Description:
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. Antigone 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, 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 a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.
Brief description:
Judith Butler (PhD, Philosophy, Yale) is the Maxine Eliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and
Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory (of which she was the Founding Director) at the University of California at Berkeley. Among her many works are Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia, 2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia, 2012), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia, 2002), and (with Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West) The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia, 2011).
Review Quotes: Antigone's Claim is a work of intricate and detailed analysis of enormously difficult material. Butler masterfully leads us to... a newfound theoretical activism within the political domain.--Maria Cimitile "Hypatia"