Research Information System
1st UTAD Conference: “Origins” , Ankara, Turkey, 14 - 16 September 2023
Butler’s Reading Antigone: The Legacy of Antigone’s
Defiance in the 21st Century
Written by Sophocles in 441 BC, Antigone follows Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at
Colonus. After Oedipus is banished
from Thebes, his sons Eteocles and Polynices are engaged in a civil war, dying fighting
each other. The new ruler Creon orders that Eteocles be buried in honour and Polynices
lie unburied. However, Antigone buries her brother and thus defies Creon’s
edict. For that, Creon orders that Antigone be immured in a cave where she
hangs herself. The multivalent meanings of the figure of Antigone have
captivated thinkers such as Hegel, Lacan and Butler. Butler focuses on the
character of Antigone, reclaims her revolutionary importance, emancipating it
for a progressive approach to sexual politics in the 21st century.
Antigone’s defiance causes her death, so Butler wonders what forms of kinship
may have helped her to live. She questions whether psychoanalysis would have
been different had it focused on Antigone “the postoedipal subject” rather than
Oedipus. She wonders what forms of new kinship may be recognised if the incest
taboo is reconsidered so that it does not make heterosexuality mandatory.
Butler argues Antigone can be regarded as a model whereby society can embrace
ideas of “radical kinship.” She relates Antigone’s assertiveness to the claims
made by those whose relations are now seen as forms of improper kinship. Hence,
this paper interrogates how the origins of ancient Greek tragedy can help us reconceive
the queer forms of radical kinship in the 21st century.