Continental Philosophy Review 35: 423432, 2002.

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Review essay

The Exception and the Rule

ADRIAN JOHNSTON
Emory University, USA

Judith Butler, Antigones Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), ISBN 0231118953 $16.00 (paper); ISBN
0231118945 $20.00 (cloth).
Antigones Claim, despite its title, does not actually focus that much on
Sophocles Antigone. Instead, Judith Butler employs this text as a springboard for continuing long-running discussions from her earlier works. Through
critiquing the Hegelian and Lacanian approaches to Antigone Butler is principally concerned with reading Hegel and Lacan as themselves readers of
Sophocles she seeks to debunk the structuralist myth of a transcendent,
normative symbolic system of kinship and gender positions in which the
concrete person is an overdetermined by-product of a static, pre-given order.
The conclusion Butlers interpretive efforts build towards is that the organizing function of, for example, the family unit (primarily as portrayed through
the prism of the Freudian Oedipus complex) has a genuine existence only
insofar as it gets enacted by flesh-and-blood individuals. And, Butlers notion of parody developed in her previous books maintains that all enactments
(or, in Butlerian parlance, performances) of a structural norm necessarily
introduce an irreducible margin of deviance/deviation into this same norm:
the norm is never truly repeated, and all ostensible repetitions of it inevitably
distort a formal purity that never was pure in the first place. Thus, since the
very being of the symbolic order (as Hegels objective spirit and/or Lacans
big Other) parasitically relies upon particular performances of its pseudogeneral forms, its trans-individual universality is itself ultimately a fiction
that falters in the face of parodic performativity.
Through an evaluation of four central aspects of Butlers work (her critique of Hegel, her critique of Lacan, her overall tactic of approaching philosophical and psychoanalytic theories via a single piece of ancient literature,
and her perspective on Sophocles writings), two fundamental problems with
Antigones Claim come to light. First, Butlers criticisms of Hegel and Lacan
present readers with a false dilemma, namely, an unnecessary forced choice

Continental Philosophy Review 35: 423432, 2002.

REVIEW ESSAY

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Review essay

The Exception and the Rule

ADRIAN JOHNSTON
Emory University, USA

Judith Butler, Antigones Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), ISBN 0231118953 $16.00 (paper); ISBN
0231118945 $20.00 (cloth).
Antigones Claim, despite its title, does not actually focus that much on
Sophocles Antigone. Instead, Judith Butler employs this text as a springboard for continuing long-running discussions from her earlier works. Through
critiquing the Hegelian and Lacanian approaches to Antigone Butler is principally concerned with reading Hegel and Lacan as themselves readers of
Sophocles she seeks to debunk the structuralist myth of a transcendent,
normative symbolic system of kinship and gender positions in which the
concrete person is an overdetermined by-product of a static, pre-given order.
The conclusion Butlers interpretive efforts build towards is that the organizing function of, for example, the family unit (primarily as portrayed through
the prism of the Freudian Oedipus complex) has a genuine existence only
insofar as it gets enacted by flesh-and-blood individuals. And, Butlers notion of parody developed in her previous books maintains that all enactments
(or, in Butlerian parlance, performances) of a structural norm necessarily
introduce an irreducible margin of deviance/deviation into this same norm:
the norm is never truly repeated, and all ostensible repetitions of it inevitably
distort a formal purity that never was pure in the first place. Thus, since the
very being of the symbolic order (as Hegels objective spirit and/or Lacans
big Other) parasitically relies upon particular performances of its pseudogeneral forms, its trans-individual universality is itself ultimately a fiction
that falters in the face of parodic performativity.
Through an evaluation of four central aspects of Butlers work (her critique of Hegel, her critique of Lacan, her overall tactic of approaching philosophical and psychoanalytic theories via a single piece of ancient literature,
and her perspective on Sophocles writings), two fundamental problems with
Antigones Claim come to light. First, Butlers criticisms of Hegel and Lacan
present readers with a false dilemma, namely, an unnecessary forced choice

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between either a rigid transcendental ahistoricism or a lawless historicized

contextualism. Second, she tacitly endorses a flawed method of critique by
purporting to undermine psychoanalysis (a discipline carefully constructed
on the basis of an interaction between rigorous theoretical speculation and
case-by-case observation of the human mind) simply through offering a
slightly modified interpretation of a fictional drama.
Butler casts Antigone in the role of a feminist heroine who performs a
parody of the norms of familial relations as well as the typical feminine
position in the polis. She is born into a family that one could call, to put it
mildly, dysfunctional, a family in which the Lvi-Straussian prohibition of
incest qua foundational norm of socialization has been violated. Antigone is
fascinating for Butler on several levels: she confounds gender roles, she doesnt
come from a typical nuclear family, she perhaps harbors incestuous desires
for her other male family members, and she doesnt end her life as a happily
married woman with children. But, does this mean that queer theorists, gay
activists, and feminists should draw some sort of strange inspiration from a
tale of incest that concludes as a calamitous tragedy? Are all deviations from
the Norm similar or identical? To what extent is homosexuality incestuous
or, psychoanalytically speaking, more incestuous than heterosexuality? Furthermore, is the only way to rewrite normative sexual codes through a
violent passage lacte, through suicidal provocations of socio-political authority? If Antigone is the ideal to be followed, then the prospects for those
wishing to live otherwise today look a bit bleak.
As noted, Butler is mainly interested in using Sophocles to conduct a debate with Hegel and Lacan. Early on in the text, she summarizes what she
sees as the essential assumptions informing their respective approaches to
Antigone for Lacan, kinship is rarefied as enabling linguistic structure, a
presupposition of symbolic intelligibility, and thus removed from the domain
of the social; for Hegel, kinship is precisely a relation of blood rather than
one of norms. That is, kinship is not yet entered into the social, where the
social is inaugurated through a violent suppression of kinship (p. 3). Whereas
Hegel allegedly treats familial ties as a kind of quasi-natural proto-sociality
to be subsumed and surpassed by a form of subjectivity mediated by the
higher spheres of civil society and the state, Lacan elevates the triangulating logic of the Oedipal family to the status of a structural possibility condition for sociality per se.
Against Hegel, Butler insists that the family is always-already both social
and political, and that state apparatuses repress the fact that the states enduring existence is founded upon the family. If the purpose of kinship relations
is to produce citizens for the polis, then the political infrastructure itself is,

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obviously, reliant upon these kinship relations functioning in ways that lead
to the (re)production of the polis. Hegel does indeed consider this to be the
proper telos of the family unit in its subservient position within the social
structure, and, of course, Butler does not see eye-to-eye with him on this
point. Thus, Hegel contends that Antigones invocation of the unwritten laws
of the gods and the obligatory mores of the family against Creons appeal to
the interests of the state and its citizens as explicitly written in legal code is
emblematic of a lower tier of sociality. Butler is convinced that this Hegelian
bias rests upon the false belief that familial kinship and political citizenship
can be cleanly separated from each other, and that the latter can be granted
priority over the former.
This said, doesnt Hegel, in his 1821 Philosophy of Right, demonstrate the
manner in which family, society, and state are inextricably intertwined? One
of his main points there is that the kinship positions within the family are
always-already defined and mediated by enveloping socio-political institutions. Conversely, he unambiguously acknowledges that there would not be a
socio-political system without families as integral parts of this system. Regardless of what he says about Antigone, is Hegel guilty of the arguments
that Butler imputes to him? When Hegel speaks of the feminine as the eternal irony of the community, he does so precisely on the basis of the indissoluble, two-way co-dependency of the family and the state. The supposedly
feminine/maternal desire to keep children permanently within the interiority
of familial life is an ironic misrecognition of the fact that the family is a
unit whose inner organization is always-already related to and colored by the
exteriority of the polis. With the admittedly stereotypical figure of the clingy
mother, one witnesses her refusal to understand that the children are never
simply her own, that her entire familys well-being, as well as the notions
defining what a family per se is as a constellation of social relations, is conditioned by the larger whole of which it is a small part.
The amount of time and effort spent on Hegel is minimal compared with
the space Butler devotes to Lacan. Butler is not content merely to criticize
the Lacanian reading of Antigone from the seventh seminar of 19591960
(The Ethics of Psychoanalysis). She attacks Lacan for his structuralist transcendentalism, taking aim at what she understands to be the core tenets of his
psychoanalytic theoretical system in its entirety. Butler begins this task by
noting that, for Lacan, a distinction should be maintained between, on the
one hand, the contingent, empirical field of historically variable sociality,
and, on the other hand, the necessary, transcendental domain of invariant
symbolic structures conditioning the social a social norm is not quite
the same as a symbolic position in the Lacanian sense, which appears to

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enjoy a quasi-timeless character (p. 20). Butler then proceeds to propose,

worded in several different manners, that Lacans transcendental stance is
merely a theoretical bluff whose specious authority derives from nothing
else besides the arbitrary, groundless rhetorical force of the repeated act of
this stances enunciation The ideal form is still a contingent norm, but one
whose contingency has been rendered necessary, a form of reification . . . It
is the law! becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force
to the law that the law itself is said to exercise (p. 21), and, the very description of the symbolic as intractable law takes place within a fantasy of
law as insurpassable authority. In my view, Lacan at once analyzes and
symptomatizes this fantasy (p. 30). Butlers goal in carrying out this critique is to undermine what is described as Lacans hasty reification of transitory social codes and arrangements.
Although a few Lacan-inspired authors should be rebuked along these lines,
Butler makes a straw man out of Lacan himself. Her entire critique relies
upon transforming Lacan into a new mile Durkheim dressed up in the terminological clothing of classical structuralism la Lvi-Strauss 1949 Elementary Structures of Kinship. She thereby ignores the entirety of Lacans
later work from the 60s and 70s, this being highly problematic even if one
does not bother to contest her reading of his 1950s period as itself a caricature. Butler dismisses any possible refutations drawn from elements of Lacans
teachings as nothing more than afterthoughts appended to a crude formalist
ahistoricism (a social norm is not quite the same as a symbolic position in
the Lacanian sense, which appears to enjoy a quasi-timeless character, regardless of the qualifications offered in endnotes to various of the masters
seminars [p. 20]). The qualifications are more than just endnotes.
Butler interrogates Lacans transcendentalism under the assumption that
he departs from the work of Lvi-Strauss, more specifically, that he endorses
the notion of a symbolic order as simultaneously ahistorical (i.e., transcendental as an apriori possibility condition) and transcendent (i.e., a reified
structure standing above the social aggregate it regulates). It is not the case
that Lacan treats the symbolic order as itself transcendental qua ahistorical,
as a Kantian apriori. For Lacan, the Geist of the polis is indeed a historically
variable set of empirical components: particular tongues, certain social rituals, various institutions and practices, etc. Additionally, Butler ignores an
import shift that occurs in Lacans later seminars, a shift signaled by his
declaration that LAutre nexiste pas the big Other as a transcendent symbolic order does not exist or, if it does exist, it does so as a sort of virtual
phantasm emerging within and attaching itself to the complex reality of human social links. In structuralist psychoanalysis, one can define the family in

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a sufficiently minimalistic fashion that the reification charge loses its sting:
the family is simply the first social unit in which the psyche of the developing child finds itself. What is more, in equivocating between Lacans transcendentalism and his 1950s recourse to the primacy of the symbolic, Butler
also conveniently avoids grappling with the material (real) as well as experiential (imaginary) features of psychical life that Lacan argues are essential to understanding why it is that subjectivity comes to be mediated by and
dependent upon the grand Autre of a symbolic order.
Lacanian theory does not require, as Butler vehemently alleges, a dubious
dichotomy between the symbolic and the social. An easy way to clarify matters is to invoke the Freudian distinction between phylogeny and ontogeny.
The symbolic order is a historically contingent formation at the phylogenetic
level, the level transcending the ontogenetic life history of the individual. In
an inverse correlation, for the particular subject whose self-identity is mediated by this pre-existent system, this same symbolic order is effectively transcendental in that it serves as a possibility condition for this form of subjectivity
itself. Without a symbolic order, the individual would not be a proper subject. The massive time lag between the different diachronic speeds of
phylogeny and ontogeny is partially responsible for this dual status of the
symbolic as paradoxically both historical (with respect to the phylogenetic
collective) and transcendental (with respect to the ontogenetic individual).
This temporal discrepancy makes it seem, from the vantage point of the individual subjects perspective, as if the symbolic order is synchronic, which it
de facto is given the slowness of its rates of change versus the comparative
brevity and rapidity of the individuals life history. Butler fails to fully appreciate Lacans philosophical audacity in tacitly relying upon a rigid distinction between the historical and the transcendental to critique him. But, what
about Butlers key assertion that the Lacanian transcendental emperor wears
no clothes, in other words, that the binding force of the symbolic rests upon
an empty performative act? Is there no other reason for the symbolics authority apart from the bald, blunt assertion of this authority by those theorizing about it?
Again, the transcendence of the symbolic order in relation to particular
subjects is of paramount importance here. Individuals neither choose what
kind of symbolic order to be born into nor have the liberty to capriciously
forge their own idiosyncratic symbolic orders ex nihilo. Furthermore, beyond Lacanian theory itself, psychoanalysis in general is committed to the
notion that, as the saying goes, the child is the father of the man. A strange
thing about Butlers work is that, for some odd reason, she feels compelled to
make the repeated attempt to integrate psychoanalytic ideas into her theories

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while, at the same time, repudiating the essential axioms upon which analytic
metapsychology rests. One is reminded of Slavoj qieks examples of new
consumer products involving a substance deprived of its substance (for
example, caffeine-free diet Coca-Cola): with Butler, one gets unconsciousfree, fatherless psychoanalysis.
A psychoanalytic/Lacanian rebuttal of Butler would be to observe that, by
the time an individual could or would conceive of the project of rebelling
against norms or transgressing Oedipal sexual patterns, it is already, in a
certain sense, too late. As with the gap separating phylogeny and ontogeny,
temporality is once more central in understanding the problems with Butlers
arguments. The subject of psychoanalysis is a genetic one, a subjectivity that
acquires its very foundations through the unfolding vicissitudes of various
levels of mediation. In the beginning, there is no I, no locus for choosing
what kind of socio-symbolic environment will be responsible for laying down
the early, essential coordinates of a subsequently emerging subjectivity. Later,
of course, the subject can (apparently) opt to reject many features of his/her
past, embarking upon projects of revolt and renewal. Psychoanalysis does
not deny this possibility.
However, the analytic caveat in this context is that transgressions are always, at least in part, reactions against a reigning norm. The power of early
familial ties is not limited to the common conception of the Oedipus complex
as positively conditioning the libidinal economy (i.e., directly bequeathing a
sexual identity to individuals as well as steering their object-choices). Due to
the fact that psychoanalysis denies that people can choose to make a total and
complete break with the past, socio-symbolic features also negatively condition the subjects they help to forge. Part of what makes people who they
are, psychoanalytically speaking, are not just the modes through which they
emulate early Oedipal authority figures based on internalizations and identifications (i.e., positive determination), but also, additionally, the numerous
and unpredictable ways in which they respond by struggling to differentiate
themselves from these figures (i.e., negative determination).
Again, Butler is correct to observe that symbolic structures are never flawlessly reproduced. To put it in the simplest of terms, children never turn out
to be exact replicas of their parents, regardless of whether or not the parents
want this. But, this does not mean that symbolic structures are fictions so
fragile that their ephemeral power can be made to completely dissipate through
the mere fiat of acting-out against the avatars of familial and social authority. The fact that there are errors in the transcription of norms as symbolic codes does not mean that there is no code in the process of being
transcribed.

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In a kind of scorched earth tactic response to Butler, maybe one could

even go so far as to claim that, while nobody ever completely embodies a
given norm or structure, the norm/structure has its own peculiar way of existing. These symbolic forms ex-ist as a negativity haunting individual socialized agents, inscribed in their being as lacking, as impossible to fully live
up to in the flesh. Butler wants to believe that these spectral structures haunting human social reality can be exorcised, that one can eliminate the often
painful and undesirable effects of their (non-)presence. She speaks the truth
when she observes that symbolic structures and norms are ultimately just
individual as well as collective fantasies. The Lacanian qualification, being
the little difference that makes all the difference, amounts to insisting that
non-existent, fantasmatic elements play a necessary, constitutive role in the
forging and sustenance of human experiential reality, and that these (unconscious) fantasies, although variable, resist unrestricted modification at the
behest of the subjected subject.
Butler speaks of Lacanian theory as seduced by a fantasy of law as
insurpassable authority. Should one risk replying in the same terms? By
suggesting that all norms are contingent and alterable via parodic
performativity, Butler panders to the persistent urge in people to believe that
they are masters of their own destiny. Despite the qualifications she would
likely tack on here in reaction to this accusation, Butlers project is secretly
enthralled by fantasies of the limitless plasticity of an auto-fashioning self as
well as titillating, risk-free provocations against impotent paternal authorities. How could one avoid construing this as a regressive reaction against
Freuds Copernican revolution? For instance, she repeatedly fails to mention a single word about the super-ego as a possible barrier inhibiting or
perverting enacted rebellions.
Apart from the matter of whether or not Butlers criticisms of Lacans
supposed transcendentalist tendencies are justified, the entire strategy of
Antigones Claim is of dubious merit. Many interpreters of the Freudian legacy
(not just Butler) make the mistake of apparently assuming that the psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex is derived from Sophocles play
Oedipus Rex. One glance at Freuds writings shows that this puts the cart
before the horse. After first formulating his ideas about how early childhood
family romances impact the psychical development of the individual, Freud
then subsequently compares his theory to the tragic figure of the Theban
king. The play furnishes Freud with a handy name for his notion of the relation between psyche and family. However, as should go without saying, the
concept of the Oedipus complex is not dependent upon or developed out of
the text Oedipus Rex. The Oedipus complex is the result of Freuds careful

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observation and analysis of living, breathing human beings, not an empty

theoretical flourish arrived at through an unorthodox reading of a piece of
literature. Whether or not every single detail of Sophocles tragedies accords
with the system of metapsychology is irrelevant as far as the genuine truthcriteria for psychoanalysis as a theory of human nature goes. Using, as Butler
does, a fictional character to contest a body of knowledge built on the study
of factual individuals is an approach of highly questionable worth.
Antigones Claim consists of three chapters, with the preceding controversies dominating the first two chapters (Antigones Claim and Unwritten
Laws, Aberrant Transmissions). The third and final chapter circumnavigates
its way back towards the play Antigone. When asked to justify her defiance
of Creons edict, Antigone explains that the reason she had to bury Polyneices
corpse was that Polyneices, as a brother begotten from two parents now dead,
is singularly irreplaceable. Butler insightfully underscores the falsity of
this rationalization. However, her reasons for doing so hinge on the fact that,
as a child of incest, Antigones father is also her brother. Thus, the body of
Polyneices might very well be an overdetermined object in the strict Freudian sense, simultaneously representing Polyneices, Eteocles, Oedipus, and
maybe even Antigone herself. Antigones conscious sense of its irreplaceable
singularity masks the unconscious multiplicity of the figures converging upon
it.
What is telling is the reason for the falsity of Antigones claim that Butler passes over in silence: Ismene is also irreplaceable, being a sibling born
from the same two dead parents. Antigone places greater value on an inert
piece of no-longer-living matter than on the only remaining sibling she has
left in this world. Many interpreters portray Antigone as a heroine. And yet,
contrary to this reading, doesnt Sophocles provide ample evidence that she
is just as flawed and disastrous a model as Creon, that this is a murky drama
with neither protagonist nor antagonist?
Antigone rejects Ismenes compromise, proposed at the plays opening, of
secretly performing the burial rites. Antigone stubbornly insists upon publicizing her flouting of Creons edict. As she admits when questioned by Creon
after having been caught in the act, Antigone already knows full well the
prescribed sentence for transgression: death by public stoning. Then, just
after Creon changes his mind and decides to have her entombed alive outside
the city of Thebes, rather than executed before the watching eyes of the
citizenry, Antigone lapses into a lament. Her defiant language and explicit
insistence upon accepting sole responsibility for her decision gives way to a
moment of weakness in which she bemoans her troubled childhood, her bad
family background, and the reckless behavior of Polyneices. The chorus

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chimes in to remind her that, as the saying goes, she is lying in the bed she
made for herself. Everything abruptly shifts right at the moment when shes
deprived of the public spectacle of martyrdom. What kind of heroine, feminist or otherwise, is this? And, doesnt the fact that Creon occupies the sociosymbolic position previously occupied by Antigones father say something
about the unconscious catalysts for her overt act of disobedience? Is she truly
outside of the law of the father that Butler is so quick to declare as powerless and deposable?
The quantity of criticism here indicates that Butler at least has the merit of
advancing assertions that are extreme enough to warrant an extended reply.
The robustness and spiritedness of her sustained confrontation with psychoanalysis is refreshing within an intellectual climate of placating consensuses.
Other aspects of Butlers work also deserve to be praised. Although her critique of Lacan misfires, this shot strikes a deserving target: as anyone in
empirical anthropology today already knows, but as many continental theorists have yet to learn, Lvi-Strauss is essentially dead. This is not to concede
any ground on the importance of the Oedipal family. However, reducing familial and social relations to the prohibition of incest is quite simplistic and
risks concealing other layers of structural complexity. Additionally, her general notion of performativity qua repetition-as-impossible has great philosophical and psychoanalytic potential, once no longer shackled exclusively
to the program of a politics of alternative lifestyles. This is not to say that
there is anything wrong with Butlers political agenda in and of itself. Contesting her critique of Lacans alleged transcendentalist ahistoricism is not
tantamount to endorsing some sort of homophobic phallocracy. It should also
be said that embracing certain Lacanian ideas does not invariably lock one
into conservatively resisting any and every measure taken towards concrete
social change, although a general Freudo-Lacanian outlook often encourages
one to have a healthy degree of pessimism about just how much can be hoped
for from the implementation of some of these changes.
What is questionable is the feasibility of forcing a shotgun marriage between psychoanalytic theory and feminist/gay politics in which the descriptive discourse of the former is made wholly subservient to the prescriptive
injunctions of the latter. It would be really interesting to see Butler make a
more radical argument: even if the psychoanalytic portrayal of the
Oedipalized psyche is descriptively true/accurate, the prescriptive ethicopolitical domain sometimes demands the impossible, namely, the bracketing of these objectively true descriptions in an attempt to reconsider the
installation of laws and the definition of rights (as Kant himself demonstrates,
accurate descriptions of human nature can and should be ignored by pure

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practical reason). Instead of insisting, as she does, upon the fictitious status
of many psychoanalytic concepts, why not shift into a different strategic mode
where discursive fictions (in this case, denials of psychical realities) are
grasped as the very vehicles for altering the status quo?
Butlers challenge to structuralist modes of analysis entails, at root, calling into question the relation between the exception and the rule. Is there, as
with many snippets of common sense or popular wisdom, some truth to
the old clich that the exception proves the rule? At a minimum, contrary
to Butler, just because there is an exception does not automatically entail the
nullification of the rule. If anything and the conclusion articulated here is
itself a kind of performative reiteration of the Butlerian performativity thesis paradoxically arrived at through the very activity of critiquing her position psychoanalysis shows how the vitality of the living rule is sustained
precisely within the ungovernable plurality of the deviations it engenders.
Adrian Johnston
Emory University, USA