Chapter III: Antigone and the Real

Antigone’s Claim: Rubin, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan

Butler’s work, particularly her reading of Antigone provides an outline for thinking a radical subjectivity not in its positivity, but in its radical dehiscence, that is, in its undoing or deconstitution. However her anti-Lacanian position, particularly an ambiguity around the Lacanian ultimate ethical gesture, the ‘act,’ prevents her from adapting the full radical implication of her reading of Antigone. Thus her theory of the subject occupies an unstable ground between, on the one hand, a radical deconstitution, in which Antigone figures the very epistemological limits of subjectivity, situated outside of any support in the big Other (Symbolic order), and, on the other, a subject of citationality that resides within the Symbolic and the universe of signification and seeks to extend and universalize its particular claims across broad sectors of the ‘abject’ populations. Butler not so much reverses the taboo on incest, (sanctioning incest between consanguine members is not what she has in mind), as open it up and allow it to show its naked effect; and it is the former reading of Antigone, the Antigone of the ‘act’, that shows the breakdown in signification that occurs when she occupies the very limits of kinship. By placing the very term ‘kinship’ in crisis, Antigone thus makes herself ‘monstrous’ and unrecognizable, and signals the conditions under which a radical subjective deconstitution is the unavoidable outcome.

Early in Antigone’s Claim Butler asks (quoting George Steiner), “What would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure?” What if Freud had noted in the speech of his patients not the Oedipal story of patricide and incest but rather an alternative guiding thread based on Antigone? What would be the consequences for kinship given that for Antigone: her ‘father’ is her brother who slept with her mother. That her family history is somewhat ‘disnormative,’ is precisely Butler’s point: Antigone rejects marriage and has no children, she holds an ‘incestuous’ love for her ‘brother’ who could be any one of Polyneices, Eteocles or Oedipus, she is called a ‘man’ by Creon and a ‘son’ by Oedipus. How the unquestioned universality of the heterosexual conjugal family that Antigone puts into crisis attained such vaunted status is the focus of Butler’s attention. Via a route through Gayle Rubin, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, Butler exposes how the incest taboo functions as a structuring principle of the social yet the social is denied any reciprocal role in affecting the structure of the incest taboo.

In her influential article “The Traffic in Women” (1975) Gayle Rubin argues that the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss conceives of the incest taboo as a universal myth that imposes an invariable law of kinship on human society. The invariable law mandates the exchange of women as one of its key features.

The incest taboo divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners. Specifically, by forbidding unions within a group it enjoins marital exchange between groups. ... [T]he taboo on incest results in a wide network of relations, a set of people whose connections with one another are a kinship structure. (Rubin 1975, 74)

Rubin then asks, if women, along with yams, pigs, mats and shells etc., are being exchanged, and these exchanges create an organization, then exactly who is being organized? Rubin’s answer is that it is the men who are being linked with each other, “the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it” (174). The key here is that the imposition of a law against incest regulates the exchange of women by forcing them to move outwards from the clan to other clans not related by blood. This move signals the key difference between animal and human society.²⁷

For Lévi-Strauss the incest taboo functions as a universal cultural law that inaugurates regulated exchange and contact between clan groups. The move from indiscriminate gratification to the taboo on incest signals a move from nature to the cultural sphere. Key here for Butler is the way these invariant cultural rules become the basis of the Lacanian Symbolic (2004c, 45).²⁸ Women represent an object of exchange which enables an exogamous ritual of exchange to function according to universal rules. Thus the incest taboo inaugurates a number of crucial changes, principally it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality.

Butler notes that Lévi-Strauss assumes that the general prohibition against incest only works in one particular direction, that of heterosexual exogamy. But does the prohibition on incest necessarily lead to heterosexual exogamous coupling? What makes it so? In her answer Butler underscores a point that Rubin mentions only in passing:

[Psychoanalysis] has rarely addressed the question of how new forms of kinship can and do arise on the basis of the incest taboo. 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. (2000a, 66)

There is nothing inherent in the incest taboo that dictates heterosexual kinship. In Butler’s reading of Lévi-Strauss the incest taboo is cited as a universal law that structures the social formation. Key to Butler’s argument is the explicit connection she makes between the way in which the incest taboo functions and the role the Symbolic plays in Lacan’s theory.

Lacan, according to Butler, takes the universal prohibition against incest and the ensuing laws of kinship and combines them with a Saussurean structural linguistics.²⁹ What emerges from this mix of incest taboo and linguistics is specific Symbolic positions coded in language: Mother, Father, Child, Aunt, Uncle etc. These positions are accorded a linguistic status by Lacan, functioning as symbolic positions or placeholders. Butler argues that the symbolic for Lacanians is insulated from any ‘social’ influences.³⁰ Lacan’s symbolic is ultimately a static structuralist law that functions to secure its own seamless reproduction unaffected by social forces. Butler claims that both Lévi-Strauss and Lacan have effectively transformed something that is social and historically variable and made it into a structural universal. This prompts her to ask “whether the incest taboo has also been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and livable ones (2000a, 70). Butler is harshly critical of heterosexist assumptions of the incest taboo and how a prohibition against sexual intercourse with next of kin turns into a necessary heterosexual exogamous exchange of women that is dictated as cultural law. 

When the study of kinship was combined with the study of structural linguistics, kinship positions were elevated to the status of a certain order of linguistic positions without which no signification could proceed, no intelligibility could be possible. What were the consequences of making certain conceptions of kinship timeless and then elevating them to the status of the elementary structures of intelligibility? Is this any better or worse than postulating kinship as a natural form? (2000a, 20)

Butler’s point of contention is that Lacan’s reading of Lévi-Strauss through Saussurean linguistics results in a structuralist linguistics based on Mother, Father, Child as three signifiers that structure in a precise way one’s very access to the symbolic.³¹ This access to the symbolic requires a precise triangulation: a representative of the phallic law intervenes between mother and child. The child then needs to assume castration as a condition for entry into the symbolic as a user of language. For Lacanians this access to language or the symbolic order is the sine qua non of intelligibility, of being able to communicate with others and make sense.³²