[lbo-talk] Butler is not a classicist

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Mon Jun 9 16:44:32 PDT 2008


At 04:41 PM 6/9/2008, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>Jerry wrote:
>
>
>
> >Butler's charms are in fact pretty resistible. Just read her very
> >uninformed and quite ignorant essay on Antigone. If she were a graduate
> >studying the classics I would never let her graduate.
>
>
>Butler writes:
>
>"I am no classicist and do not strive to be one. I read Antigone as
>many humanists have because the play poses questions about kinship
>and the state that recur in a number of cultural and historical contexts."

i haven't read the book in question, but out of curiosity, this is a summary:

In Antigone's Claim (2000) Butler redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation reconceptualizes the incest taboo in relation to kinship ­ and opens up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's Oedipus, has long been a feminist icon of defiance. What has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. She considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray, and she asks how psychoanalysis would have been different if it had taken Antigone ­ the "postoedipal" subject ­ rather than Oedipus as its point of departure. If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.

must be why Jerry's so incensed. heh.

I found this amazon review interesting and the title a giggle coz maybe the author has fantasies like Chris Doss. ha:

Butler (Miss Butler if ur nasty) is at is again..., August 7, 2001 By A Customer Judging from the reader reviews on this website, Judith Butler has yet again succeeded in provoking the outrage of several diehard and blue-in-the-face classics scholars. Those classicists who feel outraged by her work might consider her illuliminating comments on Hölderlin's own translation of Antigone, translations that themselves were received as scandals in their time and that continue, like Antigone in Butler's view, to provoke critical thought. If you think Antigone belongs on the shelves of a dusty library, you might as well leave this book alone, since here she's haunting queer bars and dining at the most interesting and vital family meals imaginable, where queer sons and daughters struggle together with their just as queer parents to figure out how it is that we might say our word to a world that persists in ignoring what it is that we have to say.

http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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