Es handelt sich um eine philosophische/psychoanalytische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Ödipus/Antigone-Stoff. Die Fragestellungen haben mich interessiert.

Είναι από τα βιβλία για τα οποία ντρέπομαι να βάλω βαθμολογία. Τα 5 αστέρια είναι λίγα για να εκφράσουν τον ενθουσιασμό μου που επιτέλους το διάβασα. Η Butler αυτή τη φορά με συγκλόνισε με ερωτήματα γύρω από την πολιτισμική απαγόρευση της αιμομιξίας, πάντα μέσα στο πεδίο της κανονιστική ετεροφυλοφιλία την οποία φυσικοποιούμε. Θα το διαβάσω ξανά και ξανά, μέχρι να αισθανθώ ότι αντιλαμβάνομαι πλήρως την κριτική της σκέψη. Ένα τεράστιο μπράβο στην εξαιρετική μετάφραση της Βαρβάρας Σπυροπούλου, η οποία δεν αλλοιώνει το λόγο των ομολογουμένως δύσκολων Μπατλεριανών.

I cannot give ths book a true review. Some parts made sense to me, other parts not so much. If philosophy was my major I might understand it more.

The important idea that resonated for me was that all of us need to awakened for our somnambulism by the power of tragedy. Who knew you could competently derive incest tabbu as a driver of hetereosexism and homophobia from Sophocles' 'Antigone'! Excellent, Judith.

I guess I'm in a mood.

For fairness and truth.

‘I say that I did it and I do not deny it,’ spoke Atigone, the titular character of Sophocles’s famous play. Antigone is a real one, defying the State in an act so subversive it triggers a familial catastrophe and full-blown political meltdown. And I thought my family dinners got awkward, and she wasn’t even drinking and didn’t have social media to talk petty shit (if she did you just know she’d already have been blocked by government officials and shadowbanned). While Antigone has a long tradition of literary and philosophical analysis as a ‘principle of feminine defiance of statism and an example of anti-authoritarianism,’ feminist and gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim stikes out to expose what Butler see’s as misconceptions about Antigone, primarily with regard to the idea of family order in relationship to the State, to examine them through linguistic and semiotic approaches. It’s a short but slightly demanding read but though Butler is often considered “difficult” with robust arguments rife with intertextual references and a rich lexicon of academic terms,I didn’t find Antigone’s Claim to be overwhelmingly challenging and instead quite engaging. You won’t pull your hair out with this one but might google some terms and wonder how the hell you pronounce them ( Responding to the scholarship on Antigone from philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Jacques Lacan, Antigone’s Claim finds Butler confronting the heteronormative assumptions on kinship, gender roles, and the political significance of Antigone’s defiance for a rather interesting read. Come for the philosophy, stay for the wild family drama as kingdoms, former theories, and social constructs crumble.

‘[C]an Antigone herself be made into a representative for a certain kind of feminist politics, if Antigone’s own representative function is itself in crisis?’

I really enjoy the tale of Antigone and the many variations on the text, with Antigonick by classicist scholar Anne Carson and Kamila Shamsie’s Woman’s Prize winning Home Fire—a modern retelling between the family of a conservative British MP and the family with a father and brother amongst the Jihadists—to be some favorites. Judith Butler, best known for her groundbreaking works on gender such as Gender Trouble, turns her eye towards Antigone as an avenue to discuss how subversions of gender norms disrupt the traditional frameworks of analysis for Antigone as a figure and also to continue her critiques of Hegel (such as in another Butler book, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, as I have just learned). If someone was looking for a succinct or quotable one-liner about Butler’s conclusions one could hazard a statement to the effect that traditional values are arbitrary and unstable as Atigone deviates from social constructs of gender, though even that would lack the nuance of Butler’s arguments here and misses some of that rather excellent analysis on language. Butler looks at aspects of kinship, ideas of the State, and idea of law and symbolism which all ricochet off Hegel and Lacan like she’s throwing those big rubber balls at a carnival and their theories are the clowns she is gleefully knocking down. And I’m fairly sure she took out enough to win the big prize (which like…imagining a giant, stuffed Antigone doll hanging on the prize cave wall is weirdly in keeping with the story?).

‘Although not quite a queer heroine, Antigone does emblematize a certain heterosexual fatality that remains to be read.’

‘I am no classicist and do not strive to be one,’ Butler admits, yet she manages to pull off quite a thought-provoking examination that pulls Antigone into her wheelhouse of gender politics and that the rejection of gender binaries and analyzing the performance of gender roles finds former analysis to be wanting and stuck in outdated heteronormative assumptions. This is most evident in her discussion on how Antigone performing the burial rites is assuming a role granted only to men while also acting in defiance to a King in what can be seen as a form of emasculation particularly as her act forces his hand—’he expects that his word will govern her deeds, and she speaks back to him, countering his sovereign speech act by asserting her own sovereignty’—and thusly unsettles the political climate of Thebes. ‘She assumes manhood through vanquishing manhood, but she vanquishes it only by idealizing it,’ Butler writes:

‘In defying the state, she repeats as well the defiant act of her brother, thus offering a repetition of defiance that, in affirming her loyalty to her brother, situates her as the one who may substitute for him and, hence, replaces and territorializes him’

But the idea of subverting gender norms and roles within the family—kinship—also extends to the notion of incest with Antigone’s mom also being her grandmother and all that jazz that Lacan makes a large part of his theories on law and social order. Antigone doesn’t just act as symbolic of a sister or a woman’s role in the family but also as a brother and a father role and just about any role except mother.

‘[F]or Lacan, kinship is rarefied as enabling linguistic structure, a presupposition of symbolic intelligibility, and thus removed from the domain of the social; for Hegel, kinship is precisely a relation of “blood” rather than one of norms.That is, kinship is not yet entered into the social, where the social is inaugurated through a violent supersession of kinship.’

Butler says that this isn’t about Antigone representing “family values” and tradition but just that those values are arbitrary and well…kind of weird. ‘Antigone is one for whom symbolic positions have become incoherent’ Butler aruges and ‘where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds’ because of this. ‘Hegel claims that Antigone represents the law of the household gods,’ with Creon as the symbol of law and State and ‘the conflict between them is one in which kinship must give way to state authority as the final arbiter of justice.’ Butler shows law as something rather arbitrary and only exists because it is enforced by violence except Antigone gets all Rage Against the Machine on Thebes, you know the one, yelling “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” and buries that dead brother against the wishes of law.

Another big element is the idea of the relationship between family and the State. In her reading of Hegel and Lacan, Butler says they see it as a clash between family and State and kinship against law. Hegel finds it to be an argument of the family but like, not the family arguing over who gets what in the will but the family arguing over who gets burial rites and who gets State execution.

‘In Hegel, kinship is rigorously distinguished from the sphere of the state, though kinship is a precondition for the emergence and reproduction of the state apparatus. In Lacan, kinship, as a function of the symbolic, becomes rigorously dissociated from the sphere of the social, and yet it constitutes the structural field of intelligibility within which the social emerges. My reading of Antigone, in brief, will attempt to compel these distinctions into productive crisis.Antigone represents neither kinship nor its radical outside but becomes the occasion for a reading of a structurally constrained notion of kinship in terms of its social iterability, the aberrant temporality of the norm.’

Butler asks of kinship and State if ‘these very terms sustain their independence from one another,’ and determines that, no, they act upon each other. Burying the brother exposes a mutual dependence of kinship and State where Creon’s authority is due to the succession of kinship yet her defiance destabilizes the State’s claim of authority.

‘[Antigone] points somewhere else, not to politics as a question of representation but to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed.’

My favorite aspect was that on language. Butler writes that ‘Creon and Antigone, are chiasmically related’ and that they both use similar language and Antigone’s linguistic structure matches that of the language used to show the sovereign State. Her response, ‘I say that I did it and I do not deny it,’ is a wonderfully ambiguous power move, being both a confession of resistance and a surrender. It’s the Greek myth version of ‘sorry, not sorry’ but also shows a paradox that even while defying Creon she is caught in the State structure she opposes.

It becomes a larger statement of Butler as a warning against the contemporary feminists that they cannot seek legitimacy through State power. Aligning oneself with State institutions causes you to be entangled in and upholding the hierarchies you are opposing. Basically, don’t think getting the State to recognize your platform will give you more freedom, probably just more paperwork and hassle and government entanglement. Such as right now where the US allowed people to use They/Them on passports and State IDs—I said the very last person I want to have a conversation with about being non-binary was a cop who would be the only person to ever see my ID and did not—are now being denied that these IDs are valid and must reapply or be unable to vote and who knows what other troubles being on a list of gender nonconforming individuals will lead to under a violent, transphobic and all around anti-LGBTQ+ administration. As Butler says, don’t trust the government to support your resistance or give you the tools to overthrow them.

‘My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and sexual theory’

Antigone’s Claim from Judith Butler is a quick but heady read that throws a lot of theory around yet makes for a rather engaging argument. I enjoy how it becomes an expression on queer identities and gender politics and moves philosophical arguments into acknowledging gender nonconformity by establishing that heteronormative assumptions are a faulty base upon which to build a theory. Worth the read!

4/5

‘She acts, she speaks, she becomes one for whom the speech act is a fatal crime, but this fatality exceeds her life and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising fatality, the social form of its aberrant, unprecedented future.’

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.

Perhaps it wasn't the best time for this reading. The subject is amongst my favorites, yet the core of Sophocles' moral question was lost in the bent style of Butler. I'm tempted to say, she did it. I suppose despite Butler's interrogation of the play and her subsequent fascinating questions, her use of Lacan, Hegel and Levi-Strauss in examining kinship kept me dazed and at an unfortunate distance. I have a trip looming and my congestion shrieks for attention, thus I hope to read the play again and explore Antigones which Butler references twice.

Profondo e coltissimo, ma troppo cerebrale davvero. Un’analisi approfondita di Antigone alla luce dei commenti di Hegel e Lacan, che alla fine fa dimenticare il suo portato rivoluzionario.

This book is probably one of the more accessible ones by Butler in terms of style. I did not get in to it terribly much in terms of content though. It should be said that it was some time ago since I finished it though, so I will leave it at that and perhaps come back with a longer reviewer later.

read this for one of my papers. it happens rarely enough that i get to read an academic book in full, not just in excerpts, so i'm logging it here

I actally have another book by Butler lying around (Precarious Life) that I got from the library before it shut down, and that I'm very very curious about, so....might use the quarantine to take a look at that too!

به این خاطر که اولین ریویو فارسی برای این کتاب را می نویسم؛ قبل از هر صحبتی درباره ی کتاب می خواستم اطلاع دهم که کتاب ادعای آنتیگون به فارسی ترجمه شده ولی موفق به چاپ و نشر نشده اما به شکل پی دی اف در دسترس است.
.نویسنده با خوانشی از آنتیگون سوفوکل نگاهی انتقادی به دو نقد معروف هگل و لکان از این اسطوره دارد

Estremamente interessante la riflessione sul femminile e in generale sulle categorie ‘nascoste’, non politiche o pre - politiche, non incluse nel politico, nel suo discorso, nel suo linguaggio e nelle sue manifestazioni, che però sono fondamento indispensabile di quel politico stesso. L’ossimoro che si crea tra ciò che è tagliato fuori dal politico e il bisogno che il politico ha di ciò che taglia fuori, è acutamente osservato attraverso la figura di Antigone. Così come la necessità paradossale di appropriarsi del linguaggio del politico e del maschile anche laddove ci si ponga con antagonismo a quella sfera, sgambetto continuamente teso alle rivendicazioni di genere contemporanee, peraltro. Però un po’ mistificate e imprecise le letture del pensiero teorico hegeliano e del significato della contrapposizione di legge statale e legge divina nel mondo etico. Peccato.