This is actually one of Judith Butler's most readable books. It starts from the Lacanian premise of "what if pyschoanalysis had taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its starting point?" I actually was inspired to create my own performance of Antigone while reading this book, and as an artist and an academic, that is the truest measure, for me, of a great book--one that inspires art as it inspires a new way of looking at something.

“¿Quién es Antígona dentro de esta escena y qué vamos a hacer con sus palabras, convertidas en acontecimientos dramáticos, actos realizativos? Ella no pertenece a lo humano, pero habla su lenguaje. Actúa, aunque se le ha prohibido la acción, y su acto apenas es una simple asimilación de una norma existente. Y cuando actúa, como quien no tiene derecho a actuar, altera el vocabulario del parentesco que es precondición de lo humano, e implícitamente se plantea la cuestión de cuáles deben ser en realidad esas precondiciones. Antígona habla desde el lenguaje del derecho del que está excluida, participando en el lenguaje de la reivindicación con el cual no es posible ningún tipo de identificación final. Si ella es humana, entonces lo humano ha entrado en catacresis: ya no conocemos su uso correcto. Y en la medida que ocupa el lenguaje que nunca puede pertenecerle, ella funciona como un quiasmo dentro del vocabulario de las normas políticas. Si el parentesco es la precondición de lo humano, entonces Antígona es la ocasión para un nuevo campo de lo humano, logrado a través de catacresis política, la que se da cuando el menos que humano habla como humano, cuando el género es desplazado, y el parentesco se hunde en sus propias leyes fundadoras. Ella actúa, habla, se convierte en alguien para quien el acto de habla es un crimen fatal, pero esta fatalidad excede su vida y entra en el discurso de la inteligibilidad como su misma prometedora fatalidad, la forma social de un futuro aberrante sin precedentes”.

v clear overview of the Hegelian and lacanian readings of Antigone

If Sophocles would read this reading about readings I'm like 70 % sure he would say "Um, ok".

Antigone has always fascinated me. This clever books draws from psychoanalysis, varying literary and sociological theories espepcially Lacan and Hegel. It touches on queer theory and what is the meaning of kinship and family. It argues that because of the curse Antigone has little choice but to act and speak like a man and claim Polynices' burial.

Queering Antigone.

What was Antigone's crime? And did she really stand against Creon, against the city-state? What if she stands at the very limit of the public law, exposing its unwritten, disavowed support?
Some of the more technical problematization of what Antigone stood for Lacan went a bit over my head.
Contra Hegel, who treats Antigone's action as a feminine 'corruption' and appropriation of what belongs to the masculine universality of the state (hence the feminine law of the family must give way to masculine law of the state) and against Lacanian psychoanalysis that supplies an unwitting apologia for the heterosexual social organization of the family via the demarcation of the social from the symbolic (the symbolic is the realm of totality and of pure formal positions), Butler maintains that Antigone represents the crisis of [normative] kinship representation itself. How? Antigone slides into every position except for that of the mother (she asserts her masculinity by appropriating the language of sovereignty even as she militates against it).
Having not read any Butler previously, I delved into this intepretation of the classic play expecting to understand little beyond immediate reference to the original text. So I'm positively amazed at how I well could, by and large, make sense of Butler's maneuvres, disruptions, interventions, etc,

This is the first of Butler's works I have read directly and I really enjoyed it, it was fairly accessible and a very good insight into Hegel's and Lacan's treatment of Antigone, though I think it focuses more on the impact of Antigone for gender (understandably) thru Lacan than what Antigone says about Law/state (Hegelian crit) which is what I was reading it for in particular, though the relationship between gender/polis is an ongoing one anyway. It is also relevant to thinking about essences at law more generally, and discusses metonym etc for those interested. I would have liked to see more of Butler developing her own formulation of what it is Antigone has to offer beyond 'loads of potential', but hey, this is poststructuralism. Enjoyed it a lot and inspired to read more about Antigone and literary crits of legal themes.

prepare for more butler coming soon

*3,5

Yo creo que el libro se llama así por que Antigona gritaría al leerlo.

Butler se basa demasiado en el discurso de Lacan y en el discurso de Hegel que cuesta trabajo encontrar cuál es la propuesta de Butler en todo este asunto.

Respecto a Lacan menciona algunos comentarios que él hizo sobre Antigona pero sin hablar más de ello, después toma algunos comentarios sobre lo simbólico pero estos son del segundo seminario de Lacan y lamentablemente para Butler, Lacan desarrollo mucho más la cuestión de lo simbólico que lo que dijo en su segundo seminario.

La lucha de Antigona no se trata de decirle que no a la ley de los hombres, tiene que ver con ponerle un final a la maldición que su padre, Edipo, puso sobre sí misma al actuar en contra de las leyes de los dioses. El actuar de Antigona es un “ya basta” a los fantasmas familiares que se han puesto sobre ella queriendo actuar base las leyes de los dioses entregándole sepultura a su hermano. Los dioses no la castigan, es Creonte quien después es castigado por los dioses ya que lo que el hace con Antigona va en contra de ellos.

To get it out of the way early, this is just barely a book about Sophocles' Antigone. I don't say this as a criticism by the way, but simply as a matter of setting expectations. As for what it is about, well, it's pretty classic Butler: take a bunch of social and political distinctions (between, say, the public and the private, life and death, family and society), show how unstable they are - the ways in which they bleed into one another, cross over at unexpected points, and muddle otherwise taken-for-granted lines of 'intelligibility' - and ground a hope for a more emancipatory and radical social order upon the wreckage wrought. Seen from a distance, it's a pretty straightforward project, and Antigone here serves as nothing less than the springboard from which to articulate it. Such are the stakes of Butler's reading of the play, which continually attends to the 'transgressions', 'scandals', and defiances of the norm which litter the text, all the better to bring out its emancipatory potential.

Yet while Antigone (the play), serves as the book's protagonist, it's the critique of its antagonists that lends the book most of its already-slim heft (just over 80 pages without notes). Thus alongside the reading of the play itself is Butler's engagement with both Hegel and Lacan, whose own readings of Antigone are taken to exemplify attempts to 'contain' and otherwise check the transgressive currents that Butler so carefully divines. Against Hegel then, will Butler reject the attempt to fix the distinction between the state and the family, while against Lacan is emphasised the unstable boundaries between the 'Symbolic' and the social, distinctions which, in Butler's reading, underpin approaches to not just the play, but to our wider understanding of social and political categories more generally. If it sounds like there's alot packed in to this little book, it's because there is, and if there's any difficulty in reading here, it's as much to do with the condensed presentation of argument than with anything else.

That all said, this book has left me somewhat torn. On the one hand, I can't help but appreciate the 'expansion' of Butler's thought from categories of gender (so central to her early work) to categories of social relations - specifically kinship relations - more generally. I've undoubtably come away from this thinking more critically and more expansively about the kinds of kinship relations that we so easily take for granted in this day and age. On the other hand, did we really need another reading of Antigone to get there? I mean, at my most critical, this felt like a footnote in the form of a book, developing ideas that really demanded more than the simple literary analysis offered within (even in a book of philosophy, is there really nothing to say of the sociology, history or economics of the family form? Really?). So yeah, a book of interesting ideas let down by the minimal effort made to pursue them - a disappointment not in spite of, but because of its allure.