The Question of Antigone

1. Opening remarks:

Hegel´s admiration for the figure of Antigone, described as “heavenly” and as the “noblest of figures that ever appeared on earth”, was to be reiterated by many other authors, artists and philosophers (Leonard, 2003). This is also true of some psychoanalysts, most notoriously Jacques Lacan, who answers his own question with regards to what one finds when reading Antigone as follows: “First of all, one finds Antigone in her unbearable  splendor” (Lacan, 1992, p. 293).

It is fair to say, that one of the striking features of Antigone, contributing to her “unbearable splendor”, is her unwavering determination to follow through with her burial of Polyneices, her persistence of this deed twice-over, and all this even in the face of certain death, as she knew well that Creon would execute anyone that would dare to honour this state-enemy and traitor. It would be disingenuous to simply understand Creon´s established law as a will for revenge against Polyneices, a traitor of Thebes. Rather, Creon is attempting to serve the polis by maintaining civil order. As Neill (2011, p. 213) has pointed out, Creon´s reasoning might be more aptly described as follows:

“To honour a traitor and enemy of the city in the same way as one honours a defender of the city would be to defame the defender and, by extension, the city itself, the people of Thebes. […] This is a simple rule of difference, to honour both traitor and defender in the same way would be to extinguish the symbolic difference between them.”

As such Antigone is showing resistance, at least on the face of it, not to a revengeful Creon but to a “rational” Creon. It is known that the reading of Antigone confronts us with the problematics behind the legitimation of the law, the feminine and the masculine, the familial and the extrafamilial, the ethical and the political, the godly and the humanly. The question of political resistance is, however, the question that most fascinated me and it is hence the question that I want to focus on. To what is Antigone resisting? What is her political commitment, if any? Is she a model for political forms of resistance? Resistance to what?

In focusing on this question, I want to revolve around a second issue that is dear to me, namely the fruitfulness, or lack thereof, of psychoanalytic reasoning for political philosophy or political engagement as a whole. This second question, of course, has quite a history, mostly a history of critique of psychoanalysis. Vernant (1978), for example, criticized psychoanalysis as ahistorical and even more vehemently indeed as apolitical (Leonard, 2003). While anachronism and apoliticism are surely related, the radicality of Vernant´s attack is more interestingly stated by the rejection of the Freudian depolitization of Oedipus. This questions the relation that psychoanalysis has with the political and brings up the question how we could understand the engagement with the tragedy of Antigone as a rectification of the Oedipal apoliticism within psychoanalysis, aimed to invigorate the relationship between psychoanalysis and the political. Indeed, Sjöholm (1998) has emphasized that it is not by chance that the figure of Antigone has become central for many feminists, political theorists and also ethicists that are critical of the Oedipal paradigm within psychoanalysis or also critical of psychoanalysis as a whole.

2. A Lacanian reading of Antigone:

Lacan rejected a reading of Antigone that simply sets out to illustrate a conflict between two different sets of principles or laws, like it was typical of the Hegelian reading, who opposed the promulgated, humanly, universal law of the city to the godly, singular law of the heavens (as Hegel associates Antigone to household gods, the Penates – for more on this, see Mills (‎1986)). It would be too easy to simply interpret Antigone´s actions as prioritising her duty towards the gods over her duty to the polis. Of course, much of the prima facie fascination that the play emanates to the intellect is precisely this: both characters of the tragedy are backed by a legitimating discourse, employing different conceptions of what is just and right, but still their discourse is incommensurately conflicting with the other.

However, Lacan (1992) sees a difference in the status of the two conflicting laws. Whereas the status of Creon´s humanly law is pretty straightforward for Lacan, serving civil order by maintaining a symbolic difference between traitor and defender of state, the status of Antigone´s law is more enigmatic. As Neill (2011) has stated, Lacan emphasizes how Antigone´s divine law is beyond comprehension to the contemporary reader. Lacan (1992, p. 259-60) writes:

“[W]e no longer have any idea what the gods are. Let us not forget that we have lived for a long time under Christian law, and in order to recall what the gods are, we have to engage in a little ethnography. […] In other words, this whole sphere is only really accessible to us from the outside, from the point of view of science and of objectification. For us Christians, who have been educated by Christianity, it doesn’t belong to the text in which the question is raised. We Christians have erased the whole sphere of the gods. And we are, in fact, interested here in that which we have replaced it with as illuminated by psychoanalysis.”

Drawing from this, Lacan proposes that Antigone´s law is actually unpronounceable, something else which is entirely ineffable to us. In congruence with this understanding, Lacan understands Antigone´s repetitious insistence on formulating her desire to bury Polyneices and her lack of further argumentation for this: Antigone´s desire is very specific, even “tautological” as Lacan has it (I must bury Polyneices because he is Polyneices). Antigone´s desire emanates in her repetitious insistence. As Neill (2011) has pointed out, the divine laws employed by Antigone can be understood, from a Lacanian perspective, as situated beyond the limit point of signification, beyond the Symbolic realm given by the current laws of the community. Something insists in Antigone even if it is beyond the realm of symbolizability, or in Lacanese: some Thing in the Real insists.

Lacan approaches a famous passage of the play in order to substantiate the tautological character of Antigone´s desire: Antigone transpires her unique sentiments for Polyneices in the notoriously repudiated and disavowed lines by Goethe, where she insists that she would not have done the forbidden deed for anyone else, neither her unborn son nor her yet-to-be husband. While Hegel extrapolates from these lines some sort of female “ethical substance” devoted to the Gods and family, suggesting that Antigone´s full ethical consciousness must be denied as she is not universalizing her principles (Leonard, 2003), Lacan takes those lines as a hint that Antigone´s desire stems from something that insists in the Real. In Lacanian terminology, the Symbolic has a substitutional character, which is emphasized by its metaphorical functioning: one thing stands in for another, or more precisely: the word (the Symbolic) is the death of the Thing (the Real), it aims to replace it. Now, Antigone is exactly not substitutional in her desire, fiercely clatching to Polyneices and Polyneices alone, which according to Lacan indicates, once more, that she is longing for the Real or the Thing in Polyneices. The Thing, or “das Ding” as Lacan usually calls it in reference to Freud´s “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1885), concerns the unsymbolizable kernel in the Other, which points to hir irreplaceable character. The unsymbolizability of this primordial experience with an Other, drives the uncanny compulsion to repeat, hence Antigone´s repetitious insistence upon burial. Lacan argues that this ineffable and irreplaceable element attaches to one single signifier, which is Polyneices name: “the emergent signifier [name] freezes it [das Ding] like a fixed object in spite of the flood of possible transformations” (Lacan, 1992, p. 278). The name “Polyneices” includes, thus, a singular uniqueness, an untradeable Thing, which is the cause of Antigone´s desire, her “object petit a”. Given her desire, caused by the Thing, Antigone is unwilling to cede it: she is unshaken by prudence (what Ismene is telling her to be) or fear (because of Creon´s premonitions).

Importantly, Žižek`s (2001, pp. 165-178) interpretation of Sophocles´ Antigone is precisely attached to this insistence of the Real. In the Žižekian (neo-Lacanian) theory of the act, an act is to be differentiated to a mere behaviour. Simply put, whereas a behaviour can be a response to a demand or a need, an act is only an act by virtue of its connection to pure desire, the insistence of the Real (Neill, 2011, pp. 214-215). A more detailed account of an act is necessary: Pluth (2007, pp. 108-125) describes an act from the Lacanian perspective in great detail and I will try to summarize the main points more concisely. An act is (i) a transgressive (ii) signifying gesture that (iii) changes the structure of the subject. An act transforms the subject, which before the act operated under a certain structure (with a certain law), and thus inaugurates a new subject, a subject beyond the limits of the previous structure (and law). As such, an act aims at what is beyond the current Symbolic in place, it aims beyond the limit of signification, consequently situating the act outside the law: for this reason one can call an act “transgressive”. The act is transgressive, precisely insofar as it uses language despite the Other, the recognized Symbolic in place, as such in indifference to the Other, because it can create meaning from non-meaning (symbolizing/signifying the Real), from nothing. As such an act is creative (it literally creates), as the product (creation) is not based on the recognition and nodding approval of the Other (Symbolic in order). It must be noted, hence, that while an act must signify, this signification is not based upon representing a signifier to another signifier (within given Symbolic structure), but rather an act signifies by being a signifier of repetition, for example, repetition of a traumatic event (e.g. see Fort/Da game or see Seminar III, in which Lacan talks about the “signifier in the Real”, a signifier that is not bound up with the production of meanings already recognized by the big Other but rather involved in the repetition of a resistance against signification). Importantly, what is stated above connects to the later Lacanian insistence upon the barred Other, the downfall of the Other and thus the impossibility of a perfectly structured and all-completing Other (the Other, as barred, cannot be the receptacle of all possible signifiers, it is necessarily not whole), which opens up the space for the perpetual flux of signification by absorption of some-Thing from the Real. While Pluth´s (2007) characterization of acts is much richer than I could have summarized in such brevity, it must be said still, as it is of enormous weight for the reception of Lacanian and Žižekian theories within the Antigone-debate, that Pluth deemphasizes Žižek´s understanding of an act as a purely negative category (the famous “no” of Antigone) and offers also a positive understanding of an act. Neill (2011, p. 215) connects the creative transgression of the act to Antigone as follows:

“The laws of the gods ‘speak’ from beyond, that is, on the side of the Real. Which is, of course, to say they do not in fact speak at all. They are manifest in Antigone and given expression through her act in such a way that ‘it isn’t a question of recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted’ (Lacan, 1988b: 229). In giving voice to the law of the gods, Antigone should be understood to have created and brought forth ‘a new presence in the world’. She should, that is, be understood to have named her desire and, moreover, assumed herself as the cause of this desire.” 

Žižek reads Antigone not only as an ethical agent but also as a political agent of resistance, as she exemplifies the pure disruption of the given social/symbolic/political order, she exemplifies the possibility of creative change in what is given and what should otherwise always remain the same. Her connection to the Real has been criticized as apolitical by several authors (e.g. Butler (2000)). While it is debatable to what extent Antigone can serve as an example for a political agent (or, on the other hand, an ethical agent), I would understand it as false to describe Lacan´s Antigone as apolitical for several reasons. To name just two of them here: (i) Antigone is not situated “only” in the Real, she follows her desire that is caused by the Real, but she symbolizes said desire by assuming it and bringing it into a political context, she is signifying something out of nothing, which is a creative political act, and (ii) there are strong reasons to assume that the Real itself in Lacanian theory is not apolitical (as often assumed): this claim can be substantiated, for example, by reference to Seminar III (1993), in which Lacan states for the first time that what is foreclosed in the Symbolic returns in the Real, which clearly brings a dialectical character to the Real, open to politization. The Real is simply the order of that which is ineffable given what is given and said what has been said – the act is the potentiality for change in structure. As such, Lacan was not alone in such kind of theorizing – it can be noticed that Lacan falls quite fairly into the category of thinkers that tried to politically reactivate philosophy (and psychoanalysis) by “thinking the impossible” (see Gutting´s (2011) book “Thinking the Impossible. French Philosophy Since 1960”).

So, is Lacan´s Antigone ethical or political? Of course the strict division of the ethical from the political is to be argued, but I will not dwell on this issue. I believe that while Lacan conceptualized Antigone in the context of an ethics of psychoanalysis, he still invested her with political agency, as she represents the suspension of the Symbolic order and the creative possibility for the transformation of this order by symbolization of something which is ineffable in the given structuring (note that my reading is more influenced by Pluth (2007) and differs from Žižek´s more restrictive and negativizing reading, more precisely insofar Žižek insists that the act is divorced from any re-inscription in the Symbolic, the act is not a moment of dialectical Aufhebung but strictly the momentary assumption of the lack in the Other, the Thing that the Other is not, the Other-Thing). As already approached, there have been, on the other hand, various theorists that have criticized Lacan for depoliticizing Antigone and making only an ethics out of the heroine. Leonard (2003), as an exemplary case for such theorizing, has insisted that, although Lacan slips forth and back between a politics and an ethics of Antigone in terminology, his Antigone is essentially an ethical agent and not a political one. One depoliticising gesture of Lacan´s interpretation of the play would be his total commitment to read the tragedy as Antigone´s tragedy alone, thus marginalizing the relevancy of Creon, Ismene and others. Surely the other figures do appear in Lacan´s interpretation, but always secondary to Antigone and the analysis of her desire. This is not by chance, Leonard (2003) suggests, as Lacan stresses how Antigone´s desire is outside and beyond the political struggle of law and authority with Creon. Loraux (1991, p. 42) has stressed as well that Lacan encounters only Antigone herself in his interpretation and not the play of Antigone, thus leaving out the theatre as such and with it the entire politics of the polis surrounding the theatre. This, again, would point to psychoanalysis´ depoliticizing appropriation of antiquity, also in Lacan.

To me, however, these critics entirely miss the point that Lacan was trying to make. Lacan, to my mind, is more concerned with advancing the political possibility beyond the agonism of politics and an ethics of transgression, an ethics beyond recognition by the other/Other. Note how this claim is not taking away from an understanding of politics as agonistics but is rather additive to such an understanding. Claiming that Lacan deemphasized the theatrical politics of ancient Greece and hence is apolitical is analogical to claiming that something is not a forest because there are no pines in it. Lacan merely believes that the force of the play does not lie in the precise content of the conflict (what exactly does conflict between Creon and Antigone?), but rather in the (alleged) formal structure of the conflict. One might even question whether it makes sense to see if Lacan´s interpretation fits perfectly and without incongruencies and contradictions to the original version of Sophocles play. To me, what matters is that the Lacanian reading clearly indicates one path for civil disobedience, which doesn´t claim exclusivity nor totality, but tries to theorize what it means to be “beyond the reality principle” by way of a performative transformation of Symbolic reality, of given doxa mutated to consensual reality, through the residual void of the Real.

As de Kesel (2009, pp. 212-215) has pointed out, Antigone takes on from the beginning a fatal position, as if she would act from the symbolic position of knowing that her life has long been dead. Antigone acts as a living dead (e.g. Antigone stated to Ismene both “Yes, you chose life, and I chose death” and “You are alive, but my life has long been dead”). Lacan describes Antigone as being “between two deaths”, as she locates herself beyond the limit of the Symbolic, she has suffered Symbolic death and, as such, stands between her symbolic death and her actual death. Consequently, Lacan can claim that Antigone stands beyond calculations of the reality principle or the pleasure principle. Antigone has no interest to maximize her personal happiness or avoid unpleasure – she is radically decentred from her own person and as such she can be describes as death-wedded: she “pushes to the limit the realisation of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such” (Lacan, 1992, p. 282). In this case, the “desire of death as such” can be understood precisely as a desire for the beyond. She desires to act, to bring about something that is beyond, she aims at something fatal that is beyond her happiness. This positioning in the beyond transpires in what could be understood as a coldness (e.g. towards Ismene) and uncanniness.

Further questions pop up. Why does Lacan focus on Antigone´s beauty? Let me scratch the surface a bit with regards to this, I believe, often misunderstood role of beauty within Lacan´s text. Lacan (1992) admires the “fierce presence that Antigone represents” (p. 265), her radiating capacity to intimidate us. Further, Lacan claims that Antigone´s beauty functions as a sort of cleansing and disposal of the imaginary, or how Sharpe (2012) has pointed it out: “Lacan sees [Antigone] as a kind of ´image to end all images´ in the tragedy to purify us of our pity and fear”. De Kesel (2009) describes Antigone as opaque, resisting to function as a mirror for ourselves, which would make her function within an economy of the same (take the typical: “I like you. We are so much alike”). As Neill (2011, pp. 230-233) has pointed out, Antigone´s function as the beautiful is strictly bound to her representation in the play as something excessive, beyond the limit, enigmatic. Insofar Antigone herself is raised to the status of the Thing (das Ding) of the spectator she is presented as inhuman (beyond humanity). When Lacan describes her as inhuman he is not implying that Antigone is uncivilized, monstrous or somehow evil-minded. It is simply a way, again, to situate her beyond the Symbolic, emphasizing her impossibility to be easily situated and understood. Note how Lacan is similar to Butler´s (2000) reception of Antigone here. Antigone is beautiful not because she complies with a certain convention of idealized beauty, but precisely because she doesn´t, because she is beyond our conventions. She radiates, she startles us, she is not to be unseen. As such, it is even more accurate to say that Antigone is not beautiful as such, but she is beautiful insofar she can function as an enigmatic cause of desire for spectators.

Leonard (2003) proposes a different reading of Lacan´s beautification of Antigone. Leonard emphasizes that Lacan is, allegedly, viewing Antigone as an example of beauty, because Antigone´s desire to bury her brother is pure, unconditional and not incestuous. Leonard (2003) continues:  

“Antigone´s pure desire has its mirror image, its supporting opposite, in the impure desire of her mother. We have come back here to the most classic economy of misogyny.”

As such, Leonard extrapolates from Lacan that Antigone is implicitly described like Mary, the immaculate and pure woman who saves man [Polyneices] without either sex nor temptation, while Jocasta would be Eve, the impure temptress that brought man [the entire community of Thebes] to its fall. Thus, for Leonard, Lacan´s Antigone interpretation turns out to be a celebrational hymn to the figure of the virginal martyr. Without wanting to salvage Lacan from claims of misogyny overall, which is neither my wish nor my belief, I think that most of Leonard´s extrapolations, again, severely miss the point. The formal structure of an ethical act that does not cede on desire is an act that does not follow what is already considered as good, but instead creatively generates what counts as such. It is most surprising that such a thing can be described by some as a misogynistic theory. Further, Leonard (2003) criticizes Julien´s (1995) emphasis, that Lacan´s ethic is formulated as contentless, claiming that Julien is “disingenuous”. I believe that contentless ethics is the only appeal of Lacanian ethics as such. Leonard mistakes “pure desire” as meaning unconditional (in the sense of unconditional love for her brother Polyneices) and ethics as a statement of good or evil: Lacan, taken seriously, implies neither, as pure desire is a statement emphasizing the “beyond” the Symbolic and ethics is simply the word that Lacan uses for the possibility of creativity in the field of values. 

3. Nussbaum´s deflationism:

Martha Nussbaum (2003), a Neo-Aristotelian scholar also influenced by psychoanalysis, sees in Sophocles play mainly a reflection upon practical wisdom. Within the play, according to Nussbaum, we can recognize in Creon and Antigone the strong inflexibility and stubbornness, the unwillingness to change one´s own frame of thought. Both Creon and Antigone demonstrate that grounding one´s own position with good reasons for one´s actions is not sufficient in the ethical and political sphere. Rather, a conflictual sphere, the willingness to confront oneself with the opponent’s position, and hence risking being torn between one and the other position, is essential for practical wisdom. In order to act justly, while one can never take reference to the totality of recognized values, one still needs to recognize conflictual tensions and disharmony. These elements are however totally or mostly lacking within Creon´s (until the very last) and Antigone´s speech according to Nussbaum.

Nussbaum´s (2003) interpretation of the play is a deflationary account with regards to the political value of Antigone´s resistance.

4. Elshtain´s essentialism?

In “Antigone´s daughters” (1982), Jean Bethke Elshtain pleads for what she calls a third, intermediary way between a feminism of equality and a feminism of difference. Elshtain criticizes the former by suggesting that equality is attained mainly, or at least abundantly, through women´s adaptation to a society that is structured by men. This adaptation to a world structured by masculinity can be seen for example, according to Elshtain, in the devaluation of a sphere that has historically been populated by women, namely the private, familial sphere, and with this sphere the function of maternality. Furthermore, she criticizes the means to achieve equality, taking issue with policies like affirmative action that implicitly suggest that women are in need of assistance in order to navigate society as equals, thus victimizing women. The latter, feminism of difference, is criticized mainly because of its alleged tendency to associate the political sphere to men, thus excluding women into political passivity. Her so-called “social feminism” as the third way assigns to women a political role, shaped by a maternal thinking. As such, Elshtain suggests, women are not just adapting to a society structured by men but are actively shaping it by virtue of a productive engagement with their history, their traditional, devalued sphere within the private and familial as mothers. From this sphere the emanating productive element is “maternal thinking”, a thinking which has its foundations in the private, familial (the first playground, where we acquire notions of empathy, mutual understanding, etc.), but can be integrated into a kind of public ethical system, which emphasizes the importance of social values and human dignity.

Antigone is seen by Elshtain as a perfect representation of the middle way: she acts publicly and politically, but in-so-doing she does not adapt to a male structuring, thus adopting another identity for the sake of “going political”. Furthermore, Antigone clearly is disruptive to the established dichotomies of masculine-feminine, public-private, statist-familial, etc., as she integrates what is associated to the private into the public, she integrates the familial into state-affairs and she emphasizes historically feminine notions within a masculine context. Importantly, gender roles are thus not simply passively accepted, nor simply reacted against, but Antigone actively engages in a productive dialogue in the political sphere, by moulding women´s history and still taking reference to women´s traditional baggage. In a way, Elshtain´s Antigone is seen as a double enrichment for the political, at first as she brings with her elements of “maternal thinking” (what precisely this is supposed to mean, is still open for me) and secondly as she waters down existing dichotomies. The first, thus, could be understood as Antigone´s act of difference, and the second as Antigone´s act of equality. Put in terms of resistance: the first could be understood as Antigone´s resistance to adapt to the “political as given”, the political as historically shaped by a man-dominated structure and her resistance to disavow and degrade the traditional roles that women have played and that have shaped their subjectivities, thus pre-empting the possibility of finding any productive element within the history and subjectivation of women that constitutes a differance to the history and subjectivation of men. The second, instead, could be understood as Antigone´s resistance to an essentialisation of differences that have contingently made up women´s or men´s history and the resistance against fixed, traditional and petrified identities.

I take it, although it might not have been the intended meaning, that Elshtain is not ahistorically and essentialistically defining the private, familial as feminine and the public, cold, static political as masculine. Seeing essentialism within Elshtain´s argumentation is just an easy way to get rid with it, not acknowledging that there could be something to it. A serious weakness however, to my mind, of Elshtain´s approach is the importance given to ethics at the cost of a deflationary account of the conflictual and political.

5. Butler´s ambiguity-driven paradigm:

While it is central to Lacan´s Antigone that she is outside the context of Creon´s discourse, this disconnectedness to the political realm and the insistence upon her desire as pure are elements that Butler (2000) has criticized about the Lacanian and Žižekian reading. An important element in Butler´s critique is that Antigone´s desire is metaphorically charged and thus symbolically involved, as she is intrenched in a transgenerational repetition of incestuous desire in her family. As such, Butler charges Lacan to have repeated the blindness to incest between Antigone and Polyneices that was typical of Hegel (Leonard, 2003).

Butler essentially disagrees with positioning Antigone as pre-political figure that stands in opposition to state-power, a state that in feminist readings (á la Elshtain) often gets connotated to the male (see Creon´s role in the play), and Antigone as a figure that represents and stands in for kinship and femininity. As Butler (2000, p. 2) formulates it:

“What struck me first was the way in which Antigone has been read by Hegel and Lacan and […] by Luce Irigaray and others not as a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implications, but rather as one who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it.”

I will come later to a short commentary of Butler´s reading of Lacan. For now it is important to note that Antigone is a political agent in Butler´s reading and that kinship ties are central to this. What else is essential? Influenced by Arendt´s idea of the “human”, Butler contemplates on the status of being deprived of the perception to be a “human” subject (Lloyd, 2005). This is, prima facie at least, quite reminding of Lacan´s ascription of Antigone as “inhuman”.  Butler (2000, p. 82) writes:

“[Antigone] is not of the human but she speaks in its language. Prohibited from action, she nevertheless acts, and her act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm. And in acting, as one who has no right to act, she upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human, implicitly raising the question for us of what those preconditions really must be.”

It is interesting that Butler sees Antigone as “not of the human” but still speaking “in its language”, further her humanity, or lack thereof, as essentially tied to her kinship ties, as she “upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human”. This is a central part of Butler´s claim in this text and needs a bit of unpacking. Firstly, Butler (2000, p. 22) lets us know that she writes within a context, where this takes on also an immediate political commentary:

“I ask this question, of course, during a time in which the family is at once idealized in nostalgic ways within various cultural forms, a time in which the Vatican protests against homosexuality not only as an assault on the family but also on the notion of the human, where to become human, for some, requires participation in the family in its normative sense.”

Kinship ties and our understanding of gender are closely intersecting. Note how the vocabulary of kinship (mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, etc.) is related to our vocabulary of gender (role expectations from mothers, fathers, etc.), which is to say that the way we understand what men and women are, is essentially tied, for Butler, to how we understood and still understand kinship ties. Being perceived as human is linked, for Butler, to the intelligibility of gender: Butler (2006, p. 22) claims that we only become intelligible as whole persons when we become gendered “in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility”. If we fail to conform to standards of intelligibility, we appear only as developmental failures or, in some sense of the word, as logical impossibilities. Thus: what is Antigone´s claim and why did this claim bring her to death? For Hegel, who writes about her (although, of course, never mentioning the name “Antigone”) within The Phenomenology of Spirit, Antigone stands in for the transition from matriarchal to a patriarchal rule, but also in order to represent the principles of kinship and the role of femininity in its representation of the godly laws. Butler (2000, p. 15) remarks that “Antigone, who from Hegel through Lacan is said to defend kinship, a kinship that is markedly not social […]” is seen by Hegel to have necessarily failed in her transgressive task and both Hegel and Lacan (in Butler´s understanding) see Antigone as acting fatally, she is “necessary to die”. Butler is at odds with this necessity and also with describing Antigone as “markedly not social”. How come not social? Hegel (and for Butler also Lacan) make family and kinship ties stand remarkably against the more abstract state, that is a union of unrelated citizens. In this sense, as Antigone´s fatal act is to bury her dead brother, who went to war against Thebes and whose burial was thus prohibited, she stands in, for Hegel and Lacan, to represent kinship ties and family over the social state. She defies the state law to defend the honour of her family (brother). In this way she is described as pre-social (say pre-oedipal in Lacanese, before the Name-of-the-Father – noting that the equation pre-social to pre-oedipal holds true for Lacan only before Seminar XVII, at best). Butler questions this interpretation: how come it is so clear cut what Antigone represents? Is it so clear that Antigone represents family, kinship and femininity in transgression of men, state and society? Butler remarks that in the first place it is very difficult to talk about Antigone´s kinship ties, because they defy clear standards of kinship intelligibility rules (Oedipus, for example, is her father and her brother at the same time, Euridice is her mother and grandmother, etc.). Antigone rides the edge of intelligibility within our sedimented ideality of kinship norms. This, for Butler, stands at odds with the interpretation that Antigone would represent and embody the very concept of kinship. Hegel (and Lacan?) make Antigone also stand in for femininity. However, femininity was associated (in ancient Greece) with passivity, submissiveness, the domestic/private sphere, with being a wife and mother as highest attainable goal, etc., and Antigone does not fulfil any of these normative standards without considerable bending and imagination. Antigone is active, that is the very thing that gets her into trouble in the first place, she is unwilling to be submissive to the insisting pleads of Creon to finally stop it with her rebellious behaviour, she exits her private sphere to act within a political context and will do this not hiddenly but in the open sunlight, she remarks to Haemon (her fiancé) that she will never be able to marry him. It would be remarkable, if after all this, Antigone could stand for the very things Hegel makes her stand for (it would rather be more fitting for Ismene). Butler, contrary to this, remarks that Antigone rather is again being quite unintelligible, because she clearly doesn’t fit neatly into neither feminine nor masculine normative idealities. She is disrupting also the identities of others, as in speaking with Creon, not only does Antigone become associated to the manly, but Creon “in being spoken to, […] is unmanned, and so neither maintains their position within gender and the disturbance of kinship appears to destabilize gender throughout the play” (Butler, 2000, p. 10). Antigone is representing an ambiguous disruption even in her very speech acts, as Butler (2000, p. 7) remarks:

“When she appears before Creon, she acts again, this time verbally, refusing to deny that it was she who did the deed. In effect, what she refuses is the linguistic possibility of severing herself from the deed, but she does not assert it in any unambiguously affirmative way: she does not simply say ´I did the deed´ [rather: ´I will not deny my deed´].” (p. 7)

Hence, Butler remarks that her kinship ties, her gender and also her speech acts are all ambiguous. As such, if Antigone is claiming something, it is difficult to understand what she is claiming at all. However, exactly this, then, is the very claim that Antigone is making. Unintelligibility, unthinkability and ambiguity. Antigone´s claim is to challenge norms by standing on the edge of their intelligibility. Antigone embodies doubt into the very categories that structure our society (in such a way as to appear for many as clear and unambiguous). The status that is making Antigone so problematic is the very fact that we don´t have the proper vocabulary to talk about her. However, vocabulary and power are strongly related: the very existence of certain vocabularies constructs praxes and as such determines the performability and intelligibility of them. As such, Butler (2000, p. 36) is claiming that “by supplanting Antigone with ´womankind´, Hegel performs the very generalization that Antigone resists”. For Lacan, as Butler remarks, Antigone is seen as seeking recourse to the gods as these represent what is beyond (or before?) the symbolic laws of humankind. Antigone is seeking recourse beyond human life, as such Antigone is seeking recourse to death and acts as if she would already be dead. Although the Symbolic has structured her live, she is constantly trying to escape this, to get rid of her Symbolic ties, for which, ultimately, she can only die. Butler disagrees with Lacan´s insistence to associate Antigone to the death drive, to the purity of her desire as caused by some Thing Real, and instead offers an alternative interpretation of Antigone´s desire. Antigone is motivated by love for her brother, but of an incestuous kind. Within her chapter “Promiscuous Obedience” Butler (2000) unpacks her interpretation. Under the assertion that kinship is not simply a “form of being”, but that it is something that is a “form of doing”, Butler asks herself which kinship ties Antigone is enacting. Butler (2000, p. 60) claims that Antigone is caught within Oedipus´ curse, as she writes:

“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:´From none did you have love more than from this man, without whom you will now spend the remainder of your life´. […] [Oedipus] demand[s] that for all time she have no man except for the man who is dead, and though this is a demand, a curse, made by Oedipus, who positions himself as her only one, it is clear that she both honors and disobeys this curse as she displaces her love for her father onto her brother.” (Butler, 2000, p. 60)

As such, Butler states that Antigone is, after all, guided by the demands of the Other and is not beyond them. The problem with Antigone is rather that no matter what she does, she ends up disobeying someone´s demand: thus she promiscuously obeys her father through a displacement.

Finally, Butler asks herself in which possible worlds Antigone could have lived, negating the necessity of her death. She undermarks the sad, contingent fact that kinship is seen as a precondition for being human today. In such a way, Antigone is a figure that opens up the space for a “new field of the human”, in which “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” (Butler, 2000, p. 82). Antigone dares the unintelligible and represents in her very identity the disruption that brings with it the fatality of certain normative idealities.

While I would claim that there is considerable overlap between the Butlerian and the Lacanian reading of Antigone, the main point of difference, it seems to me, is that Butler is strongly critical of the category of the Real within Lacanian theory. This is a known issue that has earned Butler quite some critics from the Lacanian camp (e.g. Tuhkanen (2003) has claimed that Butler “blatantly misreads” Lacan with regards to the Real). Regardless whether Butler misreads Lacan or not, which to me is not an issue of special interest, instead preferring to focus on the different political commitments that might emerge from a productive misreading, it can be said that Butler´s reading places a stronger focus onto the “performative reconfiguration” of the Symbolic from within. Change comes from within the Symbolic, as every reiteration is not a perfect repetition. Žižek (2001) has referred to this as an “internal guerrilla war” that is supposed to turn the terms of the hegemonic field against itself (e.g. by means of parody). Lacan would stand in for the importance of an arguably more radical act, by which the Symbolic is reconfigured in toto by something that is not immanent to it.

6. Luce Irigaray´s Antigone and maternal genealogy:

In Speculum (1985a), Irigaray seems to be at once flirting with Hegel and Lacan and using them as “toys” to fight each other. In so doing she tries to discover the blind spots that are operative in their receptions of Antigone. Both Hegel and Lacan will be blamed by Irigaray for making the same mistake. They both ignore the issues of sexual difference, female specificity and Antigone´s maternal genealogy, given that their frameworks are embedded in phallogocentrism: both theorists have conceptualized the feminine Antigone via their own biased masculine perspective, and have thus only described her as the negative, the “lack, absence, default” (1985a, p. 68); as the raw material for supporting male subjectivity. Antigone is only seen as “the living mirror, the source reflecting the growing autonomy of the self-same” (1985a, p. 69). Irigaray, on the other hand, will positively reconceptualize this image of the mirroring Antigone, who she has also labeled with the term of “the antiwoman” (1985a, p. 70) – since Antigone is “a production of a culture that has been written by men alone” (1985a, p. 71). Irigaray will do so by creating her own feminine and feminist body politics that focuses on the mother and her own bloodline. This already becomes clear in Irigaray´s interpretation of Hegel: her essay in Speculum, deliberately titled “The Eternal Irony of the Community”, starts with two short quotes from Hegel´s Philosophy of Nature (1817) where Hegel constructs his own phallogocentric body politics by claiming women to be passive, and men to be subjects. Hegel, mentioned before, does pay attention to sexual difference when it comes to Creon and Antigone, yet, instead of creating an ethics of sexual difference where female specificity is valued in its own right, Hegel restrains Antigone´s agency by locking her up in the “natural female sphere” of the family, and by doing so, he disregards the political characteristics of her actions, and the active female subject that she really is. Antigone is given “no gaze, no discourse for her specific specularization that with allow her to identify with herself […]” (1985a, p. 75). For Hegel it is only since women are the guardians of the blood that Antigone buries and pays respect to Polyneices (as they share the “same blood” and not because they “desire each other” (1985a, p. 78)). Irigaray asks herself whether Hegel, by taking away the element of desire, is conceiving of sister and brother to be partaking in a relationship that focuses on “equal recognition” (1985a, p. 79) and dismisses this picture as a phallogocentric fantasy:

“The war of the sexes would not take place here. But this moment is mythical, of course, and the Hegelian dream outlined above is already the effect of a dialectic produced by the discourse of patriarchy.” (1985a, p. 80)

At first sight, Irigaray argues, one could think that the relationship between Antigone and Polyneices is indeed pure and non-antagonistic (although the whole family is founded on incestuous desire). Yet, Antigone is never seen by Hegel as a proper subject at all. When Polyneices has been buried, Antigone´s task for Hegel is accomplished, the fact that she is imprisoned and in the end commits suicide are only consequences for her “intuitive feminine” actions. This brings forward the ironical status of Antigone: Irigaray argues that for Hegel “womankind” is “that eternal source of irony” (1985a, p. 82), meaning that women are never seen as political subjects, but as guardians of the family, they are meant to keep the public political domain going by “producing” male citizens. They are the primal support of a public sphere, yet never allowed to be a part of it. The Hegelian wish for an Antigone that helps her bloodline only for the sake of a “feminine wish” to guard the family is an almost hilariously passive and submissive interpretation, when one considers just how big of a political threat Antigone appears to be in the eyes of Creon.

Luce Irigaray moves beyond Hegel by looking at Lacan´s reading. Hereby she focuses on desire and jouissance in the Lacanian text. Irigaray agrees with Lacan on Antigone´s suicide (as a pure death drive – see above), but she argues that Lacan underappreciates Antigone´s search for a female subjectivity, her standing in a maternal line, a female genealogy, which would make it possible for women to be subjects of their own (1985a, p. 86). Antigone “must be allowed to speak” (1985a, p. 89), constructing a feminine Symbolic. By focusing on mother-daughter couples of mythology, Irigaray tries to reconsider history as a matriarchy and not a patriarchy – covering up the hidden roles that female genealogies have played during history: it is phallogocentric, according to Irigaray, that psychoanalysis took on from history the myth of Laius and Oedipus rather than the one of Jocaste and Antigone.

It appears that Butler´s critique of Irigaray as apolitical isn´t very nuanced, as Butler (2000) clearly understands Irigaray´s Antigone only as the “anti-woman” description, unacknowledging that Irigaray is intentionally “joking around” with this image, much like she does with many Hegelian and Lacanian concepts, in order to subvert through parody. Butler also ignores the instances, where Irigaray deliberately tries to construct a political image of Antigone. Only when a Symbolic emanating from the mother-daughter genealogy will achieve to be named, a female Symbolic can emerge that does not foreclose a maternal law.

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