Abstract

In this slim volume of three lectures, Judith Butler reads Sophocles’ Antigone with a care often reserved for Oedipus himself. She takes on Hegel’s interpretation of the play, found primarily in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right. While Butler intends to challenge Hegel’s reading, she begins the book with an epigraph from the Aesthetics: “They are gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own being.” It is this engagement with the texts, the sense that Antigone’s fate is our fate, which gives Antigone’s Claim its vitality.