Butler - key quotations

Judith Butler

Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) Page references are to the ebook available via QM Library

For Butler’s summary of Lacan, see pp. 23-25.

1. Lacanians tend to sever the symbolic account of kinship from the social, thus freezing the social arrangements of kinship as something intact and intractable. [...] The symbolic, which gives us kinship as a function of language, is separated from the social arrangements of kinship, presupposing (a) that kinship is instituted at the moment that the child accedes to language, (b) kinship is a function of language rather than any socially alterable institutions, and (c) language and kinship are not socially alterable institutions – at least, not easily altered. (p. 15; cf. p. 29)
2. My view 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 sexual theory. (p. 16)
3. The question, however, is whether the incest taboo has also been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and livable ones. (p. 35)
4. The figure of Antigone, however, may well compel a reading that challenges that structure [sc. of stable kinship norms], for she does not conform to the symbolic law, and she does not prefigure a final restitution of the law. (p. 35)
5. Although Hegel claims that her deed is opposed to Creon’s, the two acts mirror rather than oppose one another, suggesting that if the one represents kinship and the other the state they can perform this representation only by each becoming implicated in the idiom of the other. In speaking to him, she becomes manly; in being spoken to he is unmanned, and so neither maintains their position within gender and the disturbance of kinship appears to destabilize gender throughout the play. (p. 13)
6. She asserts herself through appropriating the voice of the other, the one to whom she is opposed; thus the autonomy is gained through the appropriation of the authoritative voice of the one she resits, an appropriation that has within it traces of a simultaneous refusal and assimilation of that very authority. (p. 14)
7. The state makes no appearance in Lacan’s discussion of Antigone. (p. 14)
8. Her crime is confounded by the fact that the kinship line from which she descends, and which she transmits, is derived from a paternal position that is already confounded by the manifestly incestuous act that is the condition of her own existence, which makes her brother her father, which begins a narrative in which she occupies, linguistically, every kin position except ‘mother’ and occupies them at the expense of the coherence of kinship and gender. (p. 35)
9. She does seem to deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do what is necessary to stay alive for Haemon, by refusing to become a mother and a wife, by scandalizing the public with her wavering gender, by embracing death as a bridal chamber and identifying her tomb as a ‘deep dug home’. (p. 37)
10. If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws. (p. 39)