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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #362196 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

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

About the Author
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Her many acclaimed critical works include Subjects of Desire, Gender Trouble, The Psychic Life of Power, and Bodies That Matter.

Customer Reviews

post-oedipal kinship - re-working heteronormativity
Butler's new book takes Antigone, the heroine of the Theban plays, as the basis for arguing that our ideas of kinship delimit our ideas of intelligible and legimate sexuality. Kinship, Butler argues, is constructed as pre-social, providing it with an exterior quality of the biological (blood ties). But how is kinship established? It is founded on laws which are social, laws which debar certain sexual actions within "biological" kinship networks. These social laws, such as the incest taboo, continually haunt kinship (and gender and sexuality) because they provide an abject form, which remains unintelligible, but which neverthless acts as a spectre for disruption. In practice, from this unintelligible form what counts as "human" is brought into being against it's abject other. Thus, to be human at all, to participate as a human being in the social world, demands appropriation of types of being which are seen to be intelligible. This is not a new argument from Butler. She has previously argued that it is through the continual and repitituous inciting of normative forms, and the continual exclusion of the abject, that we become human. But what does she say about Antigone? Firstly, she is arguing that Antigone is neither inside or outside of kinship, but functions as a constant disturbance on the threshold of culture. Secondly, Antigone's death actually exceeds her own life because she instigates the possibilities for an unknown future of kinship relations. In this sense Antigone provides a way of seeing how future relationships might be possible; relationships not based on the central laws embodied in Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. In short, Butler argues: what happens if we take Antigone as central to an understanding of kinship, rather than Oedipus? She doesn't really tell us, but her question is interesting!