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 [b:Phenomenology of Spirit|9454|Phenomenology of Spirit|Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1425522818s/9454.jpg|995802], 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 [b:The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960|165963|The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 (Seminar of Jacques Lacan)|Jacques Lacan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348463112s/165963.jpg|160253]. 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 [b:The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII|29277160|The Sinthome The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII|Jacques Lacan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472826670s/29277160.jpg|2900394] 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. ( )

Librería 5. Estante 3.

In Antigone’s Claim Butler suggests that although the incest taboo works in much the same way that the repressive hypothesis on sexuality constrained variable constructions of sexual alterna-tives, it nevertheless requires an alternative reading, one that not so much reverses itself, (sanc-tioning incest between family members is not what Butler has is mind), but instead Antigone signifies a crisis, a breakdown in signification that occurs when one pushes the very limits of kinship. By placing the very term ‘kinship’ in crisis, Antigone thus makes herself ‘monstrous’ and unrecognizable, and signals the conditions under which a radical deconstitution is the un-avoidable outcome.

Butler’s reading of Antigone illustrates a complex unfolding of all the principal concepts of her oeuvre, notions such as ‘abject’ ‘constitutive outside’ ‘melancholia’ all combine to articulate her notion of a ‘new field of the human’. In particular her notion of catachresis and iteration informs one’s understanding of how she develops her postoedipal political framework.

Butler argues that the heteronormative Oedipal drama is a forced drama of sorts, established as it is on the foreclosure of the diverse ways of doing kinship that exist outside of the narrow struc-turalist binary frame laid out by Lévi-Strauss and later by Lacan. Antigone commits to pushing the very borders of her very being, and placing into crisis the intelligibility of the Oedipal discursive framework. To this end Antigone’s Claim makes an "imaginative leap" in thinking the pos-sibility of a postoedipal subjectivity. Butler exposes the Lévi-Straussian/Lacanian symbolic law as thoroughly social or ‘pre-political’ and argues that Antigone figures as the epistemological limits of a kinship based on an oedipal law. Not only does she lack a language with which to articulate and gain meaning in the current oedipal symbolic frame and is forced into what But-ler’s terms ‘catachresis.’

Forced in political catachresis, Butler argues that Antigone figures a postoedipal subjectivity, a poststructuralism of kinship posited variously as: monstrous and as pushing the epistemological boundaries of one’s very being. Significantly this appears in Butler’s later work as her post-humanist attempt to articulate a non-anthropomorphic anthropology in doing so she is trying to grasp the theoretical co-ordinates of this “new field of the human” which she argues Antigone has become. But this new field of the human to emerge requires a radical desubjectivation, a draining of the subjective coordinates that held one in place and the instating of a totally new ‘symbolic’ order. ( )

Things follows Penney and Molyneux, adds Hegel and Lacan, and radical socialists, no index