Caitlin Scarano
ENGL 601
Heyne
26 February 2012
Reading Response 1: Antigone’s Claim by Judith Butler
“What new schemes of intelligibility make our loves legitimate and
recognizable, our losses true losses?” –Judith Butler
I
love this book, because I love Judith Bulter and her seemingly incomprehensible
language and how she uses it to make an intelligible, entirely culturally and
contemporarily relevant argument for how we live especially for those outside
of standard livability or reproductivity.
And I love post-Freud psychoanalytical philosophers who consider the
value of queerness in society and culture.
This
book was really difficult for me at points though. For example, though I appreciate Lacan, I don’t have a great
amount of experience with his theories or full understanding of him. Sometimes, I wish I had a degree in
Philosophy. In trying to follow
Butler’s argument, I mainly struggled with what the symbolic is. Here,
finally a definition in Chapter 3: “If we recall that for Lacan the symbolic,
that set of rules that govern the accession of speech and speakability within
culture” (58) and on to something about the father and the Oedipal complex as
an example. For Lacan, the
symbolic seems to be connected to, even reliant on, linguistics. I would like to try to figure out the
symbolic (and the Symbolic realm, and how it defers from the Imaginary realm)
according to Lacan, and how Butler is using it here, in class discussion.
I
have never read the play Antigone, but I feel as if Butler did a thorough job
of summarizing the plot points relevant to her argument. Butler uses Antigone as a surprising,
inventive starting point, a character that points out “that political
possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability
are exposed” (2). Later, she will
go on to show how Antigone is outside of what is considered livable, but
voicing her grief – calling attention to the status and position.
I
will be interested to see what the class thinks of Butler’s use of Antigone and
the incest taboo to make her argument.
It isn’t about incest.
And take the biological issues
that arise from incest out of the conversation for a moment – incest is such a cultural taboo because it goes against
the comforting social norms that reinforce blind reproductivity and limiting
heteronormativity (our feeble system for order and purpose in the face death
drive and what is incomprehensible about life and humanity). Another interesting thing to note about
incest: it is quite a cultural taboo,
but also draws a lot of fascination in culture – evident in literature and
pornography.
Butler isn’t calling for the
legitimacy, legalization, or cultural acceptance of incest, but instead,
regarding an issue of greater importance and more difficulty, questioning
“whether the incest taboo has also been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and
livable ones” (70) – the heteronormative forms of kinship that exclude entire
groups of people from intelligibility and livability within our current
society. The groups of people are
condemned to a “social death” (73). She wants to question, rethink, and
deconstruct these structures: “Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon
contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual
normativity, sociality, and the status of law?” (66).
This
text is relevant to the research I am doing for my critical article on Alison
Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home. In that article, I will utilize
Freudian concepts such as the uncanny, the death drive, and the Other, and more
contemporary philosophers’ (Lacan, Bulter, Lee Edelman, etc) application of
those concepts regarding issues of queerness, reproductivity, and
livability.
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