A reivindicação de Antígona

by Judith Butler

Judith Butler comenta Antígona uma das mais célebres tragédias gregas com os dois pés no presente.
Em A reivindicação de Antígona, Judith Butler, com seu espírito insubmisso, apresenta uma nova leitura para uma das mais célebres tragédias. Por meio de perguntas fundamentais acerca dos conceitos de parentesco, gênero, ontologia social e ética, Butler apresenta e contesta as consagradas interpretações de Hegel e Jacques Lacan sobre Antígona e demonstra as lacunas sintomáticas dessas formulações – resultantes do (não) lugar que o feminino ocupa no pensamento ocidental.
Na peça grega, Antígona, filha e irmã de Édipo, encontra seu conflito trágico na impossibilidade de enterrar o adorado irmão Polinices, considerado traidor de Tebas – cidade na qual o tio, Creonte, reina. Diante do interdito, ela não age de acordo com a própria ética e realiza o rito fúnebre. A dupla ação – fazer e reclamar a autoria do ato – foi considerada por séculos uma representação da cisão de antiga e civilizatória; matriarcal e patriarcal; simbólica e social. Porém, essa manifestação dicotômica não permitiu que a própria voz, o desejo e o luto de Antígona fossem validados, e esta é a reivindicação resgatada neste livro. 
Com os dois pés no presente, Judith Butler desvela aos olhos contemporâneos uma heroína divergente, que pode vir a ser fonte de inspiração e força para as vidas marginalizadas, os sujeitos queer. É nesse sentido que Antígona e Butler reclamam um novo é preciso reinterpretar os mitos fundadores, confrontar suas estruturas binárias heterossexuais para, então, trazê-los como construções desobedientes e revolucionárias, capazes de devolver o valor e o reconhecimento de todos os sujeitos como vidas dignas de serem vividas.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Feminism, Theory, Gender, Queer, Essays

151 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist and feminist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. They are currently a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s they held several teaching and research appointments, and were involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Their research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, and mourning and war. Their most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy and exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘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.’

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Sammy Mylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Amari · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Marta D'Agord · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Fluffy Singler · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Josefine · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3,5

[andreea. · Rating 4 out of 5]

.

[Peter Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe, just maybe, we picked the wrong tragic Theban to build psychoanalysis around.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

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?"

[Greg Florez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather dense which will mean I’ll probs come back to this, but nevertheless a great argument for a deeply radical reading of Antigone!!!

[lía · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perdín parte da miña cordura tras ler isto

[Mili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ayuda, estoy atrapada en lo simbólico

[Elinaz Ys · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Anna Belkovska · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[bootopia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never know how to rate these kinds of book, I picked it up for some "walk through" about the character Antigone and the work itself rather than its philosophical interpretations, so a lot was lost on me (I do not envy your life of wrestling with all those thoughts about beings and realms, Lacan.) But Butler's writing - when it was not about western theories I cannot grasp (talking about you again, Lacan) - was linear, clear and surprisingly enjoyable (especially when it was about sex and gender). And for that this is a 3.5/5, rounding up to 4.

[S. Kallahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the better Butler books. Digs into Antigone using Hegel, Levi-Strauss, Lacan and others to critique an entire Western philosophical tradition built on the crumbling pillars of heteronormativity and the nuclear family via the incest taboo.

I would've liked to see a little more of what Butler noted as a psychoanalysis built around Antigone rather than Oedipus. I understand the point is that the very notion is made impossible because of our ideological attachments to kinship, etc. but isn't the point to think the impossible?

One thing bothered me, and this wasn't strictly an issue with Butler, but with the critical theoretical tradition within which she places herself... where earlier philosophy, and some of the more solid contemporary stuff, built itself on First Principles, late 20th and early 21st Century theory replaces first principles with inter-referenciality to build its arguments. Butler writes "Hegel states this," "Levi-Strauss claims that," and we're meant to accept that their claims are legitimate because they are "Hegel" and "Levi-Strauss." So she has to become strangely conservative in her acknowledgment of their authority so she can build her iconoclasm on the assumption of their importance. She reifies them so she can tear them down. Granted, Hegel, Lacan, Levi-Strauss are "big names" in theoretical circles, but isn't this what others have railed against when they went after the "author" in the 70s? I always think the quality of a good philosophy book can be measured if you removed all the proper names and read the argument. Butler's book would still stand, because the argument is necessary and compelling.

This begs the question - why mention all the names? I worry the answer is more troubling than anyone is willing to admit. It has something to do with the professionalization and compartmentalization of thought via the university. She's staking a claim within a particular field that has been marked out as "continental philosophy" within Anglo-American circles, so mention of Hegel, Lacan, Levi-Strauss becomes a bit like wearing gang colors. Why not build your own counter-interpretation free of the weight of their names? Because other academics wouldn't recognize it as proper scholarship? Because she wouldn't get published by a university press? (Hint: academics tend to look down their noses at popular presses.)

There is a real danger to thought when names carry the weight of a philosophical argument. I had the feeling every once and a while reading Butler that her argument started to pull off the face of the planet and became a bit of a dance at the level representation with no roots in "real" claims. I understand this is part of her overall point in many of her books- our desire for rootedness makes us victim to reified concepts - but the use of names and putting them in circulation the way she does makes it all feel a bit... dare I say, academically incestuous? But not in a good way.

At the same time, I'm all on her side in that her real target was the entire Western Philosophical tradition using Antigone as her foil. Instead of being too literal in her attack on those who studied Antigone, maybe she could've shown how their First Principles made their interpretations of Antigone necessary, and then gone after say the dialectic, the mathematization of psychology, or anthropology itself? Or she could've pulled a Greenblatt - pulled something way out of left field from the enlightenment tradition and shown how it's logic is fundamentally related to the quieting of Antigone. This would show us our own discursive adherence to the Oedipalization of thought at the very roots of our shared philosophies.. but then that would be a whole other book.

Anyway, just a thought.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Gabriel Leibold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Como seria estruturada a psicanálise se Freud tivesse partido de Antígona e não de Édipo? Em muitos sentidos, Butler revisita essa pergunta de modo a expandir aquilo que a filosofia e a psicanálise leram historicamente nas entrelinhas da peça de Sófocles. Mas o livro pretende lançar-se enquanto provocação e proposição alerta e em revista das bases que fundam o parentesco, bem como a legibilidade de Antígona enquanto personagem a quem não se permite concretizar o luto pelo irmão. Qual irmão? Édipo? Polinices? Etéocles? Não há fundação normativa nos laços familiares de Antígona. É enquanto limite da ordem familiar, profusa, proliferante, que ela demanda o luto, a morte, o seu próprio desejo de agir segundo o seu entendimento do relacional no humano.

[Gustavo Schott · Rating 1 out of 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.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lotus Lien · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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.”

[Jerrett Lyday · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[matías saavedra · Rating 4 out of 5]

“¿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”.

[Joan]

Aquest assaig va arribar a les meves mans en forma de regal d'una persona i professor especial; i, en termes de temàtica, no podria haver encertat més. No m'atreveixo a posar-li una puntuació perquè, degut als meus coneixements limitats de filosofia del s.XXI, pecaria de posar-li una nota més baixa de la que es mereix, resultat de la meva ignorància. No obstant, a partir de les idees que he pogut copsar, puc dir que Butler fa un anàlisi exhaustiu del mite d'Antígona des de perspectives crítiques que mai se m'havien passat pel cap, proposant idees que eren noves per a mi.

Amb un centenar i mig de pàgines, Butler assoleix obrir tot un camp de moltes preguntes i algunes respostes per reinterpretar el psicoanàlisi prenent com a llindar la figura d'Antígona des del pensament de la filosofia contemporània i la teoria literària amb pinzellades dels estudis de gènere i queer.

Li hauré de donar un temps al llibre i, havent llegit més sobre l'obra original (i des d'una perspectiva postestructuralista), llavors el revisitaré per ordenar l'embolic d'idees i incògnites que m'ha deixat aquest llibre tan complex i ric.