[.ca] Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (ISBN 0231118953)

?!:
The question underlying this book is "What would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure?" (57). It is not a classical discussion about the play itself but a theoretical engagement with issues presented in the play as they have \oor have not\c been used by other theorists. To engage with this question Butler must address interpretations of the play by Hegel, Lacan, and the incest taboo as it is posited by Levi Strauss. The majority of the book is spent demonstrating how Antigone departs from traditional requirements of kinship through transgression of gender roles, sexual expectations (apparently she desires her dead brother) etc... Butler's real aim is to re-formulate traditional ideas about kinship, incest and gender. She wants to dirupt the traditional interdependence of kinship and state with a politics of transgression. That being said, her reading of the Antigone character is interesting, but tedious at times if you are not a fan of psychoanalysis and/or Hegel. Butler follows her particular reading of these theories fine, but there is no theoretical follow through of her own theory. Butler neglects to tell us what she expects to come out of her reading. The political ramifications of the moves she makes are never made clear. How exactly is Butler defining politics and the state in the first place and what would she like to see them replaced with? Moreover, does transgression not reify the categories against which one transgresses? Basically this book is a fancy way of discussing the politics of transgression and the need for different kinship and political communities without engaging in a real theoretical discussion of the assumptions embedded in this move. It is an interesting read, but it will probably disappoint both classical readers and contemporary theorists.

Does this woman know any Greek?:
I have located several misquotations and several mispellings of what little Greek she uses. Apart from it being gruesomely written, I suspect this woman does not know Antigone in Greek--she quotes widely from other sources but prefers to stay away from the original. I am tempted to at a later date say with Voltaire "I am sitting in the smallest room of the house. I have your book in front of me--soon it will be behind me"