Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.
Hegel has clearly identified the law for which Antigone speaks as the unwritten law of the ancient gods, one that appears only by way of an active trace. Indeed, what kind of law would it be? A law for which no origin can be found, a law whose trace can take no form, whose authority is not directly communicable though written language.
If it is communicable, this law would emerge through speech, but a speech that cannot be spoken from script and, so, certainly not the speech of a play, unless the play calls upon a legality, as it were, prior to its own scene of enunciation, unless the play commits a crime against this legality precisely by speaking it. Thus the figure of this other law calls into question the literalism of the play, Antigone: no words in this play will give us this law, no words in this play will recite the strictures of this law. How, then, will it be discerned?
The laws of which she speaks are, strictly speaking, before writing, not yet registered or registerable at the level of writing. They are not fully knowable; but the state knows enough about them to oppose them violently. Although these laws are unwritten, she nevertheless speaks in their name, and so they emerge only in the form of CATACHRESIS that serves as the prior condition and limt to written codification. 39
… the limit for which she stands, a limit for which no standing, no translatable representation is possible, is not precisely the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future. 40
🙂 This law is also called the ‘unconscious’ of the public law.