On Oct 29, 2008, at 8:51 PM, shag wrote:
> At 07:56 PM 6/9/2008, Shane Mage wrote:
>
>> I find it a bit hard to grasp what Butler is proposing. Is she
>> saying
>> that the
>> relationship between Antigone and Polyneikes is as incestuous as it
>> would have been normal had the drama taken place in the Hundred-Gated
>> rather than the Seven-Gated Thebes (Antigone does call her place of
>> entombment a "bridal chamber")? Or is she suggesting that Creon
>> denies
>> her the right to bury her brother because of the Oedipos/Jocasta
>> incest rather than because he was a traitor and fratricide? The
>> first makes excellent sense, but the second would misread Creon
>> completely.
>>
>> Also, I wonder how she dealt with the "daddy's girl" Antigone of
>> Oedipos at Colonus, Sophocles's last word on the topic.
>
> I can't answer any of your questions yet, I just got the book from
> interlibrary loan. It's very short, three essays. She's taking up
> Antigone as she's been used as a symbol of women's resistance to the
> state. She starts out by considering the way Antigone was taken up
> by Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray.
>
Then she isn't really talking about Antigone at all, but about Lacan
and Irigaray (about whom I know very little indeed). But this phrase
suggests that she misconceives what Hegel is about just as surely as
those do who treat his discussion of *Jacques le Fataliste*'s "master-
slave dialectic" as a sociological exegesis:
> ...Hegel has her stand for the transition from matriarchal to
> patriarchal rule, but also for the principle of kinship...
The whole discussion of "Mutterrecht" developed well after Hegel, and
his concept of "Sittlichkeit" far transcends the sociology of kinship
relations. For Hegel Antigone represents a different sort of social
"transition"--the stage of conflict between customary law including
its sacralisation of kinship (Antigone) and the positive law of the
emerging State with its emphasis on the public interest (Creon). That
was the basis for his epitome on tragedy being "not the conflict of
right against wrong but the conflict of right against right."
In any case, not having read Butler I made no suggestion that she "should be embarrassed by what she wrote re: Antigone."
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos