{"id":1807,"date":"2009-02-03T19:32:44","date_gmt":"2009-02-04T00:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=1807"},"modified":"2009-07-03T10:07:14","modified_gmt":"2009-07-03T15:07:14","slug":"antigone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/02\/03\/antigone\/","title":{"rendered":"Antigone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Butler, Judith. <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Antigone\u2019s Claim<\/span>. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n<p>My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that <strong>radical alterations in kinship<\/strong> demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and sexual theory (Butler, Antigone 2000: 19).<\/p>\n<p>Those who disagree with me then claim, with some exasperation, &#8220;but it is the law!&#8221;  but what is the status of such an utterance?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">&#8220;It is the law!&#8221; becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise. &#8220;It is the law&#8221; is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law, a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status given to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable.  The theory exposes its own tautological defense.  The <strong>law beyond laws <\/strong>will finally put an end to the anxiety produced by a critical relation to final authority that clearly does not know when to stop: a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power.  Its defenders claim that to be without such a law is pure voluntarism or radical anarchy! Or is it? And to accept such a law as a final arbiter of kinship life?  <strong>Is that not to resolve by theological means the concrete dilemmas of human sexual arrangements that have no ultimate normative form?<\/strong> (Butler, Antigone: 21)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Butler, Judith. Antigone\u2019s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press. My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/02\/03\/antigone\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Antigone&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,86,87,24,16,96,94,15,106,20],"tags":[105,109],"class_list":["post-1807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-gender","category-incest","category-lacan","category-ontology","category-phallus-butler","category-sexual-difference","category-subjectivity","category-the-act","category-zizek","tag-thedebate","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1807"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1811,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1807\/revisions\/1811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}