Whose Antigone?: The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery by Tina Chanter

Author:Tina Chanter [Chanter, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: philosophy, General, Drama, Ancient & Classical, social
ISBN: 9781438437569
Google: IEtENnuVyhIC
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2011-07-01T23:57:16.819262+00:00

Butler and Mader: Making Polynices Only a Brother

In her important discussion, Judith Butler argues that Antigone “exposes the socially contingent character of kinship.”15 There are plenty of reasons not only to take Butler's argument seriously, but to consider it as crucially important. First, and perhaps, most obviously, there is no question that the issue of kinship, the prohibition of incest, and its transgression, is central to the Oedipal cycle itself. Secondly, and no less importantly, Butler's questioning of who Antigone is, and what kind of example she might provide, enables her to draw attention to the way in which structures of kinship and the state are deeply implicated in one another.16 Butler is able to raise significant political questions about the investment of the state in maintaining the stability and fixity of normative familial configurations, while outlawing those configurations that threaten its legitimacy. She is also able to comment on the investment of Lacanians in distancing themselves from the proliferation and instability of the symbolic maternal and paternal positions that are currently operative. By pointing to the instability of maternal and paternal positions, Butler suggests that the symbolic and the social are not as easy to separate as Lacan suggests. Where “more than one woman … operates as the mother” or “more than one man … operates as the father,” Butler suggests, “the place of the father [or mother] is dispersed.”17 For Butler, the Lacanian symbolic, as the structure of intelligibility, idealizes certain kinship structures at the expense of others, but Lacanians make this idealization unavailable for questioning, in severing the symbolic from the social, and attributing a universality to the former.18 For Lacan, the symbolic renders itself immune from interrogation; his very distinction between the symbolic and the social covers over the fact that the symbolic borrows certain features from a normative interpretation of the social, disavowing its normative dimension, failing to notice that it is derivative of heteronormative kinship structures. Lacan's symbolic thus barricades itself against critique. The symbolic comes to function as a law, yet any questioning of its legality is considered out of bounds. For Butler, it is impossible to definitively purify the symbolic, as a formal requirement, from normative social arrangements.19

In contrast to Lacan, Butler sees the symbolic not as an idealized precondition of the social, but as itself constituted in and through the various sediments that make up the spectrum of social relations. “My view,” says Butler, “is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and social theory.”20

Butler's argument that the distinction between the symbolic and the social is not as easily maintained as Lacanians tend to insist is one with which I concur. Yet I wonder whether there is a sense in which Butler herself allows her own investigation into Antigone to be circumscribed by the particular

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