Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.
—The mother of Oedipus is his wife. Antigone’s father is her brother, since they share a mother in Jocasta.
Her brothers are her nephews, sons of her brother-father, Oedipus. As Butler notes
The terms of kinship become irreversibly equivocal. Is this part of her tragedy? Does this equivocation of kinship lead to fatality?
Antigone is caught within a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror (Butler, Antigone’s Claim. 2000: 57)
The Curse of Kinship
And to the extent that the symbolic reiterates a “structural” necessity of kinship, does it relay or perform the curse of kinship itself? In other words, does the structuralist law report on the curse that is upon kinship or does it deliver that curse? Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms?
Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship?
From the presumption that one cannot —or ought not to— choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that ARE possible assume any particular form (66)