Antigone's Claim by Judith Butler Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Antigone's Claim
Book Review: Must Like Hegel & Lacan
Summary: 3 Stars
I haven't finished this extremely short text yet. It was originally a small series of lectures. Basically, Butler critiques Hegel's and Lacan's appropriations of Antigone (both the play and, especially, the character) to represent a certain ideal. She summarizes rather lucidly both Hegel's and Lacan's positions. Of course, the problem with both Hegel and Lacan is that they are so dense and (often) obscure that, like Nietzsche, they get appropriated left and right themselves. So understanding what they *really* ever meant is always slippery. But Hegel and Lacan are familiar territory for Butler. She's no Classicist, and she's upfront about that. I think she does a phenomenal job highlighting the ultimately untenable postion(s) Hegel and, to a lesser extent, Lacan assume in relation to Antigone. I haven't finish yet, but Butler is certainly setting up her own "feminist" reading. It's not concerned with "what the Greeks thought" the way classical scholars (by definition) often are. Rather, she's clearly relating Greek tragedy to the modern world in response to the past 300 years of (post)enlightenment thinking. A more recent text that also deals with a lot of this material is The Antigone Complex by Cecilia Sjoholm - if you're interested.Book Review: Profound work on the legacy of Antigone
Summary: 5 Stars
Antigone's revolt lives on! As Butler says herself in the introduction, she is not a classicist and has no desire to be one. This book is about the intellectual/artistic legacy of the figure of Antigone and the political and philosophical implications of her performative resistance to state power. Having taken a seminar in 1998 with Butler on the very topic of Antigone, I can assure you that the author is well aware of the ambiguity of Sophocles's play. As Butler demonstrates, this ambiguity is what has driven so many diverse interpretations by major thinkers such as Hegel and Lacan and playwrights like Hoelderlin and Brecht. Butler insightfully analyzes the critical-artistic tradition that has developed since Sophocles and helps to demonstrate this tradition's continued relevance in the present day--in any case where individual desire conflicts with the institution of the state as it functions to set the parameters of the normal or acceptable in society.Book Review: very intelligent, ground-breaking book!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Judith Butler's study of Antigone, over the course of these 3 lectures, yields important and timely insights about how we might understand kinship and love in today's society. Her analysis of Hegel, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan is impressively rigorous. A must read for anyone interested in liguistics, structuralism, feminism and contemporary questions about political belonging.