 Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. Is this too loud or is it so echoey? It's okay? There is good. Okay. Thank you. In the back. Alright. So, in case I forget, I'm going to say this now. Your essay questions are on this beautiful, sunny yellow paper. They're up here. You can get them at the break or after the lecture. If you haven't got them already, that's where they are. Sorry? Yeah. Talk to your seminar leader. That was the right answer, right? So, talk to your seminar this week about when they're due. Also, this is a good time. Thank you for the reminder to announce that we do have a lecture next Tuesday from five till seven as a make-up for the Monday. It will be filmed, so if you're unable to attend, it will eventually be up on Arts One Digital. I don't remember the room off the top of my head. The room? We will get back to you on the room. But, yes, that is happening. Okay. So, on to, that's kind of the end of the administrative stuff, on to today's lecture, where we are talking about this book, Antigone's Claim. So, I hope you enjoyed reading the book this week or reading parts of it. And I hope you can also appreciate that this is a very dense and complex text. There are a lot of ideas going on. There's a lot of stuff going on. And so, what I'm going to say today in lecture will really only scratch the surface. Now, that's probably true of pretty much everything we're going to read in this course, but I really want to highlight it for this book. Because I have an intuition about what it might have been like to read this book. Maybe. This is my intuition. My intuition is that at least during parts of reading this book, it might have felt a little bit like wandering around in a forest or a city without a map and bumping into trees and random buildings that show up in places where you didn't necessarily expect them to be and then trying, maybe it's a different way and thinking about things a different way and finding yourself in a bog and things like this. So, what I'm saying is my intuition is that some of you might have had some trouble figuring out what's going on in this text. And if you think that everything is clear, probably it isn't. So, probably that is not true. Why do I have this intuition? Because I and many people I have talked to had that experience upon the first reading of this text. Maybe some of the people over there. So, if you feel lost at the moment you are not alone, I suspect a lot of you are together wandering lost through this text. And what I'm going to try to do today is provide you a little bit of a map. But I do want to stress that this is only one type of way of approaching this text. It's only one map of what's going on. And that, like with any map, as I provide it to you, I'm going to draw out certain features and gloss over others. So, I'm not going to be able to talk about everything. So, this is one way of approaching the text, not the only way of approaching the text. And the text is hard. And nothing I say today is going to change that. So, hopefully it will give you some new ways of thinking about it. Okay. So, Antigone's Claim was written by Judith Butler. And there's a picture of Judith Butler. We'll get some more pictures of her and other people who are influencing her as we think about this text. And it was written in 2002. So, we've jumped from an ancient Greek text written in ancient Athens to a modern USA text written a decade ago. But the modern text is drawing, as you will know from the title, obviously, really, really heavily from the ancient one. And so, one thing I hope that reading this text demonstrated for you, or illustrated for you, is that reading all of these old books is a way of talking and exploring things that can still have modern implications. And it's really extraordinary to me that a text like Antigone can still have something to say to a modern North American audience. And that's one thing that I think Judith Butler has shown in this work. So, as I move through my lecture today, I'm going to ask that you watch for three kind of main things. These aren't the only things, and they may not be main things that everyone takes to be main things, but these are three things that stood out for me in my reading of this text. So, I'm going to ask you to watch for lenses and structures, for vocabulary and power, and for clarity and ambiguity. And the way in which these three ideas interact with each other and interact with Butler's reading of the text. We're going to go over them all in detail, so if they don't make a lot of sense right now, don't worry. So, I'm going to start in kind of a funny place. Because I want to start with something Butler says right near the end of this text. And I want to be Kim here, because even though it occurs late in the text you can see on page 182, this is a place where Butler does two things. One, I think she draws our attention to the power of vocabulary, and in particular of the vocabularies of kinship and gender. And two, she illustrates the way in which she is thinking about her modern context, which is only a decade removed from our context now, and how that modern context is influencing her reading of Antigone. So, really late on, what does she say? Antigone is not of the human, but she speaks in its language. Prohibited from actions, she nevertheless acts, and her act is hardly a simple assimilation to existing norm. And in acting as one who has no right to act, she upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human, implicitly raising the question for us, what those preconditions really must be. That's a huge and really awesome idea that I want to try and unpack a little bit. What does it mean to say that she's prohibited from acting, but that she still acts? And in what ways is she upsetting the vocabulary of kinship? And how is this related to humanity and to the claim that she is not human? Remember, I think that this is a really important passage because it helps Butler bridge the gap between ancient Athens and modern day, well, a decade ago, North American culture. So in coming to answer these questions, and you don't have to write down this text because this will be posted online, and it's in your book. So you can highlight it there if you want. In answering these questions, I want to take a look at the modern day context. So what would it mean to say vocabulary of kinship is a precondition for the human? Well, here's some vocabulary of kinship. Some of these words I hope are fairly familiar. Mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew. You can probably come up with more. One thing I think is really interesting about this list is that the vocabulary of kinship by and large is also a gendered vocabulary. That is, that we expect mothers to have a certain role, and it's a role that is usually quite heavily associated with women. We expect brothers to have a certain role, and it is a role that is usually associated with men or masculinity. So our vocabulary of kinship and our vocabulary of gender are very closely related. The way in which we understand women and men is heavily influenced by the way in which we understand kinship ties and vice versa. Why would this be a precondition for the human? One thing that I think is suggested by the text is that vocabulary provides a structure. So when you have a vocabulary, it kind of tells you how you were related to the people around you, the ways in which you are expected to interact with them, the rules that govern those interactions, and they give you a place, a place to belong, and a foundation from which to build your identity. They also help us realize why this cartoon is funny, right? Because this is breaking the norms of a certain structure. Because it's a family-scrable game. Oh, my pointer doesn't reach that far. Oh well, it's a family-scrable game. What does this look like in 2012? Well, we're in 2013, but I'm actually going to look at 2011. This right here is Baby Storm, who was born in 2011. And yeah, this will work. I'm going to play you a short clip about why Baby Storm proved to be such an interesting international phenomenon that people paid a lot of attention to back in 2011. In case you don't know anything about Baby Storm. One family has decided to keep their child's gender a secret four months after the birth. Natalie's here with details on that. Natalie, good morning. And good morning, Matt. Well, this story is generating a lot of buzz and also a lot of debate. Can parents raise their children gender-free? That is what one family is trying to do. There's no blue or pink for this baby. The parent's idea is to let their child eventually pick their gender. At first glance, this baby looks like any other. Bright eyes and a big smile. But look a little closer. Is it a boy, a girl? Can you tell? And does it even matter? This Canadian couple doesn't think so. They've decided to raise their four-month-old baby named Storm genderless, allowing the baby to choose its own gender orientation. The couple's story recently appeared in the Toronto Star and has caused an uproar among family researchers like Glenn Stanton. We have to understand that the discussion of gender is not just about body parts or what clothes we would choose for ourselves or the colors that we like. It is really about science, and science is telling us that there's a male and female brain. Kathy Witterich and her husband David Stalker are keeping Baby Storm's gender a secret. They say the only people who know whether Storm is a boy or a girl are one family friend and Storm's older brothers, Jazz, Five, and Keo, too. According to the star, shortly after Storm's birth, the family sent out this email. We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now, a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand-up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime. A more progressive place? The parents want to opt into this kind of utopian idea that, oh, we can just let our child be free. Well, you know what? That is completely to misunderstand what it means to be human. But they're not the only parents publicly fighting. Oh, shoot. Ah, there we go. I might have to back this up one second. Technical difficulties? There we go. Didn't hit it early enough. Nope. Okay. Sorry, guys. There we go. Okay. So why did I want to show you a little bit about Baby Storm? It's a really huge story in early 2011. Everyone was talking about it in Canada, Baby Storm being a Canadian baby. But it also garnered some international attention as well. That the more and more the parents tried to keep Storm's sex and gender a secret, the more people started talking about it. And I really want to draw your attention to what that author said right at the end there, where he claimed that gender was fundamental to being human, that we needed to know what Storm's gender was in order to interact with Storm on some human level. So Glenn Stanton said that gender was fundamental to our understanding of being human. How does this relate to family? I think I've already talked to you a little bit about how family ties are largely gendered. But you might be wondering how we can live in a context or a time at which we could have this kind of question over a baby's gender. So this is a place where I'm going to try and draw a little bit of a distinction, and this might be something that you're already familiar with. But I'm going to draw it out just in case you aren't. So we live right now in a world in which we can draw a distinction between sex and gender. And we largely have. So we think of sex in terms of biological. So what are your chromosomes? What are your primary and secondary sex characteristics? This is largely how sex is understood and theorized. Gender, on the other hand, is thought of as social and cultural. This means that gender is not determined based on sex, but could be influenced by sex. It's not determined based on sex, which means that it is possible to have somebody who has a sex identification of male, but gender identification of female and vice versa. And more permutations and combinations that you might want to go into in your seminar. However, gender can be influenced by sex because gender is social and cultural. So if somebody perceives you as being one's sex, they might draw certain ideas or conclusions about what kind of social role you play. So I have another comic illustrating how this might work. How if you're perceived to be one kind of sex, this might affect gender identification. But because we have this distinction between sex and gender, it seems that we live in a world where it is completely possible for an infant to perhaps even have an ambiguous sex assignment and yet for their gender to still be indeterminate. However, if Baby Storm's sex assignment was released, people would probably start making conclusions about Baby Storm's gender. So I hope that's a little bit clear. Because this is going to be important as we're reading Butler, this distinction between sex and gender. So before I get into actually talking about Butler, I want to raise a couple of questions about this. Questions to keep in the back of your mind. As you're reading this text, as you're listening to lecture, maybe even as you're talking about it, if these questions stick with you. So my first question is, is it true that we need to know the sex or the gender of a person or both in order to interact with them? Is it true that we need to know our relationship to the person, our kinship ties in order to interact with them? And if we think that either of these is true, why? What difference does it make in our interactions with other people that require us to be able to answer these questions? So that's a little bit about the social context that Butler is writing in. Now we're about a decade out from that, so some things have changed. But a lot of things are still pretty similar, as when Butler wrote this. So her context is probably largely overlapping with many of your contexts, which helps a little bit. But there is a way in which Butler's context is very different from what I suspect many of yours is. Because Butler is also a philosopher. So we need to also consider the philosophical context that is influencing Butler's reading of this text. And this brings me to the idea of lenses and structures. And the way I want you to think about lenses and structures is kind of in this metaphorical way. So a lens is great, because a lens lets you see things, it lets you focus on things. That's Butler again, by the way in the picture, thinking hard and deeply. We'll talk about that. So a lens lets you see things, but it also kind of restricts and narrows your vision. It makes something salient, something stand out, and other things get lost because they're not in focus in the lens. And the same thing is true for a structure. A structure holds you up, but you become kind of confined by the structure. So I want to talk about the lenses and structures that are influencing Butler's reading of the text. What is in the background here when Butler comes to look at this text? In Butler's head. We have two philosophers that have given previous interpretations of the play Antigone. And Butler is aware of both of these philosophers, and she is interacting with their work. She's already read their work. You can see they predate her. Born in 1930, Luce Irgaray, she is still alive, I think. My last Google search led me to believe that. And Lacan, born in 1901, died in 1981. So both of these philosophers have already taken up these texts and modeled it to their own purposes. So when we're talking about remaking and remodeling, there is a history of remaking and remodeling already in existence that Butler is familiar with. That's not the only one. Further down, Hegel, born in 1770, died in 1831, also took up this text and talked about it. And Irgaray and Lacan are both responding to Hegel, and Butler is responding to all three of them. So at this point, we are really far removed from the original text. There are a lot of layers of interpretation, a lot of lenses focusing our attention towards certain salient features of the text, and away from other things that the text is saying. When Butler comes to examine this text, she is aware of all these things that are influencing her examining of the text. She wants to really pay attention to the way in which lenses are focusing her interpretation. So that's part of the reason why we get so much reference to other philosophers, because Butler wants to be very, very conscious about the way in which other philosophers are influencing her interpretation. Why is that important for you? Because Butler may influence your interpretation of the text. Rob may have influenced your interpretation of the text. We are all providing you structures and lenses for understanding this text, and like any good lens, we are making some things visible, some things easier to see, but we are also obscuring other things. So think about how we're framing this text, how Butler is framing this text. So here is the kind of roadmap that I said I would offer you to help you get through the dense forest of this text. You can see clarity and ambiguity, vocabulary and power, lenses and structures, and the way in which they interact with each other, and arise from the context in which Butler is giving this reading. I'm going to try and illustrate each of these points in turn with a few references from each aspect of the, or from each of the three chapters of the text, to try and show how I think clarity, ambiguity, vocabulary and power, and lenses and structures are playing a role in this text. The first. The very first chapter is also the title of the book, Antigone's Claim. Why this title? What is her claim? I'm assuming that must have been a question that occurred to many of you. It may still be occurring. Okay. So there's a picture of Antigone in the corner. The first thing I want to talk about is Butler's focusing on the lenses that shape her reading of the text. So we'll start with this guy. You've already seen a picture of him, but now it's a color picture. So in case you can't identify him, that's Hegel. Or at least we think that's what Hegel looked like. There he is. Looks like a pleasant guy. Okay. So why do I have a flower here beside Hegel? Well, Hegel was a really, really cyclical thinker. That may not make a lot of sense. Let me try and make this a little more clear. In one of Hegel's most famous works, The Phenomenology of Spirit, he starts the text by saying something kind of weird. He says, truth is like a flower. It may not surprise you at this point to know that Hegel's last words were, and they didn't understand me. Okay. So truth is like a flower. What does that mean? Well, Hegel said, here's what happens. You get the bud, right? So the little bud of the flower, and everybody goes, oh, I found truth. Here it is. It's the bud. Yeah, I know what a flower is. It's a bud. I'm done. Then what happens? The bud opens, right? And you get the blossom. And a bunch of other investigators come along and they go, oh, we were totally wrong. Truth isn't the bud. Forget about the bud. Truth is the blossom. That's what truth really is. We were wrong before. Great. So some time goes by and the blossom turns into a fruit. I guess this is a flower turning into a berry kind of story. And a bunch of more theorists come along and they go, oh, okay, so we were totally wrong. Truth isn't the flower. It's the fruit. Yeah, no, but we've got it now. It is definitely the fruit. Forget about the bud and forget about the flower. We know what truth is now. Well, Hegel said, if you look back at the way in which we try and figure out about truth, this is what happens. Somebody says something, but everybody automatically says the opposite. Truth is the bud. No, truth is the flower. No, truth is the fruit. No, it's not. And this just goes back and forth and back and forth like a dialectic. So I'm going to try it with you. Let's see if we can all think dialectically. Are you guys up for it? Wow. Come on. Are you guys up for it? Okay. Ready? We're going to try and think dialectically. I'm going to say something and you're going to immediately say the opposite. Black. Nice. Right. Or left. Cool. This is kind of a very watered down version or a very simplified version of dialectic reasoning. So Hegel thought that this kind of reasoning happened all over the place. Whenever somebody said something, someone else always came along and countered it. And this is the way in which Hegel reads Antigone's claim. Or Antigone, not Antigone's claim. He couldn't read Antigone's claim. He was already dead by that point. Okay. So this is how Hegel read Antigone. For Hegel, Antigone is a necessary move in this back and forth reasoning. Why is she necessary? Because what we see here is Creon asserting these kind of patriarchal rules, these social, political, human created, go back to Rob's lecture and remember all of this stuff, laws. And Antigone comes along and she is the opposite. She stands for family where Hegel, where Hegel, where Creon stands for the state. She stands for kinship. She stands for matriarch. Creon stands for patriarchy, for the state, for a loss of individuality, for the suppression of the family. Because Antigone represents all this opposite, Creon has to necessarily push back against her. So Hegel says Antigone is necessary. This movement of this opposite is necessary, but it is also necessary that Antigone fail and that Creon reassert himself. So for Hegel, Antigone represents this necessary movement in the subordination of women and kinship to family and state. And in fact, you don't even want to know the kind of things that Hegel said about women. At one point Hegel said women's lives unfold more like a plant. Men are more like animals. They're really active, but women are kind of like plants. They're just really passive. So they're not very good at philosophy because they're very plant like. Sorry, Hegel. Okay. So she represents the subordination of women and kinship to the state. I'm not to family and state. To men in state. I'm sorry, that was wrong. So that's Hegel's kind of theory. And this is the lens through which Butler is reading Antigone's claim. In fact, Hegel's theory here is the lens through which a lot of people have read Antigone. Hegel was a very influential philosopher, and so he influences a lot of philosophical work and political work on Antigone that happened afterwards. So we see from Hegel straight through to Lacan Antigone is said to defend kinship and a kinship that is markedly not social. So she stands for family and kinship against society and the state. A pre-social era, but Butler has questions about that because for Butler this is not entirely clear. If she represents family and kinship and women against men and society and the state what does it mean? What is kinship? What is family? What is femininity? And how does Antigone embody these? So what is kinship? We have a fairly, I think, common picture of a family. So right now in Canada we have the stereotypical image of the family as being two parents and 1.7 children. Okay, so I have two children. I think it's 1.7 right now is kind of the family norm. But how exactly does this work? Here's a kinship tree. So you can see almost every space on this tree, just waiting for you to fill it out, is gendered, right? Except for the me space. Me is free to be whatever gendered me wants to be, or me feels that me is, but everybody else is already gendered. Grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, me. How does this function in our understanding of kinship? So this term that gets thrown around a lot, not thrown around, used a lot in Antigone's claim and it's the idea of kinship norms. You can think of a norm kind of like a governing ideal. So I've tried to picture it here as a category. And closer to the center of the category is the ideal. So we have the ideal here. But there's still a lot of things that are captured under the term of kinship that might fail to meet this ideal. So I've got a few of them on here. Adopted children, there's no blood ties there. Step parents. How does step families work? Or step siblings for that matter. Or honorary aunts and uncles, people who aren't your blood ties, but are so close that they are for all intents and purposes treated as families. Or blended families. Or same sex couples wishing to raise a child. How does all of this work when these are our kinship terms? How to bring it back to the text, does Antigone represent kinship? I was on Antigone's family tree last day with Rob. But I want to really draw your attention, oh go away, to this part of the tree here. There is Oedipus marrying his mother Jakasta and the children. What kind of language can be used to express this? So when I was talking last week in seminar about this family relationship, we found ourselves a little bit atun tide because we'd be saying things like Oedipus who is Antigone's father and also her brother. Creon who is Antigone's uncle and also her great uncle. Heyman who is Antigone's cousin but also her first cousin once removed. It's really complicated to talk about this family. We don't have easy terms to capture how these people are related to each other so we end up having to use kind of whole sentences to talk about this relationship. Which means according to Butler that Antigone ends up right out on the edge of these kinship norms. She's really not easily classified or categorized by our kinship terms. Which means that because we can't speak about her, to some degree she is almost unintelligible, unthinkable. So Hegel and Lacan see kinship as natural, not social. It's a pre-social state. The family as pre-social. And this is an idea we're going to see again in a lecture from Rob a few weeks from now. I think maybe. So the idea of family as pre-the state. But Butler takes an issue with that. She says what makes kinship ties or family ties natural as opposed to social? When we have this ideal that doesn't really seem to capture all the different natural arrangements of family that we see. Well there's one way in which you might try and answer Antigone's kinship ties as being unnatural as opposed to not social. So you might say incest is naturally forbidden. And we have kind of a story about why incest might be naturally forbidden because there is strong evolutionary pressure to not narrow the gene pool and so it's quite natural to not engage in incest. Butler says this isn't actually just natural against the social because incest itself also has a social element. It isn't just naturally forbidden, it's socially forbidden. Why? Is it incest if you engage in a relationship with a step sibling? There shouldn't be any natural problem there since there's no blood relationship but socially people might have problems with it. What about with these honorary aunts or uncles who are so close that they might as well be family? What about adopted siblings? And what about cousins? Because right here in the context we are in right now in Canada I think it's illegal to marry your cousins. I'm pretty sure. I didn't actually check that. Anyway, however in Antigone's time and context it doesn't seem to be a problem. It doesn't seem to be engaging in incest because nobody is horrified by the fact that Antigone is betrothed to Heyman. So Butler's argument is that these kinship ties are not really properly understood as the natural against the social. That lens that drew your attention to Antigone as natural against social is obscuring the way in which Antigone's kinship ties can't be understood as just natural. So if we come back to this idea that Hegel has her standing for the matriarch, that Hegel has her standing for women and kinship, we might ask this question there's a picture of Antigone with her father. Can Antigone represent kinship ties? If she is on the border of kinship norms to the point where it is difficult to speak about her to the point where she is almost unintelligible then how is she representing kinship? Can she even represent kinship? And this is a question that Butler asks that it doesn't seem Hegel provided an answer for. So there's a way in which the lens that Hegel has given us including Antigone doesn't really seem to capture everything that's going on. Okay, so that's kinship. What about women? Lost my water, sorry. So here we have a picture of femininity. So I have a question for you since you know a little bit about what kind of roles women were supposed to fulfill in ancient Athens. You can tell me what did it mean to be a woman? What were the gender roles for women? How were women supposed to act? I know some of you talked about this in seminar. Yeah, sorry, docile? Passive, definitely. Okay, so kind of going along with the docile and passive how they would show they were docile and passive as they can't speak in the political sphere. Submissive for sure. Is there another one? Yeah, pretty much. They weren't citizens, for example. Another one in the back. They should be wives and mothers, definitely. That's kind of the highest role for an Athenian and Phoebian ancient Greek woman. Okay. Now if we're bringing Antigone up and we're trying to use it in a modern context, what does femininity or womanhood mean now? What do you guys think? I know I warmed you up with a question that you'd already talked about in seminar and now I'm asking you something different. What does it mean? Or masculinity or men? How are these roles understood now? Yeah, okay, how come? There's definitely been a change between now and ancient Greece, which can be seen because I get to stand here and speak to all of you, for example. Definitely. So we know that there's been a change, which helps support the idea that there can be, there's no tight connection between sex and gender. Being biologically female doesn't doom me to the domestic sphere and to non-citizenship, for example. Did you have a hand up as well? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So there's still this kind of pressure around motherhood and the ideals of motherhood which is different when it comes to fatherhood potentially. Okay. So if Antigone is thought to represent womenhood, as Hegel says that she does, this is a little bit odd. Because given everything that you guys have said about ancient Greek feminine roles, it seems like as many does a lot better job of representing womenhood and the matriarch. Because as many is all of the things you said. She is submissive, she is not a citizen, she is docile. She does talk a little bit about wanting to go against Creon's decree, but only if no one finds out. And if we have as many representing feminine norms sort of get Creon representing masculine norms or trying to anyway, how good of a man Creon is depends on your reading of the text. So it's odd that Hegel and Lacan see Antigone and Irrigare actually see Antigone as representing women, as just representing womanhood or womankind because he's not very much like her sister. So where would Antigone fit here? There she is. Why would I put Antigone in the center here? Butler says that in speaking to him, Creon, and now she uses Creon with a C, but that's just an alternative way of spelling. So it's Creon with a C or Creon with a K, it's referring to the same die. So in speaking to him, Creon, she Antigone becomes manly. In being spoken to, he is unmanned. So neither maintains their position within gender and the disturbance of kinship appears to destabilize gender throughout the play. This is so curious to me. In the very act of speaking to Creon, Antigone takes over a masculine role and she threatens Creon's masculinity simultaneously. How is she able to do that? Well you might ask the question, if Antigone can be manly then what determines whether somebody is a man? Or if Antigone can be manly, then in what ways does Antigone embody masculine norms? So what if we took the center ring here, the ring that has Antigone in it, as the norms of gender. Now it looks like Creon is the exception. Whereas before Antigone spoke in the public sphere, Creon was totally fine and secure in his manhood in the center of the masculine norms. But now that Antigone is speaking manly and Creon is kind of unable to control her and to force her back into the feminine sphere, it now looks like Creon is less of a man than Antigone is. And this means that we're getting a shift of masculine norms. Which is both somewhat empowering to Antigone and also very threatening to Creon. So in the same way that Antigone is on the margins of kinship he's also on the margins of gender norms. But if we look if we focus our lens on Antigone, now it looks like Creon and his many are on the margins. What determines what's in the center and what's on the margins? How is that happening? There's a really interesting relationship I want to suggest to you guys between clarity and ambiguity that is happening here. That the more unintelligible and unthinkable Antigone, sorry, that Antigone is viewed as unintelligible, unthinkable and ambiguous because we are assuming or because readers of the play are assuming that things like that symmetrical family tree and Creon and his many are unproblematic and clear. So if we focus our lens on Antigone, those other things start looking kind of ambiguous or kind of unsupported. Why would that symmetrical family tree be the norm when there are so many families that don't fall into it? And why would as many in Creon stand for the normative understandings of male and female when there are people that don't fall there either? So the more we try and make Antigone appear clear to us, the more ambiguous things that we thought were once clear start looking. There's this polar opposite relationship here and it might help explain why we don't want to make Antigone seem very clear to us because if she's clear then a lot of things that we thought were clear are no longer clear and that's kind of unsettling. So again, if Antigone stands for women, how can she do so when she isn't unproblematically a woman? When she is referred to over and over in this text as male, as acting like a man and this is just to further question Hegel's claim that Antigone can stand easily for women and for kinship. Okay, so she cannot stand unambiguously for women, not without us doing some more work. She cannot unambiguously stand for kinship. Okay, so I told you guys we were going to talk about her claim. What is her claim? What does she stand for if she can't stand for either of these things unproblematically? And this is where we start talking a little bit about vocabulary and power. Antigone says when confronted, did you bury Polynesius' body and she says, yes, I confess, I will not deny my deed. And Butler finds this very interesting that the way in which Antigone confesses to having buried her brother is by saying I will not deny my deed. The Butler tells us when she appears before Creon she acts again this time verbally, refusing to deny that it was she who did the deed. In effect what she refuses is the linguistic possibility of severing herself from the deed, but she does not assert it in any unambiguously affirmative way. She does not simply say I did the deed. Instead she says I will not deny that I did the deed. That's kind of an ambiguous answer. Did you do this? I won't deny it. I'm not going to confess to it either. I'm not going to affirm it, but I won't deny it. You think what you want, Creon. It's weird. Why does she do that? Even her speech acts are ambiguous. She doesn't come right out and answer Creon's question in a clear way. So her gender is ambiguous. Her kinship ties are ambiguous. Her speech acts are ambiguous. She's making a claim, but I don't know what she's claiming. Maybe she stands for ambiguity. Maybe she stands for suspicion. This is a suggestion for those parts of ourselves or those parts of our societies that cannot be captured easily and put into boxes and clarified and understood. She stands for all the little ways in which we defy these laws. All the little ways in which we aren't really clear to each other. Butler says that Antigone is somewhat unthinkable. Why is she somewhat unthinkable? Is it because we are desperate to be unthinkable? Because if we admit that we understand her, then we have to admit that a lot of things that we thought were pretty obvious are really not clear. Like what it means to be a woman. Like what it means to be somebody's mother or somebody's sister. Or somebody's brother. Brother is a huge one in this text, actually. And if she is unthinkable, then what can she stand for? This is the way in which Butler is countering the text, looking at the lenses that have shaped the way she understands the text and challenging those lenses for focusing on certain things and leaving other things out. So Butler says, I ask this question, what can she stand for? During a time in which the family is at once idealized in nostalgic ways with various cultural forms. A time in which the Vatican protests against homosexuality not only as an assault on the family, but also on the notion of the human. Where to become human for some requires participation in the family in its normative sense. So we have, as one of your classmates mentioned when I was asking for what it might mean to be a woman, these kind of idealizations of motherhood. We have idealizations about family too. And I would argue these idealizations are still very much with us. This idea about what a family is ideally supposed to be like and what the role of a mother or a father are ideally supposed to be. And at the same time we still have in our culture these kind of protests against homosexuality and in particular against homosexual families which relates quite well in this context. Because they don't match this ideal. And if you understand humanity as fundamentally something that has to do with these family relations then homosexual families could represent this kind of assault on what it might mean to be human. And we actually see this in the kind of protests that are brought up particularly around marriage. So the protests that continue to happen in the US and did happen in Canada around the time Butler wrote this about homosexual marriage or homosexual unions talking about it in terms of something that would destroy marriage. That it was so non-normative that it had the power to destroy the norm. In the same way that Creon feels threatened by Antigone that Antigone is so non-normative when she becomes a manly person that she threatens Creon's identity as a man. So I return to questions about vocabulary and power. But the way in which our words shape the world around us and the way in which people who fall outside of these norms who challenge our words can threaten the way we've shaped the world. Okay. So that's kind of going through the first part of Antigone's claim. And I hope now you're starting to see a little bit of a relationship between these three structures. That Antigone is ambiguous because we don't have the vocabulary to talk about her. That in trying to make Antigone clear, other things become unstable, become uncertain. And that this should highlight for us the way in which vocabulary serves as a lens for us understanding the world around us and as a structure for us figuring out where we fit. Because if we don't have the words, it's hard to figure it out. And structures are great. They provide foundations, they provide security, but they also kind of trap us so that when people don't clearly fit into the structure, it's hard to know what to do. Alright, so can you guys take about a 10 minute break and we'll come back and go through the next two sections. Thanks. Find your seats. Thank you. Alright. So we're picking up in the second text, or the second chapter of this short three chapter book. Unwritten laws and aberrant transmissions. And I want to draw your attention quickly to page 33 of your text. If you have it with you. If not, buddy up with someone who does. So I have a picture here on the slide of Antigone coming to bury her brother, Polynesius. And we know from Butler's discussion that there's something kind of interesting happening here with Antigone's relationship to Polynesius. Because how many brothers does Antigone have? Two, three, yes. That's right, she has two and or three. But Polynesius is special. In a way it seems the other two aren't necessarily, although Edifice occupies his own special category that we will come to talk about. Miss Antigone talks about this need to bury her brother. And that there's something unique about this brother. Because he's irreplaceable she can't get another one. She could get another son, she could get another husband, but her brother is irreplaceable. And this strikes Butler is very strange. Because Antigone has three brothers. So what makes this one so irreplaceable? And in fact her brother is so unique that the law she calls in claiming that she has to bury him is a law that only has one application. It only applies to this one brother. She is never going to act on this law again. Because there is no other relation that she has that pulls her in this way. So page 33 there is no justification for the claim Antigone makes the law she invokes is one that has only one possible instance of application and is not within any ordinary sense conceptualizable as a law. Why isn't it conceptualizable as a law? Because it isn't generalized. It isn't universal, it isn't generalized, it only has one instance of application that's a strange law. Why would you even make that a law? So it's very weird here what allows Antigone to make this kind of claim that she makes. And the law itself seems very odd. Seems very defined norms or aberrant. So once again we look at Antigone to lenses. How has Antigone's action here been understood in the past? It's Hegel again, in case you couldn't recognize him. There he is. Okay, so we're going to try and get inside Hegel's head and see what he's thinking about Antigone. Let's see if this works. Oh, there she is. In fact, if you read The Phenomenology of Spirit, if you ever do, this is the first place but not the only place where Hegel talks about Antigone. If you had not already read the play Antigone, you may not know he's talking about Antigone at all. Hegel never uses her name. He talks about her kinship ties. And that's enough to identify her. So he never identifies her by name. So when we're talking about the way in which kinship and language relate to how we think of ourselves, think about this. If you're familiar with this play, you don't even need Antigone to be named to know who Hegel is talking about. That's how powerfully she is defined and determined by her kinship ties. But why doesn't he name her? Butler tells us that by supplanting Antigone with woman kind, Hegel performs the very generalization that Antigone resists. So he doesn't name her because he doesn't want her to stand for Antigone herself. He wants her to stand for all women. So she doesn't get named. She just stands for all women. And this allows her to be generalizable. But what do we know about Antigone's claim, the claim that she is making that allows her to bury her brother? It's not generalizable. So it seems that Hegel's treatment of Antigone is performing the very act that Antigone herself is resisting. That Antigone is not generalizable, but Hegel, by unnaming her, makes her generalizable. So what about Lacan, the other person who's kind of hiding in the background here? There's a lot to say about both Hegel and Lacan and Irgaray, who I'm actually not getting into here. So what I'm saying is very, very small. It's just kind of a little bit to give you a little bit of understanding of the lenses that Butler is working with. And it isn't necessary to understand these two figures in order to understand the ways in which Butler is trying to examine the influence that they've had on her. So what do I want to say about Lacan? Well Lacan is Freudian and he is also a structuralist. And I will talk about both of these things a little bit. So Lacan is very interested in the way in which what he calls the symbolic structures and defines the real. So the symbolic. You can think of this as kind of the linguistic structures that govern our lives increasingly towards the end of Lacan's career. He became very interested in ways that language structures the way in which we interact with each other and the way in which we understand reality. However Lacan was also very interested in the real. The real for Lacan represents what doesn't get captured by this symbolic. What doesn't get captured in the linguistic structures. What is above or behind them. Transcending our language. Things we can't speak about. So given what I've already told you about in Antigone. It might make sense to you why Lacan would be very interested in Antigone. Because Antigone does occupy this kind of weird role where she seems to defy or escape language such that she becomes ambiguous. Such that we can't really understand what's going on or how to speak about her or how to identify her or define her. But what does it mean to say Lacan is a Freudian? What I really really love about these two pictures is that both Lacan and Freud are looking. If you know anything about Freud that's pretty funny. Because it's a cigar. So there's a lot more to say about Freud and we are going to say a lot more about Freud next semester. I think that's Christina but I can't remember. Yes it is. But here's a little preview since Lacan is a Freudian. So Lacan takes up a couple of things from Freud that affect the way in which he views Antigone. The other two things are basically that humans are driven by two main drives, sex and death. There you go. What does that mean? We are driven by sex. We all love ourselves and we love each other and we want to have a lot of sex. But we also curiously want to kill ourselves. We're a little bit aggressive and a little bit destructive. And this first manifest is kind of a desire to destroy ourselves. What does that mean? Well here's how I sometimes describe it because this makes sense to me although it might not make sense to you. So I'm going to try and see if this resonates with some of you. What might it mean to say that you kind of are driven by death or that you want to kill yourself or that you have a death drive? Well think of it this way. I'm not exactly afraid of heights. What I am afraid of is the way I react when I get up high. Because I get up high and I stand on the edge of a building or something and I'm standing there looking down and my first thought is you could jump. Okay that's not cool. Where did that thought come from? So there's this little voice that's like yeah you could just jump off. You'd be flying. Okay the end's going to be nasty but so there's this little kind of push. And that's what frightens me. This thing that comes up from inside that seems completely counterproductive of everything I want that just whispers you could jump right now. Nothing's stopping you. So that's part kind of my take on what I think Freud is getting at when he talks about this death drive that we have. This like subtle self-destructive line that's inside all of us but manifests in us in different ways. So not all of you get up on tall buildings probably and think about jumping. But there is this kind of weird self-destruction that we have. And when Lacan thinks about this self-destruction he thinks about it not strictly as we want to kill ourselves but as we want to escape our symbolic structures. So let's see what Lacan thinks about Antigone. He has a death wish. She has transcended life. So when Lacan thinks about Antigone he thinks about the way in which she appeals to the gods. That she appeals to the gods to support this weird law that only has one instance. For Lacan to seek recourse to the gods is precisely to seek recourse beyond human life. To seek recourse in death and to instate that death within life. In fact Antigone is instating death within life throughout the entire play. She tells us over and over again that she is already dead. So this recourse to what is beyond or before the symbolic leads to destruction. So for Lacan this death wish that he thinks Antigone has is her drive to escape the ways in which language and the symbolic have structured her life and her understanding of herself. So she is actively trying to escape the kinship and the gender ties that are holding her in place. That's Lacan's reading. There's something kind of weird then if we look at Hegel and Lacan's reading together. So Hegel says she stands for women against the state and her story represents the necessity of the divine law supplanting the family law so she must fail. That's kind of weird. How does her story represent divine law supplanting family law? Well Hegel says that Creon is upholding divine law. Creon appeals to the gods and says that what he is doing these kind of universal state laws are finally ordered and so Antigone has to fail because she's only representing her family and her brother and we need the divine state to supplant the family. Now some of you might be puzzled and it would be good if you were puzzled. Why? Because Lacan tells us that she stands at the limit of the symbolic structures that govern our lives and in appealing to the gods it's she that reaches beyond human experience and so she must die. We both agree that she must die but Lacan says she must die because she appealed to the gods and Hegel says she must die because Creon appealed to the gods. So for Hegel Creon has the gods on his side and that's what makes Creon right but for Lacan Antigone has the gods on her side. Okay so where are the gods? Actually both Antigone and Creon appeal to the gods in the play. So both of them are calling on the gods. This means that if Lacan is right about Antigone reaching out of symbolic structures transcending we think of the gods as transcendent because they're above human experience. If Antigone is transcendent well shouldn't Creon be transcendent too? And for Hegel if the divine laws must supplant the family laws isn't that a little bit problematic if family laws are also divinely supported? So it seems like both these structures are drawing our attention to some things and kind of covering over other things that are happening in the text. So if both Antigone and Creon have support of the gods we can't use the gods to explain why Antigone must fail. So Butler agrees with Lacan that Antigone herself is structured by norms. And this is going to be complex because what I hope you're recognizing now is that our reading and Butler's own reading of this play is also structured. That it's structured by past readings that have happened, that it's structured by Rob's lecture given last week, that it is being structured right now by my lecture. So it's really hard to look at this text with fresh eyes. To look at this text and try and figure out what kind of message this text might have for a modern day context there are so many remakings of this text that are in existence. So which would it mean to say that she stands at the limit of these structures that she is reaching beyond these experiences? How can Antigone escape these structures? In fact Butler disagrees with Lacan here. So Lacan seems to be making Antigone this kind of character with a death wish who is reaching beyond of her own free will to escape the norms holding her in place. Hegel makes Antigone stand for everybody well not everyone, sorry men, all women. But Butler says actually what's interesting about Antigone on her reading is that Antigone is singular and ambiguous and so she cannot represent all women. Also yes Antigone is at the limits of intelligibility this does not according to Butler put her at the limits of the symbolic that is she is not at the limits of human understanding or communication entirely. It isn't because she is trying to reach outside of herself that she is unintelligible. Instead it is the norms that make her unintelligible and I'll come to explore that a little bit more in one moment. Lastly and this is one of Butler's perhaps more controversial statements. She says that Antigone is not motivated by a death wish you can think about whether you think the text supports that reading because it is true that pretty early on Antigone talks about being dead and instead Butler says that Antigone is motivated by love for her brother and not necessarily a familial love either. What makes this brother so unique when she has two others one or two others? Yeah. What makes this brother so unique? Butler suggests that Antigone might have a kind of lustful or romantic feelings towards this brother that the love she has for this brother is an incestuous kind of love and Butler says what's very striking is that when the suggestion is made most people come back and go no, no, no, she doesn't feel like that. It's her brother. No, no, it's just a brother-sister relationship. Butler wants us to examine this reaction because she thinks that the insistence that there is no incest here should draw our attention and make us wonder why is everybody so determined to say there's no incest here what's the big deal about incest and what's going on and why is it so important and how does it structure our lives and why would it be so detrimental to this story according to other people if Antigone actually felt some kind of romantic or lustful love for her brother. But now I want to return to the claim that it is norms that make Antigone unintelligible and not her own appeal to the gods. I'll return to this picture of the norms. I want you to notice that without any appeal to the gods, Antigone already ends up at the edge of the kinship norms. Where do the norms come from? It isn't obvious that the norms come from the gods. In fact, Greek gods have very interesting family structures which you can talk about in seminar if you want to. But it doesn't necessarily seem like the Greek gods are setting down any of these familial norms. So if norms make Antigone unintelligible then it's us, we make Antigone unintelligible. We make her unintelligible because we've set up norms in which she doesn't fit and we refuse to see and to have language for talking about her. So it's not like us, us in this room but us kind of this whole history of dealing with Antigone and of having kinship in gendered roles that makes Antigone unintelligible. Do I want to say something about this? So when we're thinking about this unwritten law that frames Antigone's claim, I hope it becomes a little bit do I want to use the word clearer? A little bit clearer about ambiguity anyway. I hope it becomes a little bit clearer the ways in which this law is very peculiar. The ways in which it's really not obvious where this law comes from or what upholds it, but at the same time it's not actually obvious where Creon's law comes from either. So if we're concerned about Antigone's law and about whether or not Antigone really is upholding the gods will, we have to also be concerned about Creon. So this is another way in which focusing the lens on Antigone now makes Creon look a little bit unclear a little bit problematic. Promiscuous obedience the last chapter I actually think this is an awesome title. What does it mean promiscuous obedience? Promiscuity So we're dealing with a type of obedience that is somehow casual or slightly taboo or indiscriminate. An obedience that is unexpected and obedience that is non-normative. However Antigone is obeying her laws she is doing so in a weird way. Alright well darkness is good. That kind of set the scene here. Okay is it up here? Lights. Technical difficulties? No? Well yeah okay that'll work. We're back. Okay so what exactly does Antigone need to be obedient to? Well it seems that there are kind of two forces pulling at her as identified by Hegel and Lacan. There's the force of kinship and there's the force of the state. She's supposed to be obedient to kinship ties but she is also supposed to be obedient according to Creon to the laws that Creon has laid down. That doesn't mean to say she is obedient to kinship ties. And this is where we have this really interesting idea from Butler. Butler argues that kinship is not a form of being but a form of doing. That is kinship has to be enacted. If you're going to have a kinship tie there has to be an active relationship happening. You have to do something. How else do we get kinship ties between very very close friends that are so close as well be family members? It's by doing things together. By having holidays together, by being there for each other when they need help. Kinship is a form of doing. It happens because we care for each other, because we act. So which kinship ties is Antigone going to enact? I won't say her brothers or her fathers because you already know that's ambiguous into Antigone's mind. Okay so I found out how to make things appear on Prezi this week. Okay so Butler tells us that Antigone is caught. She is caught between her father's curse and her brother's need. If kinship is something that you do then in order to maintain these kinship ties Antigone has to do something. But the ties are pulling at her in slightly different directions. Sort of. What was her father's curse? Did anybody talk about this at all in seminar? Yeah. Yeah, she's supposed to love him best of all. And she, oh, yep. She is doomed to love a dead man. She is doomed to never marry. She is doomed to never be a mother. So Edavis lays this curse on his daughters. He curses his sons to kill each other. So he's pretty powerful curser actually. Well I guess we don't know as many maybe gets married and have a bunch of kids. It's not told. So she has this curse from her father saying that he's not supposed to love anyone other than, or she's not supposed to love anyone above him. But then there's her brother's need. Which brother? What do you think? Which brother is in need in this play? Is it just that nobody wants to say his name because you're not sure how to pronounce it? I've seen a nod. It's Polynesius. Or Polynesius depending on how you want to say it. He's the brother for whom she acts. Now this seems odd to Butler because her father has cursed her to love no one more than himself. And yet it's not her father, it's Polynesius that she is willing to act for. It's Polynesius that requires this special law that only has one instance. That seems like she's putting Polynesius above her father. Ah, but if you remember her father is not only her father he's also her brother. So there's a way in which this is a little bit ambiguous. Is she obeying her father's law? Maybe. Maybe in this kind of indeterminate way. Maybe in this promiscuous way. So Butler tells us that Antigone is guided by the words of the other. That is her actions contra what Lacan might say are not just driven by her own need. She is driven by the kind of kinship requirements that are placed on her by other people in her family. In fact, although Butler doesn't go into this you might think that Creon's demands are also a type of kinship tie. Creon is the head of state but who is Creon to Antigone? He's her uncle or her great uncle. Well, he's both. Okay, so there's a way in which Creon's command itself is another kind of kinship tie. How is Antigone going to obey all of these kinship ties? She is guided by the words of the other. But which other? Which brother in other words? For Antigone the word brother is ambiguous. It's really not clear who it refers to. Sister seems better off. But brother is really problematic. And so there's a way in which her obedience is problematic too because it's not clear which brother should trump her other brothers or which kinship tie should trump the others. So I ask you to turn to page 67 or buddy up with someone who has a book. I'll read it out. Bottom of the page, one might simply say in a psychoanalytic spirit that Antigone represents a perversion of the law and conclude that the law requires perversion and that in some dialectical sense the law is therefore perverse. She goes on to talk and complicate this, but I like this idea to start out with because it suggests to me that what Antigone does in acting and in speaking is show us the way in which the laws that we already have in place, or that Creon already has in place, are themselves perverse. They're perverse, they are unnatural, they are twisted because they push Antigone into this role. They push her into a place of unintelligibility. They push her into a place where no matter what she does, no matter who she obeys, she's going to be disobeying somebody else. So she ends up promiscuously obeying because she cannot obey someone and because the word brother is indeterminate. So in obeying a brother, we're left kind of wondering, well which brother? Which takes us back to where we began. So I ask you to look at this quote again. Antigone is not of the human but she speaks in its language. What does it mean to say Antigone is not of the human but she speaks in its language? Why would Butler say that? I'm actually asking now. What would make Antigone not of the human? Yeah, she's hard to define. She doesn't exist in defined kinship norms. Is there anything else that might make her not human? Yeah, and she says that, right? She embraces this failure. That's another thing that Butler talked about which I found totally fascinating but not a lot of time to fit into this lecture is the way in which the cause and effect in this text is weird. That Antigone kind of anticipates her failure right from the start and embraces it. That this text was written first before the other two in the series. So there's kind of weird timeline causality things happening here. Which might seem very unnatural or not normal when we think about a human life as being kind of linear. Anything else in terms of why she might not be considered human? So what does it mean to say she speaks in humans language? Why is that important? She's not human but she speaks like a human. Yeah, you could interpret it that way I think. So there's this idea that she's not human because she's, in fact, because Butler wants to bring this up and contemporize it I might suggest something like this. That she's not human because she's not clearly man or woman. She speaks like a man. That's a human role, right? Men are humans. Women are humans. Antigone is speaking like a man. But she's speaking about things that seem to be quite feminine because she's speaking about the family and about her ties to her brother and that seems very womanly, at least in Athens. So the things she cares about are very feminine but the way she's going about it is very masculine. So she is speaking in one language that is human an Athenian or Athhebian male language but she doesn't really fit. Prohibited from action she nevertheless acts and her act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm. Everyone would know what it means to say assimilation to an existing norm. How would one assimilate to an existing norm? What would it mean? Yeah. So for some people assimilating to an existing norm isn't a big deal because maybe they fit the norm already. So they may not always have to give up their individuality. If your family happens to fit that family tree that I showed earlier, the very cartoony one with all the gendered rules in place, if your family fits that, you're not giving up your individuality to say that. You just happen to fit in the norm. But, Antigone can't fit into this norm. If she does fit into the norm, the only way she could do so is by giving up certain facts about who she is and how she's related to other people. So in acting as one who has no right to act she upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human. How does she upset the vocabulary of kinship just by acting? Just by the act of burying her brother. How can she do that? I mean she's just one person. Any ideas? Yeah. So in some way she's making herself more unintelligible. Because if she really is in love with her brother, this is just making her family tree even more unintelligible, even harder to talk about. Yeah, I think so. Because now say she married her brother. Her father, who was also her brother, would also now be her father in law is getting pretty complicated. So there is a way in which she upsets the vocabulary of kinship just because she acts for her brother and because we're not quite sure why this brother is so special. You might also think that she upsets the vocabulary of kinship just because she occupies a family that is strange, but that she is demanding that we hear her. So if she just faded into the background like as many and she didn't get involved then we might not have such a big problem. She could sit with her family on the borders of kinship, but we could just forget about it. But because she's in the public sphere, she's in our faces and she's talking and she's acting, she refuses to be ignored which means now we have to recognize these really weird kinship ties and try and make sense of them. And as we try to make sense of her kinship ties, now we start looking at our own kinship ties and go, wait a second why do I think that Antigone's kinship ties are so strange? And I find other kinship ties not strange. I mean, aren't those kind of strange too? There's no natural foundation for any of this. So I think she kind of upsets things that way too. Okay, which means she raises a question what the preconditions for human really are. Which brings me back to the questions I asked you at the start of this lecture. Why did people run, and they did an online poll asking people to identify whether they thought baby storm was male or female just from looking at that picture of baby storm that I showed you. Why were people so invested? Why did people feel that they needed to know so badly? This is curious. What are the preconditions for human? Is it really a matter of gender? Is it a matter of kinship? And if so, why? So we're back here. Okay, so what is going on here with Antigone? In what ways does she upset the balance of kinship? Does she upset our understandings of how these terms work? Does she upset our intelligibility of ourselves? Because if she stands for ambiguity, it seems that she's a bit unintelligible. I want to ask you, is ambiguity powerful? In some ways it seems that it is quite powerful. That being able to be ambiguous and be recognized as ambiguous is a powerful position because it resists classification. And in resisting those classifications, it challenges our assumptions about stereotypes, our assumptions about what's natural or what's normal. So being able to be ambiguous does all of this really powerful stuff. Antigone's manly acting tends Creon. Not literally, figuratively, socially. But there's a problem because Antigone, as we've seen, is very, very hard to understand. I hope that's really been brought home. So we spent a week on Antigone and now you'll spend a week with people who have tried to understand Antigone. And what I think you'll see is that a lot of people approach this test in many, many different ways and all of them butler I think included, to one degree or another, makes certain things really clear and make other things kind of drop out of the text. So ambiguity is hard to capture. It's hard to understand. That's why we say it's ambiguous. That's what that term means. But this means that we need to pay a lot of attention to the lenses and structures that influence the way we read this text. So I want to say coming back to that question of all the lenses the butler refers to, remember, she refers to Hegel, she refers to Iraguerre, she refers to Lacan, she actually refers to a few other philosophers that I didn't mention, is that butler in this text is engaging in what she recommends that we do. That is, she's examining the lenses that affect our perceptions and examining the structures through which we understand the text and simultaneously the structures through which we live our lives. So in examining the way Hegel has thought about this text and the way Lacan has thought about this text butler is examining the lenses that influence the way she thinks about the text. So she's recommending that you do it and she's doing it herself. And she's asking, what holds these structures in place? Why do they seem intelligible? Why do they seem so intelligible that it might not have ever occurred to me to examine them before? And what effects do these structures have on individual lives? So finally we come to the last thing butler says Hey JD2, if kinship is the precondition of the human then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human. Achieved through political catharsis the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human when gender is displaced and kinship founders on its own foundering laws. She acts, she speaks she becomes one for whom the speech act is a fatal crime but this fatality exceeds her life and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising fatality, the social form of its apparent unprecedented future. So when we ask what is the legacy of Antigone's defiance? One reason we might ask this is because she dies. Lacan says that Antigone's death is necessary but Butler finds Antigone's death really disturbing because Antigone stands for this possibility of overturning norms. Antigone stands for the possibility of somebody who really is truly ambiguous being able to live and speak in all their ambiguity without having to be captured and clarified and categorized. But she dies at the end. So what are we supposed to take away from this? What is the legacy of Antigone's defiance? Butler suggests here at the end that Antigone's death can be seen as the start of a conversation about why it was that Antigone had to die and about whether or not death is inevitable. So rather than assuming as Hagelin Lacan did that death is obviously inevitable we can instead pick up this kind of conversation and start talking about it, about why it was that Antigone died and what kind of message we're supposed to take away from that. So at another point in this text Butler says that Antigone can't really stand as a very strong heroine. She can't stand as a good model because she gets locked in a tomb and takes her own life and that's not the kind of positive model we necessarily want I think. Maybe that's just me. So what are we supposed to take away from this? Can the ambiguous challenge the vocabulary that upholds our structure of kinship and gender? Or will the structures always reassert themselves? Will the ambiguous always need to conform or to die? Butler asked this in 2002. We're asking it now again in 2013. Baby Storm was born two years ago and as far as I can tell the buzz around Baby Storm's gender lasted about six months and then everybody kind of let it go. Nobody did any kind of follow up piece to see what Baby Storm's gender is or sex is. People kind of let it go. So maybe Antigone can represent I'm trying to put a positive spin on here. Maybe Antigone can represent this kind of occasion for a conversation about these norms themselves, about gender, about kinship ties, about the ways in which our idealizations of the perfect 1950s family and home here in North America are not helping people who don't fall in the center of those graphs. People whose lives are more on the margins. Maybe it's time to start thinking about a vocabulary for them. So that's about all I have but I'm curious about your reaction here. What is the legacy of Antigone's defiance? Is there a positive spin here? What do you think? There was another hand at the back. What's the question? The biological, there is thought to be a likely evolutionary source to incest taboos and the evolutionary source isn't necessarily straight up that children born from incestuous relationships are always unhealthy. The issue is that incestuous relationships are a narrowing of the gene pool. So if there is any kind of problematic gene like a gene for sickle cell anemia or something like that that's being carried likely it's being carried by both your parents because they're siblings. So it compounds the likelihood of this kind of non-genetically advantageous diseases happening but it isn't necessary that children born of incestuous relationships are necessarily sick. It's not necessarily inherently harmful it really depends on the genes involved and another thing that Butler wants to talk about when she says it's not strictly biological is that incest taboos vary a lot across different cultures. What is considered incestuous is socially influenced. So I'm not sure if this is true but I remember an anthropologist friend of mine saying that the only one that they know of that is across most social categories is the taboo of a mother and a son, the taboo we actually see enacted in Oedipus. But all other combinations have at varying times and in varying places been acceptable including brother and sister. Any other comments or questions? Okay, we'll have a good week talking about Antigone's claim. Thank you.