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Judith Butler comments on Antigone , one of the most famous Greek tragedies, with both feet in the present.
In Antigone's Reclamation , Judith Butler, with her rebellious spirit, offers a new reading of one of the most celebrated tragedies. Through fundamental questions about the concepts of kinship, gender, social ontology, and ethics, Butler presents and challenges Hegel and Jacques Lacan's established interpretations of Antigone and demonstrates the symptomatic gaps in these formulations—resulting from the (non)placement of the feminine in Western thought.
In the Greek play, Antigone, daughter and sister of Oedipus, finds her tragic conflict in the impossibility of burying her beloved brother Polyneices, considered a traitor to Thebes—the city where her uncle, Creon, reigns. Faced with the interdict, she does not hesitate: she acts according to her own ethics and performs the funeral rite. This dual action—performing and claiming authorship of the act—was considered for centuries a representation of the division of orders: ancient and civilizing; matriarchal and patriarchal; symbolic and social. However, this dichotomous manifestation did not allow Antigone's own voice, desire, and mourning to be validated, and this is the claim rescued in this book.
With both feet firmly planted in the present, Judith Butler reveals to contemporary eyes a divergent heroine who can become a source of inspiration and strength for marginalized lives, for queer subjects. It is in this sense that Antigone and Butler claim a new place: it is necessary to reinterpret the founding myths, confront their heterosexual binary structures, and then present them as disobedient and revolutionary constructions, capable of restoring the value and recognition of all subjects as lives worthy of being lived.
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