Feminist Readings of Antigone (SUNY series in Gender Theory)
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 143843278X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
New and classic essays on Antigone and feminist philosophy.
Feminist Readings of Antigone collects the most interesting and provocative feminist work on the figure of Antigone, in particular looking at how she can figure into contemporary debates on the role of women in society. Contributors focus on female subjectivity and sexuality, feminist ethics and politics, questions of race and gender, psychoanalytic theory, kinship, embodiment, and tensions between the private and the public. This collection seeks to explore and spark debate about why Antigone has become such an important figure for feminist thinkers of our time, what we can learn from her, whether a feminist politics turning to this ancient heroine can be progressive or is bound to idealize the past, and why Antigone keeps entering the stage in times of political crisis and struggle in all corners of the world. Fanny Söderbäck has gathered classic work in this field alongside newly written pieces by some of the most important voices in contemporary feminist philosophy. The volume includes essays by Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Tina Chanter, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.
“These essays move beyond the critical aspect to consider the productive insights of Antigone for addressing contemporary political problems. Particularly remarkable because of its timeliness is the unity of the persistent themes of the political import of the relation of life to death, as well as of bare life to political life, and the state’s need to have access to the body in order for the law to have force.” — philoSOPHIA
ancient law of blood, the true site of the uncanny (deinon) lies. The play crucially recounts the story of a body, a body that, both in its exclusion from the city and its return to it, takes on the ghastly guise of a corpse, both victorious and vanquished. This body disorders and disrupts through the foul dissolution of its flesh, which was evoked at the play’s outset by the haunting figure of the unburied Polyneices. A longer version of this chapter was originally published as chapter 1 of
politics and therefore not something that we should even try to overcome. 32. This should bring our attention to another important and stark antagonism within the play, namely that between generations. When we speak of age rather than gender, it is more straightforwardly obvious that Antigone and Haemon represent the new order, while Creon stands for the past and tradition. 33. Arendt contests that “all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted . . . that freedom
condemning his sister to die buried alive. At least in his passion for blood he has annulled the right of his brother—Eteocles—to command, has destroyed his brother’s—his elder’s?—relation to power, reason, property, the paternal succession. And has, with the same blow, killed himself. 104 Feminist Readings of Antigone Yet the government’s mode of action remains unchanged. Another man was ready to take up the challenge: Creon. He also is alone—like Antigone—but he has the instrument of the
individual, city and family, into an antagonistic dualism; and, further, reduces the individual to the role he or she inhabits. It is not social roles as such that are the problem here. It is, rather, as Hegel said earlier, that those roles in traditional societies only reach as far down as the particular, which entails not only that the roles are not chosen, but that there is no space between self and role through which that relation may be elaborated, criticized, or repudiated: No voice, no
“But you’re in love with impossibility” Knox interprets Antigone’s true motive as betraying a general principle of devotion to blood relations. He holds that although she begins by defending herself in universal terms, with claims such as, “Hades longs for the same rites for all,” she ultimately demonstrates that this is not the genuine motive for her prioritizing of her brother over a hypothetical husband or child in the defense speech.8 He finds that in the end: . . . the driving force behind