Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death

Abstract

"Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death" by Judith Butler is reviewed.

Judith Butler. Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 103 pp. ISBN 0-231-11894-5 (cl).

Judith Butler explores the depth and contemporary relevance of the mythical figure of Antigone. She begins by examining how Antigone has been interpreted in both Hegel and Lacan as a primitive and incestuous figure, symbolizing either prepolitical kinship or the prelinguistic imaginary, respectively. In either case, Antigone represents that which is overcome, the evolution of the state over kinship for Hegel or the domination of the imaginary by the symbolic for Lacan. Yet Butler wishes to position Antigone as an agent of dissent, one who mocks and apes the power of Creon; Antigone is a myth of feminist and sexual agency and self-determination, not a myth of evolution of the state over kinship. As Oedipus' daughter, Antigone's confused kinship relationships allow one to reconsider the incest taboo, which has stood at the center of psychoanalysis and structuralism for so long, and which marks Antigone as primitive. This post-Oedipalism allows one to conceive of kinship that is not predicated upon the incest taboo, a conception which broadens the meaning of kinship to include mixed families and homosexuality. --Raully Donahue