Theory & Event

Introduction

Judith Butler’s 1998 Wellek Library Lectures have been published as a short text entitled Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000a). This book makes a number of important and interesting suggestions, and throws out a challenge to some of the tradition’s ways of reading Sophocles’ Antigone. As such it is both a commentary on and criticism of scholarship on this text, and a contribution to that scholarship. At the same time Butler is able to move beyond the text in order to make a number of points that speak to her wider concerns. The argument here is that Butler neglects two crucial issues in her reading of the tragedy, place and community, both of which are explicitly related to the question of the polis. A reading which articulates the relation between these two issues is therefore well placed to provide a response to Butler’s text, a response that has implications beyond the reading of Antigone itself.

My reading of Antigone’s Claim in this paper moves through four stages. In the first I outline and discuss Butler’s argument. Whilst I have some sympathies to her overall aim, my contention is that in trying to read relevance to contemporary debates back into Antigone she neglects the context of the text itself. Despite her interest in the play because it “poses questions about kinship and the state that recur in a number of cultural and historical contexts” (2000a, 2), she is inattentive to the shifting meaning of these terms, particularly that of the state.¹ ‘State’, which is accepted unproblematically as a translation of the word ‘polis’, is thought here in an entirely modern way. By suggesting that Antigone's defiance of the polis can be mirrored in contemporary debates about the state Butler commits an act of violence on the text. Or perhaps, in the terms in which she characterises other readings, this is her blindness (2000a, 5); a blindness to the political, a political blindness. The second part of the paper therefore critically discusses a range of literature that discusses the term of polis. Butler notes that “I am no classicist and do not strive to be one” (2000a, 2), and it would be a sad day if discussion of texts such as Antigone were confined to classicists. However, one does not need to be a classicist to recognise that certain key terms of Greek thought are irreducible to a simple English rendering. As Loraux notes, important work is being done in freeing antiquity from pre-established – that is, modern – conceptions (1981a, vii). Instead of the modern notion of the state I suggest that polis functions both as a place, a site, and the embodiment of the humans within it, close to our modern notion of community. In the third part, drawing on critical literature, variant translations and ultimately the Greek text itself, I attempt to think through how Antigone functions with a notion of polis at its core. In the final part I make some tentative suggestions about how this might be useful in resituating contemporary issues, and indeed, provide a basis for strengthening Butler’s claims.

Reading Butler Reading Antigone

Butler suggests, at the very outset, that the reason she began to think about Antigone was when she wondered

What happened to those feminist efforts to confront and defy the state. It seemed to me that Antigone might work as a counterfigure to the trend championed by recent feminists to seek the backing and authority of the state to implement feminist policy aims

(2000a, 1).

Butler suggests that the point of Antigone’s defiance may be missed in these contemporary feminist accounts (2000a, 1). But can Antigone be seen as someone who challenges the state in any simple way? This, it seems, was Butler’s initial aim, and had been claimed by Elshtain (1982), but when researching the book she found “something different from what I had first anticipated” (2000a, 2).² For Butler – and this in some sense is the heart of the book – the representative function of Antigone herself is in crisis...