#10 Antigone's Claim - 23/05/2019

23 May | 5.00 - 6.30pm | Room 1, LAHRI (29-31 Clarendon Place) | All welcome!

In Antigone’s Claim (2000), Butler begins by outlining her assumption that the figure of Antigone may potentially point to an alternative to what she terms the growing feminist trend of ‘seek[ing] the backing and authority of the state to implement feminist policy aims.’ Yet Butler’s aims shift as she begins an engagement with the history of scholarship on Antigone, including Hegel, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and others, who determine Antigone as the pre-social and pre-political embodiment of kinship relations definitively separated from the state. Butler disrupts the demarcation of kinship and state, rendering Antigone’s dual act of refusal – actual and linguistic – as one of both transgression and assimilation to highlight the entanglement of kinship relations and the polis. From this vantage point, Butler elaborates on the subversive potential of Antigone’s speech act as one that opens sedimented and ideal forms from within the symbolic to the play of resignification.

Troubling both notions of kinship and the incest taboo in an era of precarity for the “norms” of familial relations, the figure of Antigone provides an allegory for the disruption of kinship, gender and sexuality. For Butler, this opens up questions concerning vulnerability and what constitutes grievable lives – issues that, as we have discussed in previous sessions, become central areas of inquiry in Butler’s later works. Full with rigorous analysis in its own right, Antigone’s Claim is therefore also useful in tracking the trajectory of Butler’s thinking.

We will be reading the eponymous first chapter of Antigone's Claim alongside a short extract from Lyat Friedman’s essay ‘Anti-Oedipus: The Work of Resistance’. Friedman provides a discussion of the Oedipal complex alongside the role of resistance within the psychoanalytic method more generally, before positing an alternative method of analysis from within Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972). We will be focusing on Friedman’s critique of Butler’s Antigone’s Claim on pages 98-101; however, the discussion of Antigone that is present throughout the essay will also be relevant to our discussion. We may also want to take a look at pages 666-672 of Slavoj Zizek’s ‘Melancholy and the Act’ in which he discusses the Lacanian reading of Antigone that Butler critiques.  

As ever, all welcome!