Not only did I like this book, but I was surprised and pleased with how comprehensible it was. Judith Butler has a reputation for opaque writing, so I figured I was in for 80 pages of suffering, but it really wasn't bad. I did struggle a little because this book is so thoroughly based in Sophocles' Oedipus cycle, which I have yet to read (though it's near the top-ish section of my reading list). *Update, I have read the Oedipus cycle since the time I wrote this original review.

Basically in this book Butler puts forth a theory that Antigone, as the figure who doesn't quite fit into normative commandments disrupts them through speech and by claiming rights entailed in certain socially constructed positions to which she does not properly belong (e.g., state sovereignty, masculinity). Portions of Butler's argument made me think of Ranciere's claim that those excluded from politics actually engage in political action when they attempt to claim political rights, thereby exercising the rights they attempt to lay claim to. But, whereas Ranciere uses the example of women in the French Revolution, Butler chooses Antigone, who cannot (and does not attempt to) claim a socially legitimate place in either the kinship order or the state order, the two realms which critics have traditionally read as in conflict with one another. Therefore, unlike French women claiming a place in a nation-state's political structure, Antigone must (and does) claim a place which is no place, meaning that she claims death as her legitimate space, and her presence within state and kinship networks intrudes death into those networks. But at the same time, death was always already within those networks. It's complex.

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Admittedly, quite a lot of this went over my head, but I managed to glean a few salient points that will keep me thinking about this work and likely have me returning to it.

1. This text certainly put kinship on the radar for me as something that can be actively complicated. My general understanding of kinship relations has revolved around Levi-Strauss and Engels, but Butler shines a new light on them that I think is extremely useful to thinking through modern kinship norms and relationships

2. I thought it was pretty illuminating the way Butler uses Antigone as a “way into” conversations and questions about kinship and kinship relations as well as the relationship between the family and the state that are relevant to our contemporary situation. I certainly “knew” that literature was a powerful tool for interesting conversations about our world, but Butler masterfully exhibits what something like that looks like.

3. The last chapter of this book was particularly fascinating for me. The suggestions seems to be that Antigone is “outside” of the Polis but comes to inhabit its language in a way that is at once transgressive and perfectly within the boundaries of the law, making apparent the “promiscuity” (Butler’s word) already inherent and potential to the law itself. Butler uses this as a springboard to consider if psychoanalysis is necessarily conservative (a claim often made against psychoanalysis) OR, if it’s possible that Antigone points the way toward inhabiting psychoanalysis that at once retains its “Oedipal relationships” and forces them into new territory.

Fun read. Highly recommend.

For all the criticism against their opaque writing style, Butler genuinely has quite lovely prose when it comes to explaining theory.

In a sense, Antigone refuses to allow her love for her brother to become assimilated to a symbolic order that requires the communicability of the sign. By remaining on the side of the incommunicable sign, the unwritten law, she refuses to submit her love to the chain of signification, that life of substitutability that language inaugurates.

Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement, one that puts the reigning regimes of representation into crisis and raises the question of what the conditions of intelligibility could have been that would have made her life possible, indeed, what sustaining web of relations makes our lives possible, those of us who confound kinship in the rearticulation of its terms?

What is produced ... is a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode. What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love, where the lack of institutional sanction forces language into perpetual catachresis, showing not only how a term can continue to signify outside its conventional constraints but also how that shadowy form of signification takes its toll on a life by depriving it of its sense of ontological certainty and durability within a publicly constituted sphere.

Ah, ah, ah. So much complexity. The ways I enact all of this, the ways I do not. The open questions as to whether there is not still more of my own repudiations to own --

"How do we understand this strange place if being between life and death, of speaking precisely from that vacillating boundary? If she is dead in some sense and yet speaks, she is precisely the one with no place who nevertheless seeks to claim one within speech, the unintelligible as it emerges within the intelligible, a position within kinship that is no position."

*

"[For Lacan] The image of Antigone, the image of irresolution, the irresolved, is the position of Being itself.

Earlier on this same pages, however, Lacan links this same image to "tragic action," one that he later claims articulates the position of Being as a limit. Significantly, this limit is also described in terms of a constitutive irresolution, namely, "being buried alive in a tomb." Later, he gives us other language with which to understand that irresolved image, that of motionless moving (252). This image is also said to "fascinate" and to exercise an effect on desire -- an image that will turn out, at the end of "The Slendor of Antigone," to be constitutive of desire itself. In the theater, we watch those who are buried alive in a tomb, we watch the dead move, we watch with fascination as the inanimate is animated.

It seems that the irresolvable coincidence of life and death in the image, the image that Antigone exemplifies without exhausting, is also what is meant by the "limit," and the "position of Being." This is a limit that is not precisely thinkable within life, but that acts in life as the boundary over which the living cannot cross, a limit that constitutes and negates life simultaneously.

When Lacan claims that Antigone fascinates as an image, and that she is "beautiful" (260), he is calling attention to this simultaneous and irresolvable coincidence of life and death that she brings into relief for her audience. She is dying, but alive, and so signifies the limit that (final) death is . . . There is something more: they are characters who find themselves "right away in a limit zone, find themselves between life and death" (272), conveyed by Lacan as one hyphenated word: "entre-la-vie-et-la-mort."

*

"Although Lacan identifies this death-driven movement internal to desire as what finally takes her out of the symbolic, that condition for a supportable life, it is peculiar that what moves her across the barrier to the scene of death is precisely the curse of her father, the father's words, the very terms by which Lacan earlier defines the symbolic . . ."

*

"In a sense, Antigone refuses to allow her love for her brother to become assimilated to a symbolic order that requires the communicability of the sign. By remaining on the side of the incommunicatible sign, the unwritten law, she refuses to submit her love to the chain of signification, that life of substitutibility, that language inaugurates. She stands, Lacan tells us, for "the ineffacable character of what is" (279). But what is, under the rule of the symbolic, is precisely what is evacuated through the emergence of the sign. The return to an ineffacable ontology, prelinguistic, is thus associated on Lacan with a return to dead, and, indeed, with a death drive . . ."

*

"Antigone represents a kind of thinking that counters the symbolic and, hence, counters life, perhaps it is precisely because the very terms of livability are established by a symbolic that is challenged by her kind of claim . . . The words of the father, the inaugurating utterances of the symbolic curse connect his children in one stroke. These words become the circuit within which her desire takes form, and though she is entangled in these words, even hopelessly, they do not quite capture her. Do these words not condemn her to death, since Oedipus claims that it would have been better had his children not lived, or is it her escape from those words that lead her into the unlivability of a desire outside cultural intelligibility? . . ."

*

"But to what extent can this death-driven thought return to challenge the articulation of the symbolic, and to alter the fatal interdictions by which it reproduces it's own field of power? And what of her fate is in fact a social death, in the sense that Orlando Patterson has used that term? This seems a crucial question, for this position outside life as we know it, is not necessarily a position outside as it must be."

*

"How does one grieve from within the presumption of criminality, from within the presumption that one's acts are invariably and fatally criminal?

Consider that Antigone is trying to grieve, to grieve openly, publicly, under conditions in which grief is explicitly prohibited by an edict that assumes the criminality of grieving Polyneices and names as criminal anyone who would call the authority of that edict into question. She is one for whom open grieving is itself a crime. But is she guilty only because of the words that are upon her, words that come from elsewhere, or has she also sought to destroy and repudiate the very bonds of kinship that she now claims entitlement to grieve? She is grieving her brother, but part of what remains unspoken in that grief is the grief she has for her father, and, indeed, her other brother. Her mother remains almost fully unspeakable, and there is hardly a trace of grief for her sister, Ismene, whom she has explicitly repudiated. The "brother" is no singular place for her, though it may well be that all her brothers (Oedipus, Polyneices, Eteocles) are condensed at the exposed body of Polyneices, an exposure she seeks to cover, a nakedness she would rather not see, or have seen.

. . . Her melancholia, if we can call it that, seems to consist in this refusal to grieve that is accomplished through the very public terms by which she insists on her right to grieve. Her claim to entitlement may well be the sign of a melancholia at work in her speech. Her loud proclamations of grief presuppose a domain of the ungrievable. The insistence on public grieving is what moves her away from feminine gender into hubris, into that distinctly manly excess that makes the guards, the chorus, and Creon wonder: Who is the man here? [!] There seems to be some spectral men here, ones that Antigone herself inhabits, the brothers whose place she has taken and whose place she transforms in the taking. The melancholic, Freud tells us, registers his or her "plaint," levels a juridical claim, where the language becomes the event of the grievance, where, emerging from the unspeakable, language carries a violence that brings it to the limits of speakability.

We might ask what remains unspeakable here, not in order to produce speech that will fill the gap, but to ask about the convergence of social prohibition and melancholia, how the condemnations under which one lives turn into repudiation that one performs, and how the grievances that emerge against the public law also constitute conflicted efforts to overcome the muted rage of one's own repudiations. In confronting the unspeakable in "Antigone," are we confronting a socially instituted foreclosure of the intelligible, a socially instituted melancholia in which the unintelligible life emerges in language as a living body might be interred into a tomb?"

“I remember hearing stories about how radical socialists who refused monogamy and family structure at the beginning of the 1970s ended that decade by filing into psychoanalytic offices and throwing themselves in pain on the analytic couch. And it seemed to me that the turn to psychoanalysis and, in particular, to Lacanian theory was prompted in part by the realization by some of those socialists that there were some constraints on sexual practice that were necessary for psychic survival and that the utopian effort to nullify prohibitions often culminated in excruciating scenes of psychic pain. The subsequent turn to Lacan seemed to be a turn away from a highly constructivist and malleable account of social law informing matters of sexual regulation to one that posits a presocial law, what Juliet Mitchell once called a “primordial law” (something she no longer does), the law of the Father, which sets limits upon the variability of social forms and which, in its most conservative form, mandates an exogamic, heterosexual conclusion to the oedipal drama. That this constraint is understood to be beyond social alteration, indeed, to constitute the condition and limit of all social alterations, indicates something of the theological status it has assumed. And though this position often is quick to claim that although there is a normative conclusion for the oedipal drama, the norm cannot exist without perversion, and only through perversion can the norm be established. We are all supposed to be satisfied with this apparently generous gesture by which the perverse is announced to be essential to the norm. The problem as I see it is that the perverse remains entombed precisely there, as the essential and negative feature of the norm, and the relation between the two remains static, giving way to no rearticulation of the norm itself.

In this light, then, it is perhaps interesting to note that Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure.”

Antigone was kind of boring, had no real plot twists.

I never know how to rate books of academic theory, in part because I never know whether to treat them as instrumental (so I use this book to do x in my own work) or as aesthetic works in their own right (good luck with that). I think of this book as sort of a third category, related to the instrumental one: a book that I read as a sort of abstract instrument, which is thought-provoking of ideas that are not necessarily directly linked to what this book is saying. In this sense, I found this book both helpful and--to use a word I find myself using a lot on this site--rich. Having recently taught Antigone, I don't know that Butler supports her claim for incest between Antigone and her brother forcefully enough; much of the proving to this point, which is central to the manuscript, goes in a footnote. I also can't remember something I've read that lurched so rapidly between passages I understood immediately and passages I still can't quite comprehend. But as a thinking-producer, in a way I can't quite articulate, this book worked fantastically, and may work for you, if you work in and around things like performance.

I have read some Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and a couple more), but not all Butler, so I was surprised to find out that she had written about Antigone. I did not take her for a classicist. However, I can see why she chose Oedipus daughter / sister for her reflection on kinship. Antigone provides a fertile ground for reflection on the limits of the law, for its questioning, and allows for new forms of kinship. I must say that the essay, though easy to read (not always the case with Butler), did not provide me with a clear picture of what these new forms can be, so at the end is more a reflection on Antigone herself and her situation than a presentation of new forms of kinship.

4.5 tan 5

Provavelmente um livro que merece mais do que 3 estrelas. Mas dei essa nota por ser um livro que perde o sentido se você não estiver dentro desse panorama, incluindo ter uma boa noção (não-superficial) previa de Hegel e Lacan. Dou essa nota porque poderia ter mais discussão sobre a antígona fora do diálogo Hegel-Lacan, talvez o livro fosse mais acessível também. Agora, para quem está dentro dessa discussão me parece ser um grande livro com muitos argumentos e densidade teórica impressionante.

a really challenging reworking of the antigone myth for modern political activism. Butler uses the story of antigone to queer concepts such as kinship and family for a feminist reworking of systems of power and obligation. it's a handfull but really pushes readers in new directions.