Butler Antigone's Claim
Text
Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life & Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. PLEASE READ IN ENTIRETY (pp. 1-82.)
Journal Entries. Butler's Claim (or one of them): Does It Hold Up?
This will be an exercise in critical thinking. You'll be choosing one of the claims that Judith Butler makes in her book, Antigone's Claim, and then evaluating it.
Now, before you panic, please note that this is intended to be a PRACTICE EXERCISE and OPEN-ENDED. Pre-packaged, "right" answers don't interest me. Honest efforts by students do. So,
- Please look over brief discussions of critical thinking from another course site (the Persuasion site):
- As you read Antigone's Claim, think about, and then write about in your online journal, some particular point Judith Butler (the author) makes (can be a minor point). In doing so, try to address the following questions:
- What is the point or thesis you'd like to discuss?
- In supporting that thesis, does Butler seem to draw her conclusions in a well-reasoned or logical fashion? Explain. . .
- Does Butler document, that is, provide evidence in support of, the thesis you're discussing? Explain. . .
- Do you feel convinced? Explain. . .
In doing the above, I would ask that students maintain a respectful and courteous tone. I'm not interested in sensationalist blogging or in snark. I'd like us to treat others, their arguments, and their ideas, as we would want others to treat us and our ideas in their writing.
We'll reflect further on critical thinking in class.
Author
Judith Butler (b. 1956) is a feminist, post-structural philosopher and theorist teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.
She is associated with the study of gender as a social construct, with queer theory, and with ideas like that of the "gender performative," the idea that "gender" represents a set of expectations culturally generated and instilled in an individual through repeated rituals, starting with the summoning of a gender identity at birth: "It's a girl!" or "It's a boy!" (Think of all the baby showers where dolls/bats will be given as a consequence of gender expectations, and as reinforcement of same.)
Butler is a feminist and activist, but has sometimes stood oppositionally in relation to other feminists and activists. She is, in other words, quite willing to think critically about the work of others, as I think you'll see her do in her book, Antigone's Claim.
Work
Antigone's Claim seeks to do two things:
- To interrogate past interpretations of Sophocles' Antigone — to ask whether, in trying to theorize the defiance Antigone shows in the play, certain thinkers, Hegel (late 18th-early 19th cent.) and Lacan (20th cent.) in particular, do not end up validating the "take" of Creon and the power structures he stands for.
- In the case of Hegel, the position of Creon as exponent of public, political law against the private, divine law impelling Antigone to defy Creon
- In the case of Lacan, the position of Creon as exponent of the "symbolic order," the "word of the father," that which orders human life as if from the outside, though it is very much internal to human and social existence
and,
- To see if Antigone's defiance and "crime," not to mention the incest that runs through it all, can't be understood in more positive terms, which is to say, as pointing toward acceptance, even embrace, of the unconventional.
Basic Shape
Antigone's Claim starts out with an overview of the issues (chapter 1, "Antigone's Claim") and then proceeds to a critique of Hegel's and Lacan's respective interpretations of the Sophocles Antigone and of the play's title character (chapter 2, "Unwritten Laws, Aberrant Transmissions").
Then, in chapter 3, "Promiscuous Obedience," Butler charts out an original take on the challenges Antigone poses to convention and power.
This is not always an easy book, especially in chapters 1 and 2; I might recommend starting with pages 69-72 for a straightforward statement of the issues on the social and political plane.
As for Butler's style of exposition, it often moves from the abstract to the concrete — read on beyond that difficult paragraph or sentence, and you'll find that it all begins to fall into place.
Beyond that, I leave it up to you to piece together the argument and to consider it in relation to the primary text, Sophocles' Antigone, providing the original impetus for her study.
Glossary
Butler uses a fair amount of technical terminology which I try to clarify below:
Ate. In Greek, ate means either "destructive, delusional madness" or the "ruin" that follows from delusion. The concept has a close association with tragic action, where characters are often deluded by the gods or by their own arrogance into bringing about their own downfall.
Lacan takes ate and develops within it the idea of destruction as a boundary between life and death. Thus Lacan connects Antigone with the limit of the symbolic order (see below), a limit beyond which lie divine laws (the dictates of the gods) propelling Antigone's defiance of Creon and her destruction as well. Ate is, therefore, "the limit of human existence that can be crossed only briefly within life" (Butler 47).
Aufhebung. Hegelian concept: "sublation," the process whereby a term or concept is transformed through interaction with its opposite or "antithesis."
catachresis. An improper, strained, or otherwise borderline use of a word, phrase, metaphor, etc. — one that, in a sense, tests limits. To use the word "law" for what Antigone advocates (law of kin, of gods; unwritten law that cannot be precisely articulated) is a "stretch" within Hegel's interpretation of Antigone (it's not law as usually understood), an example, therefore, of catachresis, according to Butler, and an idea that she seems to appropriate from Hegel and to develop further. See also promiscuous obedience. chiasmic. It refers to reverse ordering: A B, then B A. Stack those pairs one over the other and you get a crosswise arrangement, a chiasmus (from the Greek letter X, or "chi.") Hence Antigone's defiance of Creon's authority, because it mirrors that authority in reverse, is "chiasmic" (or better, "chiastic").
contingent norm. A rule that is subject to change in response to people's attitudes, etc. That which is "contingent" depends on other things/circumstances for its meaning, etc.
episteme. "Knowledge" or a system of knowledge. In Foucault, knowledge is power in a whole bunch of ways.
exogamic mandate. The idea that you should marry OUTside a given group (nuclear family, village, etc.).
Hegelian. "Of or having to do with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German idealist philosopher, 1770–1831)." But this proved a problematic term last time. Let's say for the Antigone and Butler readings, "Hegelian" means "Hegel-like" specifically in terms of featuring a clash of opposed ideologies (thesis and antithesis), from whose clash emerges a new ideology (synthesis), "a 'reconciliation' of two principles" (Butler 47).
Hegel evidently read Sophocles Antigone as a kind of allegory of the creation of the state. Antigone stands for pre-state matriarchy and Creon for an emerging statist patriarchy. Out of their clash emerges a patriarchy subordinating women to the role of producing male citizen-soldiers.
illocutionary. See below, speech act.
irreducible. That point beyond which you can't go in an explanation. A lego block is irreducible to yet further divisions into lego blocks. "Lego block" becomes, then, an irreducible, elementary basis for all sorts of more complex, composite structures. So, too, if symbol is a linguistic structure "irreducible to the social forms that language takes" (Butler 20), it becomes the foundation on which social communication rests, and is itself immune to the give-and-take of redefinition in social life.
Lacanian. "Of or having to do with Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalytic thinker, 1901–1981)." In discussing Lacan or things "Lacanian," as far as this class is concerned, we're mostly talking about Lacan's ideas on the "symbolic order," which see.
mimesis, mimetic. Mimesis = the process of imitation, of fashioning of an image or facsimile, whether visual (painting, drawing, sculpture, photography), in words (literature), or otherwise. "Mimetic" = "of or having to do with mimesis."
nomos. "How are we to understand the strange nomos of the act itself?" (Butler 59). Nomos in Greek means "law" or "custom." Recall that Sophocles, Hegel, Lacan, and Butler are in different ways concerned with the law/legality (or is it custom?) on which Antigone's claim to justice rests.
ontology. Either the study of being/existence (thus a branch of philosophy), or a way or system of being/existence.
The "Other," otherness, alterity. The idea that our social and/or political existence places us in relationships with persons not us — those with/to whom we speak, to whom we listen, people different from us in simply in terms of non-identity between us and them. We need others, we want contact with them, they give us meaning. But the "Other" as embodiment of what is different can also unsettle or frighten.
polis. Polis in Greek means "city-state," or even simply "state," that is, a fully autonomous political entity. Athens was a city but it was also an independent country. In political thought, polis sometimes refers not to a particular state but to "the state" as an abstraction.
promiscuous obedience. This concept, which supplies Butler with a title for her last chapter, refers to the idea that Antigone's "action implicates her in an aberrant repetition of a norm, a custom, a convention, not a formal law but a law-like regulation of culture that that operates with its own contingency." She fulfills traditions of burial, but in so doing, violates traditions and norms having to do with women's silence (her act of burial is virtually a speech act, "I say I did and don't deny it") and with women's subservience to patriarchy (she disobey's her father's and uncle's injunction, yet she's obeying the male word of her brother and, indeed, the traditions of her people). That's all against the backdrop of confused kinship relations confusing kinship-related norms relating to, among other things, burial of kin. So Antigone's "promiscuous obedience" performs the character's simultaneous adherence to, and challenge to, norms. And it seems to be that, or something like it, that makes Antigone so compelling a figure for Butler.
sedimented ideality of the norm. "Norms" are the commonly acknowledged rules and such within a society; they define what is/isn't "normal" or acceptable. "Sedimentation" is the process whereby things like norms "settle to the bottom" of our shared attitudes, where they become the basis or bedrock of a culture's or society's language, belief system, and so on. A "sedimented ideality of the norm" will then be a rule or the like (say, the incest taboo) removed from the give-and-take of social reality, and then abstracted or idealized (the incest taboo as "RULE" in capital letters), and furthermore made foundational for a whole moral or cultural system. (Imagine if the ordering of civilization were understood as, ultimately, a consequence of the incest taboo. . . .)
Sittlichkeit. German for "morals," "morality," "ethical norms." Butler defines Hegel's use of the term thus: "the articulated norms that govern the sphere of intelligibility" — society's morals as a way for society to make sense of its values, etc.
speech act, illocutionary, performative. A "speech act" is an utterance that does something. ("With this ring I thee wed.") "Illocutionary" and "performative" basically mean "having to do with speech acts" or "possessing the power/quality of a speech act." I have a document explaining speech acts on the Persuasion site.
Symbolic order. In the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, kinship is as symbolic, that is, as a set of meaningful relations, as if to say that, under a given cultural system, "mother" or "brother-in-law" means such-and-such. (Your mother gave birth to you, but she surely means much more than that. What, then, does "mother" mean within a particular cultural system?)
Familial relationships are thus treated as signifiers (read "words"), and kinship systems, as quasi-languages. For Lévi-Strauss, that applies especially to the exchange of women between families (through marriage). Exchange like that is, therefore, like the exchange of words, that is, like the the communication of meaning. It signifies forms of connection between the families involved.
Lacan (20th-cent. French thinker) takes that idea and develops it in a psychoanalytic direction. Thus for him, the "symbolic order" refers to language-like structures controlling and stage-managing sexual energy so that values and culture can emerge, and so that the individual can become acculturated — so that it all can be "meaningful." The symbolic order will, then, involve "symbols" in the usual sense of meaningful abstractions, but also in the sense of rules controlling and leveraging — but also negating — all that sexual energy we had when younger.
It is confusing that Lacan describes the symbolic order as something that we both are and are not in, as both contingent and transcendental/universal. But it becomes less confusing when we understand the symbolic order as an element of human existence, hence something we are "in" and something dependent on other factors (contingent). But the symbolic order, where it is functioning, is trying to impress itself on us as something "outside" and "beyond." Or to quote Butler, "Its function is to transcendentalize its claims" (43). Thus the Oedipal Complex, "a structure of the symbolic, ... appears as that which is everywhere true" (44-5, author's emphasis).
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October 27, 2013
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