straussian/Lacanian symbolic law as thoroughly social or ‘pre-political’ and argues that Antigone figures as the epistemological limits of a kinship based on an oedipal law. Not only does she lack a language with which to articulate and gain meaning in the current oedipal symbolic frame and is forced into what But-ler’s terms ‘catachresis.’ Forced in political catachresis, Butler argues that Antigone figures a postoedipal subjectivity, a poststructuralism of kinship posited variously as: monstrous and as pushing the epistemological boundaries of one’s very being. Significantly this appears in Butler’s later work as her post-humanist attempt to articulate a non-anthropomorphic anthropology in doing so she is trying to grasp the theoretical co-ordinates of this “new field of the human” which she argues Antigone has become. But this new field of the human to emerge requires a radical desubjectivation, a draining of the subjective coordinates that held one in place and the instating of a totally new ‘symbolic’ order.