ABSTRACT

I read Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim shortly after it appeared in print in

2000. A long-time admirer of Butler’s oeuvre, I’ve also expressed several

lingering points of reservation about her overall work, especially concerning

the possible politics thereof (Seery 1999). But Antigone’s Claim won me over

without complaint. Its style alone seemed to be an improvement: spare,

readable, accessible, luculent. And here she was proffering an interpreta-

tion not of another near-contemporary philosopher, but of a classical text,

no less one that has attracted legions of learned readers into its pages. Butler reviews some of the most important modern readings for feminist

purposes – Hegel’s, Irigaray’s, and Lacan’s – and deftly distinguishes her

own reading from the rest. I took her emphasis on incest to be stunningly

insightful, its unspoken gothic connection to heteronormativity to be noth-

ing less than brilliant, and her portrayal of Antigone’s living death to be

hauntingly profound. For two years running I made it a point to teach

Antigone, along with Antigone’s Claim, in two of my courses (Classical

Political Theory and Contemporary Political Theory). I told my friends, anyone who would listen to me, that Butler’s book was one of the most

important pieces of scholarship in the last fifty years – indeed, that such

a reading of a classic text comes around only once every 2500 years or

so. I had become a Judith Butler fan, not just a cautiously appreciative

onlooker.