Citations of gender and fatality. Critical readings of lacanian appropriations of Antigone

Abstract

This paper analyses how Judith Butler critically reassesses Sophocles’s Antigone through a Lacanian lens. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler makes clear how deeply impressed she was by Hegel’s and Lacan’s interpretations of the myth, to the point of developing her own argumentative rereadings. Specifically, the article aims at the core of the Butlerian critique of Lacan: the underlying conceptualizations of kinship. Hegel’s account of kinship is rendered different from State, so it comes as a precondition of the latter, whereas in Lacanian theory the State is not up for consideration whatsoever and kinship is thus reassessed as a symbolic function dissociated from the social. We intend to reread, alongside Butler, Lacanian Antigone so as to take the difference between the social and the symbolic toward a gender-centered productive crisis.