Antigone's Claim

Kinship Between Life and Death

Judith Butler

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231518048
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

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.

CHAPTER 1

Antigone’s Claim

Ibegan to think about Antigone a few years ago as I wondered what happened to those feminist efforts to confront and defy the state. It seemed to me that Antigone might work as a counterfigure to the trend championed by recent feminists to seek the backing and authority of the state to implement feminist policy aims. The legacy of Antigone’s defiance appeared to be lost in the contemporary efforts to recast political opposition as legal plaint and to seek the legitimacy of the state in the espousal of feminist claims. Indeed, one finds Antigone defended and championed, for instance, by Luce Irigaray as a principle of feminine defiance of statism and an example of anti-authoritarianism.¹

But who is this “Antigone” that I sought to use as an example of a certain feminist impulse?² There is, of course, the “Antigone” of Sophocles’ play by that name, and that Antigone is, after all, a fiction, one that does not easily allow itself to be made into an example one might follow without running the risk of slipping into irreality oneself. Not that this has stopped many people from making her into a representative of sorts. Hegel has her stand for the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal rule, but also for the principle of kinship. And Irigaray, though wavering on the representative function of Antigone, also insists upon it: “Her example is always worth reflecting upon as a historical figure and as an identity and identification for many girls and women living today. For this reflection, we must abstract Antigone from the seductive, reductive discourses and listen to what she has to say about government of the polis, its order and its laws” (Speculum, 70).

But can Antigone herself be made into a representative for a certain kind of feminist politics, if Antigone’s own representative function is itself in crisis? As I hope to show in what follows, she hardly represents the normative principles of kinship, steeped as she is in incestuous legacies that confound her position within kinship. And she hardly represents a feminism that might in any way be unimplicated in the very power that it opposes. Indeed, it is not just that, as a fiction, the mimetic or representative character of Antigone is already put in question but that, as a figure for politics, she points somewhere else, not to politics as a question of representation but to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed.

But let me recount my steps for you. I am no classicist and do not strive to be one. I read Antigone as many humanists have because the play poses questions about kinship and the state that recur in a number of cultural and historical contexts. I began to read Antigone and her critics to see if one could make a case for her exemplary political status as a feminine figure who defies the state through a powerful set of physical and linguistic acts. But I found something different from what I had anticipated. What struck me first was the way in which Antigone has been read by Hegel and Lacan and also by the way in which she has been taken up by Luce Irigaray and others³ not as a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implications, but rather as one who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it. Indeed, in the interpretation that Hegel has perhaps made most famous, and which continues to structure appropriations of the play within much literary theory and philosophical discourse, Antigone comes to represent kinship and its dissolution, and Creon comes to represent an emergent ethical order and state authority based on principles of universality.

What struck me second, however, is a point to which I hope to return toward the end of this chapter, which is the way that kinship is figured at the limit of what Hegel calls “the ethical order,”⁴ the sphere of political participation but also of viable cultural norms, the sphere of legitimating Sittlichkeit (the articulated norms that govern the sphere of cultural intelligibility) in Hegelian terms. Within contemporary psychoanalytic theory, based on structuralist presuppositions and made perhaps most salient by the work of Jacques Lacan, this relation emerges in yet a different way. Lacan provides a reading of Antigone in his Seminar VII⁵ in which she is understood to border the spheres of the imaginary and the symbolic and where she is understood, in fact, to figure the inauguration of the symbolic, the sphere of laws and norms that govern the accession to speech and speakability. This regulation takes place precisely through instantiating certain kin relations as symbolic norms.⁶ As symbolic, these norms are not precisely social, and in this way Lacan departs from Hegel, we might say, by making a certain idealized notion of kinship into a presupposition of cultural intelligibility. At the same time Lacan continues a certain Hegelian legacy by separating that idealized sphere of kinship, the symbolic, from the sphere of the social. Hence, for Lacan, kinship is rarefied as enabling linguistic structure, a presupposition of symbolic intelligibility, and thus removed from the domain of the social; for Hegel, kinship is precisely a relation of “blood” rather than one of norms. That is, kinship is not yet entered into the social, where the social is inaugurated through a violent supersession of kinship.

The separation of kinship from the social haunts even the most anti-Hegelian positions within the structuralist legacy. For Irigaray, the insurrectionary power of Antigone is the power of that which remains outside the political; Antigone represents kinship and, indeed, the power of “blood” relations, which Irigaray doesn’t mean in a precisely literal sense. For Irigaray, blood designates something of bodily specificity and graphicness that fully abstract principles of political equality not only fail to grasp but must rigorously exclude and even annihilate. Thus, by signifying “blood,” Antigone does not precisely signify a blood line but something more like “bloodshed”—that which must be remaindered for authoritarian states to be maintained. The feminine, as it were, becomes this remainder, and “blood” becomes the graphic figure for this echoing trace of kinship, a refiguring of the figure of the bloodline that brings into relief the violent forgetting of primary kin relations in the inauguration of symbolic masculine authority. Antigone thus signifies for Irigaray the transition from the rule of law based on maternity, a rule of law based in kinship, to a rule of law based on paternity. But what precisely precludes the latter as kinship? There is the symbolic place of the mother that is taken over by the symbolic place of the father, but what has instituted those places to begin with? Is this not the same notion of kinship after all, with an accent and a value being placed on separate terms?

The context for Irigaray’s reading is clearly Hegel’s, who claims in The Phenomenology of Spirit that Antigone is “the eternal irony of the community.” She is outside the terms of the polis, but she is, as it were, an outside without which the polis could not be. The ironies are no doubt more profound than Hegel understood: after all, she speaks, and speaks in public, precisely when she ought to be sequestered in the private domain. What sort of political speech is this that transgresses the very boundaries of the political, which sets into scandalous motion the boundary by which her speech ought to be contained? Hegel claims that Antigone represents the law of the household gods (conflating the chthonic gods of the Greek tradition with the Roman Penates) and that Creon represents the law of the state. He insists that the conflict between them is one in which kinship must give way to state authority as the final arbiter of justice. In other words, Antigone figures the threshold between kinship and the state, a transition in the Phenomenology that is not precisely an Aufhebung, for Antigone is surpassed without ever being preserved when ethical order emerges.

The Hegelian legacy of Antigone interpretation appears to assume the separability of kinship and the state, even as it posits an essential relation between them. And so every interpretive effort to cast a character as representative of kinship or the state tends to falter and lose coherence and stability.⁷ This faltering has consequences not only for the effort to determine the representative function of any character but for the effort to think the relation between kinship and the state, a relation, I hope to show, that has relevance for us who read this play within a contemporary context in which the politics of kinship has brought a classical western dilemma into contemporary crisis. For two questions that the play poses are whether there can be kinship—and by kinship I do not mean the “family” in any specific form—without the support and mediation of the state, and whether there can be the state without the family as its support and mediation. And further, when kinship comes to pose a threat to state authority and the state sets itself in a violent struggle against kinship, can these very terms sustain their independence from one another? This becomes a textual problem of some importance as Antigone emerges in her criminality to speak in the name of politics and the law: she absorbs the very language of the state against which she rebels, and hers becomes a politics not of oppositional purity but of the scandalously impure.⁸

When I reread Sophocles’ play, I was impressed in a perverse way by the blindnesses that afflict these very interpretations. Indeed, the blindnesses in the text—of the sentry, of Teiresias—seem invariably repeated in the partially blind readings of the text. Opposing Antigone to Creon as the encounter between the forces of kinship and those of state power fails to take into account the ways in which Antigone has already departed from kinship, herself the daughter of an incestuous bond, herself devoted to an impossible and death-bent incestuous love of her brother,⁹ how her actions compel others to regard her as “manly” and thus cast doubt on the way that kinship might underwrite gender, how her language, paradoxically, most closely approximates Creon’s, the language of sovereign authority and action, and how Creon himself assumes his sovereignty only by virtue of the kinship line that enables that succession, how he becomes, as it were, unmanned by Antigone’s defiance, and finally by his own actions, at once abrogating the norms that secure his place in kinship and in sovereignty. Indeed, Sophocles’ text makes clear that the two are metaphorically implicated in one another in ways that suggest that there is, in fact, no simple opposition between the two.¹⁰ Moreover, to the extent that the two figures, Creon and Antigone, are chiasmically related, it appears that there is no easy separation between the two and that Antigone’s power, to the extent that she still wields it for us, has to do not only with how kinship makes its claim within the language of the state but with the social deformation of both idealized kinship and political sovereignty that emerges as a consequence of her act. In her act, she transgresses both gender and kinship norms, and though the Hegelian tradition reads her fate as a sure sign that this transgression is necessarily failed and fatal, another reading is possible in which she exposes the socially contingent character of kinship, only to become the repeated occasion in the critical literature for a rewriting of that contingency as immutable necessity.

Antigone’s crime, as you know, was to bury her brother after Creon, her uncle and the king, published an edict prohibiting such a burial. Her brother, Polyneices, leads an enemy army against his own brother’s regime in Thebes in order to gain what he considers to be his rightful place as inheritor of the kingdom. Both Polyneices and his brother, Eteocles, die, whereupon Creon, the maternal uncle of the dead brothers, considers Polyneices an infidel and wants him denied a proper funeral, indeed, wants the body left bare, dishonored and ravaged.¹¹ Antigone acts, but what is her act? She buries her brother, indeed, she buries him twice, and the second time the guards report that they have seen her. When she appears before Creon, she acts again, this time verbally, refusing to deny that it was she who did the deed. In effect, what she refuses is the linguistic possibility of severing herself from the deed, but she does not assert it in any unambiguously affirmative way: she does not simply say, “I did the deed.”

In fact, the deed itself seems to wander throughout the play, threatening to become attached to some doers, owned by some who could not have done it, disowned by others who might have done it. The act is everywhere delivered through speech acts: the guard reports that he has seen her; she reports that she has done it.

The only way that the doer is attached to the deed is through the linguistic assertion of the connection. Ismene claims that she will say that she did the deed, if Antigone will allow it, and Antigone refuses to allow it. The first time the sentry reports to Creon, he claims, “I did not do the deed, nor did I see who did” (25), as if to have seen it would have meant to have done it, or to have participated in its doing. He is aware that by reporting that he did see the deed, his very reporting will attach him to the deed, and he begs Creon to see the difference between the report of the deed and the deed itself. But the distinction is not only difficult for Creon to make, it survives as a fatal ambiguity in the text. The chorus speculates that “this action may have been prompted by the Gods” (29), apparently skeptical of its human authorship. And at the end of the play, Creon exclaims that the suicides of his wife and son are his acts, at which point the question of what it means to author a deed becomes fully ambiguous. Everyone seems aware that the deed is transferable from the doer, and yet, in the midst of the rhetorical proliferation of denials, Antigone asserts that she cannot deny that the deed is hers. Good enough. But can she affirm it?

Through what language does Antigone assume authorship of her act or, rather, refuse to deny that authorship? Antigone is introduced to us, you will remember, by the act by which she defies Creon’s sovereignty, contesting the power of his edict, which is delivered as an imperative, one that has the power to do what it says, explicitly forbidding anyone to bury that body. Antigone thus marks the illocutionary failure of Creon’s utterance, and her contestation takes the verbal form of a reassertion of sovereignty, refusing to dissociate the deed from her person: “I say that I did it and I do not deny it” (43), translated less literally by Grene as “Yes, I confess: I will not deny my deed” [in Greek, Creon says, “phes, e katarnei ne dedrakenai tade” and Antigone replies: “kai phemi drasai kouk aparnoumai to ne”].

“Yes, I confess it,” or “I say I did it”—thus she answers a question that is posed to her from another authority, and thus she concedes the authority that this other has over her. “I will not deny my deed”—“I do not deny,” I will not be forced into a denial, I will refuse to be forced into a denial by the other’s language, and what I will not deny is my deed—a deed that becomes possessive, a grammatical possession that makes sense only within the context of the scene in which a forced confession is refused by her. In other words, to claim “I will not deny my deed” is to refuse to perform a denial, but it is not precisely to claim the act. To say, “Yes, I did it,” is to claim the act, but it is also to commit another deed in the very claiming, the act of publishing one’s deed, a new criminal venture that redoubles and takes the place of the old.

Interestingly enough, both Antigone’s act of burial and her verbal defiance become the occasions on which she is called “manly” by the chorus, Creon, and the messengers.¹² Indeed, Creon, scandalized by her defiance, resolves that while he lives “no woman shall rule” (51), suggesting that if she rules, he will die. And at one point he angrily speaks to Haemon who has sided with Antigone and countered him: “Contemptible character, inferior to a woman!” (746). Earlier, he speaks his fear of becoming fully unmanned by her: if the powers that have done this deed go unpunished, “Now I am no man, but she the man [aner]” (528). Antigone thus appears to assume the form of a certain masculine sovereignty, a manhood that cannot be shared, which requires that its other be both feminine and inferior. But there is a question that persists: has she truly assumed this manhood? Has she crossed over into the gender of sovereignty?

This, of course, leads back to the question of how this manly and verbally defiant figure comes to stand for the gods of kinship. It strikes me as unclear whether Antigone represents kinship or, if she does, what sort of kinship it might be. At one point she appears to be obeying the gods, and Hegel insists that these are the gods of the household: she declares, of course, that she will not obey Creon’s edict because it was not Zeus who published the law, thus claiming that Creon’s authority is not Zeus’s (496–501) and apparently displaying her faith in the law of the gods. And yet, she is hardly consistent on this score, noting in an infamous passage that she would not have done the same for other members of her family:

For never, had children of whom I was the mother or had my husband perished and been mouldering there would I have taken on myself this task, in defiance of the citizens. In virtue of what law do I say this? If my husband had died, I could have another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother. Such was the law for whose sake I did you special honour, but to Creon I seemed to do wrong and to show shocking recklessness, O my brother. And now he leads me thus by the hands, without marriage, without bridal, having no share in wedlock or in the rearing of children. (900–920)

Antigone here hardly represents the sanctity of kinship, for it is for her brother or, at least, in his name, that she...