Customer Reviews

Antigone's Claim

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Antigone's revolt lives on! As Butler says herself in the introduction, she is not a classicist and has no desire to be one. This book is about the intellectual/artistic legacy of the figure of Antigone and the political and philosophical implications of her performative resistance to state power. Having taken a seminar in 1998 with Butler on the very topic of Antigone, I can assure you that the author is well aware of the ambiguity of Sophocles's play. As Butler demonstrates, this ambiguity is what has driven so many diverse interpretations by major thinkers such as Hegel and Lacan and playwrights like Hoelderlin and Brecht. Butler insightfully analyzes the critical-artistic tradition that has developed since Sophocles and helps to demonstrate this tradition's continued relevance in the present day--in any case where individual desire conflicts with the institution of the state as it functions to set the parameters of the normal or acceptable in society.

I haven't finished this extremely short text yet. It was originally a small series of lectures. Basically, Butler critiques Hegel's and Lacan's appropriations of Antigone (both the play and, especially, the character) to represent a certain ideal. She summarizes rather lucidly both Hegel's and Lacan's positions. Of course, the problem with both Hegel and Lacan is that they are so dense and (often) obscure that, like Nietzsche, they get appropriated left and right themselves. So understanding what they *really* ever meant is always slippery. But Hegel and Lacan are familiar territory for Butler. She's no Classicist, and she's upfront about that. I think she does a phenomenal job highlighting the ultimately untenable postion(s) Hegel and, to a lesser extent, Lacan assume in relation to Antigone. I haven't finish yet, but Butler is certainly setting up her own "feminist" reading. It's not concerned with "what the Greeks thought" the way classical scholars (by definition) often are. Rather, she's clearly relating Greek tragedy to the modern world in response to the past 300 years of (post)enlightenment thinking. A more recent text that also deals with a lot of this material is The Antigone Complex by Cecilia Sjoholm - if you're interested.

Judith Butler's study of Antigone, over the course of these 3 lectures, yields important and timely insights about how we might understand kinship and love in today's society. Her analysis of Hegel, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan is impressively rigorous. A must read for anyone interested in liguistics, structuralism, feminism and contemporary questions about political belonging.

Judging from the reader reviews on this website, Judith Butler has yet again succeeded in provoking the outrage of several diehard and blue-in-the-face classics scholars. Those classicists who feel outraged by her work might consider her illuliminating comments on Hölderlin's own translation of Antigone, translations that themselves were received as scandals in their time and that continue, like Antigone in Butler's view, to provoke critical thought. If you think Antigone belongs on the shelves of a dusty library, you might as well leave this book alone, since here she's haunting queer bars and dining at the most interesting and vital family meals imaginable, where queer sons and daughters struggle together with their just as queer parents to figure out how it is that we might say our word to a world that persists in ignoring what it is that we have to say.

This is a terrible book. This is I think the worst monograph I have ever read. Miss Butler cannot write English; moreover, she apparently cannot read Greek. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the Antigone in Greek and translate it (as I have) would know immediately--to drop into the cistern of academic language for a moment--that The Antigone is an "unstable text" We don't even know what many lines mean. The first line "O koinon autodelphon Ismene kara" is untranslatable.If you try you get something like "o common self sister head of Ismene" So we know that it hasto do with kinship. But how do you write about kinship in Antigone with utter lack of humility as Miss Butler does without even knowing what the first line means? We have no idea how this play was received nor do we have any idea what it was intended to be "about". Miss Butler is entitled to her fantasies I suppose but in common with most current academics her fantasies are built on ignorance. Can she scan even the stikamuthia much less the choral odes? Does Miss Butler have any idea what "deinos" can properly mean in Attic Greek? Most importantly, has she given ANY attention to the Greek particles in the text? Does she know how they function or rather does she have the remotest idea how they function? Does she even know Denniston's work? Greek is a language in which words can have a broad range of meaning--a study of character is very difficult even for a great man like Jebb or a fine scholar like Charles Segal. Does she really understand how "polis" and "oikos" contend with each other? No she doesn't. Robert Penn Warren stopped teaching when he realized his graduate students could not recite or scan an English Sonnet. Miss Butler could easily have been one of his students. But her chutzpah knows no bounds. She brings her interpretative ignorance to a language she does not know. I know that modern academics like to write essays without any recourse to evidence. No one has any business doing interpretive work on Antigone if they do not know Greek. Miss Butler might take the trouble to learn it--who knows it might improve her English---NOT! For people seriously interested in reading the Antigone--I suggest Sir Richard Jebb's Greek English text with commmentary or Andrew Brown's more recent literal translation (with Greek and Commentary)

This is a terrible book. This is I think the worst monograph I have ever read. Miss Butler cannot write English; moreover, she apparently cannot read Greek. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the Antigone in Greek and translate it (as I have) would know immediately--to drop into the cistern of academic language for a moment--that The Antigone is an "unstable text" We don't even know what many lines mean. The first line "O koinon autodelphon Ismene kara" is untranslatable.If you try you get something like "o common self sister head of Ismene" So we know that it hasto do with kinship. But how do you write about kinship in Antigone with utter lack of humility as Miss Butler does without even knowing what the first line means? We have no idea how this play was received nor do we have any idea what it was intended to be "about". Miss Butler is entitled to her fantasies I suppose but in common with most current academics her fantasies are built on ignorance. Can she scan even the stikamuthia much less the choral odes? Does Miss Butler have any idea what "deinos" can properly mean in Attic Greek? Most importantly, has she given ANY attention to the Greek particles in the text? Does she know how they function or rather does she have the remotest idea how they function? Does she even know Denniston's work? Greek is a language in which words can have a broad range of meaning--a study of character is very difficult even for a great man like Jebb or a fine scholar like Charles Segal. Does she really understand how "polis" and "oikos" contend with each other? No she doesn't. Robert Penn Warren stopped teaching when he realized his graduate students could not recite or scan an English Sonnet. Miss Butler could easily have been one of his students. But her chutzpah knows no bounds. She brings her interpretative ignorance to a language she does not know. I know that modern academics like to write essays without any recourse to evidence. No one has any business doing interpretive work on Antigone if they do not know Greek. Miss Butler might take the trouble to learn it--who knows it might improve her English---NOT! For people seriously interested in reading the Antigone--I suggest Sir Richard Jebb's Greek English text with commmentary or Andrew Brown's more recent literal translation (with Greek and Commentary)

Prof. Butler has many references to Hegel and Lacan but remarkably few to the play itself. Of those only one or two are in Greek. It is not at all clear that she is familiar with the language--for example: on page 8 of her book she transliterates Antigone's response to Creon as "kai phemi drasai kouk aparnoumai to ne". This may be a misprint but in any case the last word should be "mey" (mu eta). Does Prof. Butler understand the force of the initial "kai" or the function of the article at the end? I have no sense of engagement with the line--instead she offers two translations, both inaccurate. . The problem is that Antigone is such an ambiguous text that even a reading in Greek using the lines as evidence is problematic. She seems to depend on what others have said about Antigone rather than going through the work of actually reading the play in Greek by herself. The line I quoted is I think -- apart from translating "glory" as "kleos"(correct as far as it goes though had she bothered to study the linguistic history and possibilities of the word she might have helped her argument)-- the only sign of any contact with the Greek. The passage she presents about the primacy of the brother over the child--a passage that has troubled readers of Antigone since the nineteenth century-- is given in English and her conclusion that Antigone's notion of Kinship is eccentric seems to suggest she has not read recent scholarship. Rather Prof. Butler has an agenda (nb her anti-Catholicism) which she presents using the play as a forum. She is certainly entitled to her agenda and entitled to argue that Antigone represents it. Problem is she offers no textual evidence and has I fear little or no familiarity with Greek. If you want to make an argument you have to back it up with evidence not hearsay--where's the beef?

Some of the previous reviewers' responses to this book might give an idea of what's so interesting and provocative about it, and about Butler's work overall. Even if you're not a classicist with too much time on your hands.

I have located several misquotations and several mispellings of what little Greek she uses. Apart from it being gruesomely written, I suspect this woman does not know Antigone in Greek--she quotes widely from other sources but prefers to stay away from the original. I am tempted to at a later date say with Voltaire "I am sitting in the smallest room of the house. I have your book in front of me--soon it will be behind me"

i would just like to say that the 2 previous reviewers should not speak so ill of academics, acedemia, and academic jargon since they themselves sound so notoriously academic in their petty, self-important quibbling. give ms. butler a break.