The Antigone Myth On The Basis Of Liminality And Subjectivity

The Antigone Myth on the Basis of Liminality and Subjectivity

This book explores the enduring myth of Antigone, constantly rediscovered and relevant across centuries. It examines how myth influences collective consciousness and is kept alive through rituals. Antigone’s marginal position, created by the exclusion of Polynices from the death ritual, is analyzed using the concept of liminality developed by Van Gennep and Turner. The process of people on the threshold, likened to being in the womb by Turner, is explained through Kristeva’s ideas of subjectivity, chora, abject, and poetic language, as well as the thoughts of Guattari and Levinas. It shows how subjectivity can be constructed as singularity in moments of crisis. The book also discusses how Antigone, a founding myth of Western thought, is reconstructed in the work of Kamila Shamsie. Her rewriting of Antigone, through the character of Aneeka, a Muslim Urdu-British woman, demonstrates Antigone’s timeless power of resistance. Both Antigone and Aneeka validate Guattari’s view that subjectivity can be individualized through social and semiological ties, positioning themselves in relation to otherness, family habits, local customs, and judicial laws.

The Antigone Myth on the Basis of Liminality and Subjectivity

Antigone's Claim

The celebrated author of Gender Trouble here redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation does nothing less than reconceptualize the incest taboo in relation to kinship—and open up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's Oedipus, has long been a feminist icon of defiance. But what has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. Moreover, Antigone shows how the constraints of normative kinship unfairly decide what will and will not be a livable life. Butler explores the meaning of Antigone, wondering what forms of kinship might have allowed her to live. Along the way, she considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray. How, she asks, would psychoanalysis have been different if it had taken Antigone—the "postoedipal" subject—rather than Oedipus as its point of departure? If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.