Title: Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
Author(s): Judith Butler
Year: 2000
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. (2)
kinship is figured at the limit of what Hegel calls “the ethical order,” the sphere of political participation but also of visible cultural norms (3)
two questions that the play [Antigone] 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 the independence from one another? […] 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. (5)
Antigone has already departed from kinship, herself the daughter of an incestuous bond, herself devoted to an impossible and death-bent incestuous bond, herself devoted to an impossible and death-bent incestuous love of her brother, how her actions compel others to regard her as “manly” and thus cast doubt on the way that kinship might underwrite gender… (6)
On the one hand, we are told that the rule of prohibiting incest is universal, but Levi-Strauss also acknowledges that it does not always “work.” What he does not pursue, however, is the question, what forms does its nonworking take? Moreover, when the prohibition appears to work, does it have to sustain and manage a specter of its nonworking in order to proceed? More specifically, can such a rule, understood as a prohibition, actually operate, however effectively, without producing and maintaining the specter of its transgression? Do such rules produce conformity, or do they also produce conformity, or do they also produce a set of social configurations that exceed and defy the rules by which they are occasioned? (17)
Her [Antigone’s] fate is not to have a life to live, to be condemned to death prior to any possibility of life. This raises the question of how it is that kinship secures the conditions of intelligibility by which life becomes livable, by which life also becomes condemned and foreclosed. Antigone’s death is always double throughout the play: she claims that she has not lived, that she has not loved, and that she has not borne children, and so that she has been under the curse that Oedipus laid upon his children, “serving death” for the length of her life. Thus death signifies the unlived life, and so as she approaches the living tomb that Creon has arranged for her, she meets a fate that has been hers all along. Is it perhaps the unlivable desire with which she lives, incest itself, that makes of her life a living death, that has no place within the terms that confer intelligibility on life? (23)
is her death precisely a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives can be countenanced as living? (29)
Antigone is caught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking, outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. Her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror. Kinship is not simply a situation she is in but a set of practices that she also performs, relations that are reinstituted in time precisely through the practice of their repetition. (57-58)
Before he dies, Oedipus makes several utterances that assume the status of a curse. He condemns her, but the force of the condemnation is to bind her to him. His words culminate in her own permanent lovelessness, one that is mandated by Oedipus’ demand for loyalty, a demand that verges on incestuous possessiveness […] His words exert a force in time that exceeds the temporality of their enunciation […] Can the implications of the curse, understood as extended action, be understood only retrospectively? The action predicted by the curse for the future turns out to be an action that has been happening all along, such that the forward movement of time is precisely what is inverted through the temporality of the curse. The curse establishes a temporality for the action it ordains that predates the curse itself. (60-61)
they do this precisely by becoming words that act in time, words whose temporality exceeds the scene of their utterance, becoming the desire of those they name, repetitious and conjuring, conferring only retrospectively the sense of a necessary and persistent past that is confirmed by the sense of a necessary and persistent past that is confirmed by the utterance that predicts it, where prediction becomes the speech act by which an already operative necessity is confirmed. (64)
the curse operates within an uncertain temporality. Uttered before the events, its force is only known retroactively; its force precedes its utterance, as if the utterance paradoxically inaugurates the necessity of its prehistory and of what will come to appear as always already true. But how surefire is a curse? Is there a way to break it? Or is there, rather, a way in which its own vulnerability might be exposed and exploited? The one who within the present recites the curse or finds oneself in the midst of the word’s historical effectivity does not precisely ventriloquize words that are received from a prior source. The words are reiterated, and their force is reenforced. (65-66)
To the extent that the incest taboo contains its infraction within itself, it does not simply prohibit incest but rather sustains and cultivates incest as a necessary specter of social dissolution, a specter without which social bonds cannot emerge. (66-67)
This equivocation at the site of the kinship terms signals a decidedly postoedipal dilemma, one in which kin positions tend to slide into one another […] for anyone living in this slide of identifications, their fate will be an uncertain one, living within death, dying within life. (67)
We are all supposed to be satisfied with this apparently generous gesture by which the perverse is announced to be essential to the norm. The problem as I see it is that the perverse remains entombed precisely there, as the essential and negative feature of the norm, and the relation between the two remains static, giving way to no rearticulation of the norm itself. (76)
those relations that are denied legitimacy, or that demand new terms of legitimation, are neither dead nor alive, figuring the nonhuman at the border of the human. (79)
She [Antigone] is not of the human but speaks in its language. […] If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws. She acts, she speaks, she becomes one for whom the speech act is a fatal crime, but this fatality exceeds her life and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising fatality, the social form of its aberrant, unprecedented future. (82)