some gorgeous and radical takes on antigone, loved the section comparing the problem of antigone to contemporary issues between kin and state, have not read hegel and lacan so her sometimes scathing critiques were incredibly boring and decontextualised for me! this would probably be 10x more comprehensible if u already had some knowledge on significant interpretations of antigone, which i don’t lol

Magical, maddening, provocative, poorly argued. It occurs to me that Antigone's attachment of great importance to the burying of her brother's body, which is obviously culturally obtained, starkly weakens many of Butler's and others' arguments regarding Antigone's position in or outside of society as well as the question of following society's laws when they contradict (and they do not always) the more primally ingrained laws of kinship.

I am fascinated by many of the ideas here and grateful for the opening up of new planes in the geometry of my thinking, but I do wish that these essays were more rigorously logical. I am also so far removed from and so deeply disgusted by Hegel's views as they relate to Antigone and to women that I find myself wishing to skip the paragraphs in which I see his name. That's a lot of paragraphs. (This is not to imply that I hold Butler responsible!)

I am completely unconvinced by Butler's argument that Antigone's recourse to language (i.e. using it) implicates her in the dominant power structure. I am disappointed by the attempt, for example, to portray as linked a) doing something and b) being "blind" to the existence of other options. Agency, anyone? Butler attributes this monstrosity of logic to Hegel, but I don't buy it. That said, I need to spend more time with both Hegel and Antigone to truly have a right to my opinion.

The large-scale arguments here are admirable. However, the circumventing of logic and the favoring of the seductive over the deductive seem to me somehow oddly like an attempt to take over from the [patriarchal] power structure Butler wishes to reconsider without first properly dismantling it.

I struggled with the assertion that words (with examples given in many different social and legal contexts) are equivalent to deeds, but after some time I came to be able to accept this peacefully and view it as a useful tool for considering the weight of various sorts of human interactions.

.......... bref

Started reading and then slotted into Deleuze and so on but here we are. Three sections that are distinct enough that I want to call them essays though they follow one another. The text is a kind of deconstructive reading of Antigone that inspects the State/Kinship relation and blurs those boundaries as we might expect. It's not bad, though limited by the fact of staying with the one text, and I feel Derrida has done this better in Force of Law and Of Grammatology. Perhaps a 3.5?

Section one was strong and also I feel stuck closest to the text of the three. Nice analysis, as we'd expect from JB of the refractive-mutual disturbances of categorical gender in the text.

Second essay kind of ran out of steam for me. This is where JB took two readings of Antigone - Hegel's and Lacan's and had a go at them. Very strange for me, Deleuze was actually quite appreciative (uncharacteristically!) of Hegel in ATP so I wondered where I was when she was having a go at him. Anyway, if I remember rightly, Hegel on Antigone is a very brief section in the Phenomenology, and apparently he also has a look at her in PoR. I wondered if it was really fair to hack at this when Hegel wasn't primarily interested in what Sophocles thought about these things but so it goes. JB's reading of Lacan is (in)famously kind of rocky, and it did feel a bit unsteady here. His point about Antigone's love reaching for the asymbolic, desperate to evade the regulative procedures of the symbolic was beautiful and I feel like was kind of underserved in this text.

Third essay was broader - more Antigone-based theory of kinship as related to contemporary structures, particularly pertaining to gay marriage. Nice. Nothing too remarkable for her, a strong essay though not one altogether concerned with the play.

Good stuff anyway. I'll be returning to it with closer looks at Antigone.

Butler apresenta em 3 capítulos uma análise do que se escreveu sobre Antígona (de Hegel, Hölderlin, Lacan, G. Steiner,L. Irigaray, Zizek, com o acréscimo das críticas ao estruturalismo na Antropologia, isto é, à tese de Lévi-Strauss sobre As estruturas de parentesco.

No terceiro capítulo, há uma leitura muito pertinente sobre a temporalidade e sobre a força particular da palavra: o parentesco não é simplesmente uma situação em que Antígona se encontra, mas um conjunto de práticas que ela própria performa, relações que são reinstituídas no tempo precisamente por meio da prática de sua repetição.

Cada ato é o efeito temporal aparente de alguma palavra pronunciada anteriormente, e assim se estabelece a temporalidade de um atraso trágico, segundo o qual tudo o que acontece já aconteceu e virá a aparecer como o que já vinha acontecendo o tempo todo, uma palavra e um ato enredados e estendidos ao longo do tempo pela força da repetição.

A palavra criptografada traz dentro de si uma história irrecuperável, uma história que, em virtude de sua própria irrecuperabilidade e sua enigmática vida futura na forma de palavras, carrega uma força cuja origem e final não podem ser totalmente determinados. Antígona fala a linguagem do direito da qual está excluída, participando da linguagem da reivindicação de direitos com a qual não é possível uma identificação final. Se ela é humana, então o humano entrou em catacrese: já não sabemos mais qual o seu uso adequado.

Catacrese é a figura de linguagem que consiste no uso de uma palavra ou expressão que não descreve com exatidão o que se quer expressar, mas é adotada por não haver uma outra palavra apropriada

hegel: antigone is the kinship structure destroyed by the state
irigaray: antigone is maternal order usurped by patriarchy
lacan: antigone is the threshold of the symbolic function
butler, brain big as the moon: antigone is gay

People often complain about Judith Butler's labyrinthine writing style, but that's never been my main problem with her. What don't like about her work is a) she often misreads key French thinkers (Foucault, for instance, in Gender Trouble) and b) she has an underlying political project that, while I pretty much agree with it, seems to me to cloud her ability to regard the concepts with which she is dealing with the necessary rigor. In other words, she often puts her politics ahead of her philosophy.

Antigone's Claim is generally a well-written and accessible rethinking of how, as Butler puts it in her introduction, Antigone might be used as a figure who challenges the logic of the State. I think this a genuinely worthy project, especially in the way that Butler holds up Antigone as an alternative to the prevailing focus on Oedipus.

Throughout the book, Butler shifts predominantly between two major critical readings of Sophocles's play. The first is Hegel's interpretation of Antigone in Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he looks upon Antigone as the representation of the claims of kinship, in which the ties of blood challenge the hegemony of the State. For Hegel, of course, this is unacceptable. Butler shows how Antigone's challenge turns into that of all womenkind - against all logic, since Antigone is hardly an adequate representative - that is subsumed by Hegel's fetishization of the State.

The other reading Butler deals with extensively is Lacan's reading of Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Butler sees Lacan as the reverse of Hegel, championing the structures of kinship (à la Lévi-Strauss) and the symbolic order of the Oedipal father over the ties of the State.

While Butler's reading of Hegel seems sound enough, her interpretation of Lacan is very weak.

First of all she talks about Antigone as a "postoedipal" character, a label that she seems to think undermines Lacan, when in fact this aspect of Antigone is precisely what makes her so fascinating to him.

Second, Butler shows how the Oedipal/symbolic order is already grounded in perversion, since the law it establishes (e.g. incest taboo) also disingenuously promotes its own transgression. Doesn't Lacan already acknowledge this situation, implicitly throughout his work, and explicitly in The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII with the concept of "père-version"?

But the third and most annoying thing about the way Butler misreads Lacan is by interpreting him as a strict structuralist who locates everything in the field of the symbolic. She is able to do this by referring only to the early Lacan writings and seminars - not a single text later that Seminar VII, if I remember correctly, is cited. In this way, she is able to paint Lacan as some kind of linguistic idealist, so that Antigone's ability to mess up the symbolic kinship structures and even the limits of language disrupts his neat little system.

Such a critique is nonsense. It ignores entirely the function of the Real in Lacan's work and its crucial connection to the death drive, and all of the increasingly postoedipal concepts that mark his middle to late work. It also ignores, too, the work of Slavoj Žižek in bringing this aspect of Lacan's work to public attention. The Real is mentioned only once, in passing, in Antigone's Claim - otherwise, it is all structuralism as symbolic idealism.

It is possible that I am being a little ungenerous in my rating. This book really is a thoughtful (if misguided) look at a fascinating literary character and the consequences that arise from her situation. But one also has to wonder why it is that Butler ignores the middle to later Lacan, which extends so brilliantly his earlier thinking on ethics as illustrated, in part, by Sophocles's play.

Brilliant! I love everything about Antigone, kinship, mourning, and power.