Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.
Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray: Antigone for them is not a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implication but rather … one who articulates a pre-political opposition to politics representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it” (81-81 Loizidou citing JB in Antigone’s Claim 3)
Butler’s subject is one that comes into being through norms and language that pre-exist it. Though, let’s not forget that the subject becomes agentic through its resistance to these norms. This very constellation of the subject puts the subject within the sphere of the public. Language or norms are public. For Butler, in this sense there is no pre-political or private, our coming into the world establishes us as public and therefore political figures. 83
Let’s not forget that Antigone thought that her life was worthless if she was unable to provide her brother with the appropriate burial rites. Antigone, who comes into being through the norms that she does not possess, through a language that is not her own, a human walking towards death, offers, as Butler writes, a catachrestic reading of the human, in the sense that she has been stolen of her humanity. however, in re-appropriating and risking the truth, she turns her inhumanity, her zoe into a possibility for the future.
When Heidegger criticizes metaphysical philosophers for forgetting, in their attempt to find what it means to be human and their preoccupation with the meaning of human, he points out that the human is thrown into the world, is ek-static and through ek-stasy moves towards a future of death. … (For Butler) The human is thrown into the world, it comes into the world through language norms that are represented as culturally intelligible, but at the same time this human is always inhuman, it always resists or deliberates these norms that bring it into being.85
If we are to rethink how we can have livable and viable lives, despite how different and irreconcilable each life is to each other, we need to think of the subject within the parameters that Butler proposes: a subject that deliberates before it acts in the face of absolute difference and moves towards the Other despite this difference. 85