on-line copy of handout on Butler’s Kinship article

Judith Butler: “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?”

“…I do not mean to resolve this dilemma in favor of one or the other but to develop a critical practice that is mindful of both. I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship” (117)

Paradox of recognition (107)

“By recommending that we become critical, that we risk criticality, in thinking about how the sexual field is constituted, I do not mean to suggest that we could or should occupy an atopical elsewhere, undelimited, radically free. The questioning of taken-for-granted conditions becomes possible on occasion; but one cannot get there through a thought experiment, an epoche, an act of will. One gets there, as it were, through suffering the dehiscence, the breakup, of the ground itself” (109). [NB: re: dehiscence: we may get frustrated with new language at times, but thing about the fact that this term refers to a biological phemomenon; how does this make optimal use of metaphor in the argument; what difference does this different word make?]

Literature is a place for us to enact such a critique – a place where we can’t depend (in practice!) on the fixity of categories or fall prey to the uptopian (or dystopian) fantasies of a radically free “elsewhere.”

Some ways in which Butler’s argument intersects with some things we have been working with:

“Public” and “private”: Butler’s comment on how the French philosopher, Agacinski, connects the “symbolic order” to issues of public and private (113). Think of Antigone’s struggles with the limits of citizenship and how the fluidity to kinship functions here. At the outset, Creon would seem to be the “public” voice and Antigone the “private” (domestic) voice but then things begin to shift. The tomb of Antigone’s “legacy” and dead relatives: public or private?

“’Recognition’ becomes an effort to deny what exists and, hence, becomes the instrument for the refusal of recognition. In this way, it becomes a way of shoring up a normative fantasy of the human over and against dissonant versions of itself” (113). Think back to repression in Freud; and the “return of the repressed.”

“[The state’s] regulations do not always seek to order what exists, but to figure social life in certain imaginary ways. The incommensurability between state stipulation and existing social life means that this gap must be covered over for the state to continue to exercise its authority and to exemplify the kind of coherence which it is expected to confer on its subjects.” Think here about the increasing emphasis on “the law” in Antigone. The limits of what can be recognized as “the law” get slippery for both Creon and Antigone: Creon’s law must invoke recognition of “the family” to make his law legible and this gets messy; Antigone speaks to the “laws of the state” to legitimate her claim, and this too is caught up in her paradoxical claim that as the heir of Oedipus she is “outside the law.” Also, the chorus: were do they fit in all of this? What kind of “imaginary” does the chorus represent? Tiresias? What kind of “recognition” does Tiresiais demand or assume?