Antigone's Claim (Paperback)

by Professor Judith Butler (Author) "I began to think about Antigone a few years ago as I wondered what happened to those feminist efforts to confront and defy the state..." (more)
Key Phrases: cultural intelligibility, symbolic position, incest taboo (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Butler is interested in Antigone as a liminal figure between the family and the state, between life and death... but also as a figure, like all her kin, who represents the non-normative family, a set of kinship relations that seems to defy the standard model... one senses in Butler's interest... homage to those who have lived, or have tried to live, and to those who have died 'on the sexual margins.'" -- Georgette Fleischer, The Nation " Antigone's Claim is a work of intricate and detailed analysis of enormously difficult material. Butler masterfully leads us to... a newfound theoretical activism within the political domain." -- Maria Cimitile, Hypatia "Brief but powerful and provocative nook." -- Shireen R. K. Patell, Signs "Thought-provoking and politically provocative... Bulter joins the great philosophical tradition which grapples with the ancient tragedy of Sophocles." -- Ido Geiger, Hagar: Studies in Culture Polity Identities

Product Description
The celebrated author of Gender Trouble here redefines Antigone´s legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler´s new interpretation does nothing less than reconceptualize the incest taboo in relation to kinship -and open up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles´s Oedipus, has long been a feminist icon of defiance. But what has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. Moreover, Antigone shows how the constraints of normative kinship unfairly decide what will and will not be a livable life. Butler explores the meaning of Antigone, wondering what forms of kinship might have allowed her to live. Along the way, she considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray. How, she asks, would psychoanalysis have been different if it had taken Antigone -the "postoedipal" subject -rather than Oedipus as its point of departure? If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (March 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231118953
• ISBN-13: 978-0231118958
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 4.9 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #88,905 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Must Like Hegel & Lacan, January 4, 2007

By	Dan (Albany, NY) - See all my reviews

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.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars very intelligent, ground-breaking book!!!, February 7, 2006

By	km - See all my reviews

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.

23 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Butler (Miss Butler if ur nasty) is at is again..., August 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Antigone's Claim (Hardcover)

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.