“Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler”
Theory & Event Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009
Consider Antigone. As we know, she buried her brother in spite of Creon’s order, and then, when she is asked to deny that she has done this, she enters a very interesting and particular position. Because she is not a citizen, she is not allowed to speak; she is prohibited from speaking, and yet she is compelled by the sovereign law to speak. So, when she does speak, she defies that law, and her speech exceeds the law that governs acceptable speech. To what extent, then, can Antigone figure for us in the position of the speaker who is outside of the accepted discourse, who nevertheless speaks, sometimes intelligently, sometimes critically, within and against that discourse? Perhaps the norms that govern philosophy work that way, producing a mimetic excess that questions the legitimacy of those norms. More broadly, these questions may have larger appeal and prove relevant to any number of people who are in minority positions or understand themselves as excluded from official public discourse – but somehow are still talking.
As we titled this conversation “Antigone’s Claim”, so we may ask what would Antigone’s claim be for the present and how we understand her claim in the present. It seems to me that in insisting on the public grievability of lives, Antigone becomes for us a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty. In a way, she stands in advance for precarious lives, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged. That she, in some sense, becomes a figure through whom we can think what it means to understand certain lives as more precarious than others, who live out a precariousness so that others can engage in the fantasy of their impermeability and omnipotence.