Antigone's Claim Paperback – March 15, 2002

To get it out of the way early, this is just barely a book about Sophocles' Antigone. I don't say this as a criticism by the way, but simply as a matter of setting expectations. As for what it -is- about, well, it's pretty classic Butler: take a bunch of social and political distinctions (between, say, the public and the private, life and death, family and society), show how unstable they are - the ways in which they bleed into one another, cross over at unexpected points, and muddle otherwise taken-for-granted lines of 'intelligibility' - and ground a hope for a more emancipatory and radical social order upon the wreckage wrought. Seen from a distance, it's a pretty straightforward project, and Antigone here serves as nothing less than the springboard from which to articulate it. Such are the stakes of Butler's reading of the play then, which continually attends to the 'transgressions', 'scandals', and defiances of the norm which litter the text, all the better to bring out its emancipatory potential.Yet while Antigone (the play), serves as the book's protagonist, it's the critique of its antagonists that lends the book most of it's already-slim heft (just over 80 pages without notes). Hence alongside the reading of the play itself is Butler's engagement with both Hegel and Lacan, whose own readings of Antigone are taken to exemplify attempts to 'contain' and otherwise check the transgressive currents that Butler so carefully divines. Against Hegel then, will Butler reject the attempt to fix the distinction between the state and the family, while against Lacan is emphasised the unstable boundaries between the 'Symbolic' and the social, distinctions which, in Butler's reading, underpin approaches to not just the play, but to our wider understanding of social and political categories more generally. If it sounds like there's alot packed in to this little book, it's because there is, and if there's any difficulty in reading here, it's as much to do with the condensed presentation of argument than with anything else.That all said, this book has left me somewhat torn. On the one hand, I can't help but appreciate the 'expansion' of Butler's thought from categories of gender (so central to her early work) to categories of social relations - specifically kinship relations - more generally. I've undoubtably come away from this thinking more critically and more expansively about the kinds of kinship relations that we so easily take for granted in this day and age. On the other hand, did we really need another reading of Antigone to get there? I mean, at my most critical, this felt like a footnote in the form of a book, developing ideas that really demanded more than the simple literary analysis offered within (even in a book of philosophy, is there really nothing to say of the sociology, history or economics of the family form? Really?). So yeah, a book of interesting ideas let down by the minimal effort made to pursue them - a disappointment not in spite of, but because of it's allure.

Antigone's revolt lives on! As Butler says herself in the introduction, she is not a classicist and has no desire to be one. This book is about the intellectual/artistic legacy of the figure of Antigone and the political and philosophical implications of her performative resistance to state power. Having taken a seminar in 1998 with Butler on the very topic of Antigone, I can assure you that the author is well aware of the ambiguity of Sophocles's play. As Butler demonstrates, this ambiguity is what has driven so many diverse interpretations by major thinkers such as Hegel and Lacan and playwrights like Hoelderlin and Brecht. Butler insightfully analyzes the critical-artistic tradition that has developed since Sophocles and helps to demonstrate this tradition's continued relevance in the present day--in any case where individual desire conflicts with the institution of the state as it functions to set the parameters of the normal or acceptable in society.

Judith Butler's study of Antigone, over the course of these 3 lectures, yields important and timely insights about how we might understand kinship and love in today's society. Her analysis of Hegel, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan is impressively rigorous. A must read for anyone interested in liguistics, structuralism, feminism and contemporary questions about political belonging.

Servizio puntuale, efficiente. Prezzo competitivo. Imballo non appariscente ma sufficiente al compito. Non ci sono osservazioni negative. Prezzo ottimo. Un buon libro. Consigliato.

This book over the consideration and judginemt for the story of Antigone enable us to think what the feminism really is.Moreover, we can go through some of the principle of ties between individuals and society.How many people who claim the feminism really and appropreately define what feminism is?Butler, although just I feel, is a femisit.Her attitude through this one stimulate us to think a variety of affairs we are relating to. If you like the Essentialism, this book must help you.