Absolute Ambivalence: On Modernity and Its Corpses

Owing to a longstanding commitment to the autonomous, self-transparent subject, many roads have not been taken in rhetorical studies. Our present conversation about Lacanian psychoanalysis represents one of those roads, which is the most radical route stemming from the little traveled thoroughfare of the “rhetoric of the interior.” Insofar as its central category is the dynamic unconscious, psychoanalysis in general represents a theory of an inside or interiority that has largely been ignored, and sometimes attacked, in favor or defense of surfaces and exteriorities (e.g., fantasy themes and rhetorical visions, rational argument in ideal speech situations, and so on). Despite the pioneering work on Jung and mythic criticism by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, despite articulate calls for psychoanalytic research by Barbara Biesecker, Michael J. Hyde, and Loyd S. Pettegrew, and despite the remarkable, interdisciplinary work of Henry Krips, among NCA-style rhetorical studies scholars, psychoanalysis has been the place of dead roads, indeed, the place of dead subjects. Christian Lundberg’s welcome and insightful critique of “Refitting Fantasy” ought to be read as a road sign of sorts, indicating not only an exciting route for research, but also the number of places it might go. In general, Lundberg argues that a critical perspective that begins in the imaginary overlooks the master’s focus on the Symbolic order, thereby missing the true locus of rhetoric in Lacan’s work (principally, “tropology”). Further, Lundberg argues that a critical attention to fantasies is limited to discrete texts and intersubjective encounters, thereby avoiding an opportunity to do true Lacanian rhetorical criticism. The consequence of an approach focused on the criticism of (pre-)conscious and unconscious fantasies, he implies, is twofold. First, it promotes a perspective akin to the project of “ego-psychology” and, thus, relies on the “naive psychologism of solely intersubjectively mediated accounts of subject formation,” which bars scholars from the pursuit of a deeper, more

ABSTRACTThis article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.

This exegesis has developed from my visual research that comes in the hybrid form of public feminist performance art, installations, photography and printmaking. It details the enactment of three feminine fantasies that stem from repressed political and ideological desires. Theoretical models that relate to activist and Surrealist performance art are the focus of the first section of the exegesis. I explore theorists such as Stephen Duncombe, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, and Laura Mulvey to understand the levels of self-scrutinisation and shame experienced when considering performing acts that involve returning the gaze onto the “Other,” and to determine which set of precepts should be chosen in order to construct an ethical spectacle. In keeping with Surrealist methodology, Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis becomes a key component of my work. I tie Lacan and Freud through an exploration of Surrealist creative techniques and notions such as Andre Breton’s “Mad Love,” Salvador Dali’s “paranoiac critical method,” “convulsive beauty,” and particularly Claude Cahun’s method of “indirect political meaning,” simulation tactics, and use of “alter egos” to challenge binaries between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ I describe such techniques to show how I delineate the emotions surrounding the several stages of fantasy fulfilment whilst ethically resisting and defying repressive cultural ideologies in the creation of my work. As the central component of my research, I then explain how such Surrealist techniques are consciously used to provide the audience with an indirect level of political meaning so that I can maintain my role as an invisible provocateur without experiencing any negative repercussions. Artists and films that exemplify such creative models including Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Sophie Calle, Roberto Matta, Cindy Sherman, Amelie from Montmarte, Possessed and The Purple Rose of Cairo are referenced. Through a discussion the ideas of Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault I then show how I have adapted cultural stereotypes formed by discourses such as psychoanalysis and film to the performance of each fantasy. I do this in order to see how much such notions of the feminine contribute to the repression of feminine desires. The idea of erasing gendered binaries through Surrealist methodology is discussed largely to detail how this has helped me to achieve the fantasies that I wanted to fulfil.

As an artist who operates in the realm of the subjective, I use techniques of image appropriation as an external means to negotiate my internal world. In the treatment of sourced images, specifically through fracturing, disrupting and subverting, I re-enact a formal fracture of identity. A key narrative within the exploration of this subjective identification is the inherent push-and-pull of my relationship with my mother. A tension of opposites reverberates throughout the practical research: object and subject, self and other, male and female, straight and gay, surface and meaning; in a capacity that can be subversive, anxious, delicate and harmonious. The psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein provides a useful model in which to demystify these tensions and provide a lateral basis for my approach to the aesthetic. I will probe further the issue of the mother in the context of feminist theory by Joan Copjec, and compare my approach to this theme with other artists. The monstrous orchid, a botanic hybrid of the late Victorian era, offers the perfect metaphor through which to explore some of the issues that connect my subjectivity to the practical research. I examine the significance of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley for their championing of the decorative as a means to communicate the subversive. The research explores examples in Victorian and contemporary art that approach the subversive through autobiography and artifice, referencing my own past when self was surface. I highlight in the theoretical research the important role of the mask in connecting the internal with the external. Three important concepts help qualify this connection: Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, Judith Butler's views on gender and performativity and Laura Mulvey's articulation of the gaze. I will investigate the technical dimension to my approach through multiple frameworks. This includes a semiotic discussion on symbolism in Picasso and the potential for image to act as language and narrative in a way that can function independent of the subjective. In addition to the exploration of the principle is detournement, a 1950s strategy I will situate my work against. Recognising that I work within a space of queer aesthetics, I also define my position through an examination of theories of camp in the written exegesis. I compare the ideas of Susan Sontag with more updated definitions of camp, uncovering the secret subversive language of polari and highlight the symbolic and technical potential of the closet in the context of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's gender theory.

In response to concerns voiced by Judith Butler and Joan Copjec regarding the possible incompatibility of the discourses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and gender studies, this paper argues that gender studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis can hope for a meeting ground precisely around the topic of ``sexual difference.'' Questions about transgender subjectivities afford a point of entry for thinking through the impasses and political purchase of a necessarily contestatory integration of these two domains; however, imagining this integration requires in part an analysis of each discourse's limitations. This paper suggests that one of the limitations of Lacanian psychoanalysis resides in the too easy capitulation of the terms ``feminine'' and ``masculine'' to ``gendered'' readings. Arguing that Jacques Lacan's formulas of sexuation write against the facile collapse of sexual difference into gender identity, the paper considers what it would look like to conceptualize transgender subjectivity as an expression of the logic of sexual difference, ultimately suggesting there may be a way of reading transgenderism as a ``feminine'' phenomenon. The paper responds to two texts also invested in the integration of Lacanian psychoanalytic and queer/feminist concerns: Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim and Tim Dean's Beyond Sexuality. Dean's project to ``de-gender'' desire offers a reply to Butler's concerns about the compulsory heterosexuality of the Oedipal scene; however, both texts, in their preoccupation with scenes Oedipal and object based, occlude to some extent a ``feminine'' perspective and by extension significant ``feminine''/transgender insights concerning sexual difference.

This article defends Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler against the long-standing but recently reiterated charge that they affirm a linguistic idealism or foundationalism. First outlining the parameters of Lacan’s thinking on this topic through his comments on the materiality inherent in the imaginary, symbolic, real schema to show that he offers an account built around the tension between the real and symbolic, I then move to Butler to argue that she more coherently identifies the parameters of the problem before offering an explanation based on paradox. With this, both offer (1) a forceful rebuttal of linguistic idealism, (2) a far more complex analysis of the materialism–signification relation than their new materialist critics tend to appreciate, and (3) innovative but often-ignored “new” materialisms of their own.

The Politics of Lack Lasse Thomassen Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. The Ticklish Subject is a recent work by Slovene philosopher, social theorist, and Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, who has produced books at the pace of more than one per year since the 1989 publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology. As in his previous books, Zizek intermixes psychoanalysis, nineteenth-century German philosophy, political theory, and popular culture. With The Ticklish Subject, Zizek endeavors to bring together three of his main concerns: Lacanian psychoanalysis, the question of subjectivity, and the possibilities for a Leftist politics in today’s late-capitalist, postmodern world. He sets out to provide a “systematic exposition of the foundations of his theory” (to quote the book’s cover), in order to address the relation between Lacanian theory, subjectivity, and politics. Thus, The Ticklish Subject purports to be a Lacanian theory of politics and the political—in short, a theory of political subjectivity. The book is divided into three parts, each of which addresses one of three important formulations of subjectivity: the German Idealist subject, the political subject of French post-Althusserian political philosophy, and the deconstructionist and multi-spectral subject theorized by Judith Butler. In each of the book’s three main parts, Zizek starts from a critical reading of Martin Heidegger’s, Alain Badiou’s, and Judith Butler’s respective critiques of the traditional Cartesian notion of the subject. As an alternative to the Cartesian subject and to the three critiques of the Cartesian subject, Zizek proposes a Lacanian notion of subjectivity. To explain what this involves, we can start by looking at the notion of the decision and at the distinctions Zizek makes between the “ontological” and the “ontic.” Whereas the ontic refers to what is—that is, to a positive being—the ontological refers to the conditions of possibility and limits of what is. With the ontic we ask what is; with the ontological we ask how it is possible that it can be. Zizek believes that no ontic content or being can be derived from an ontological form. In other words, there is no concrete ontic content that can be the positive expression of being as such—that is, of the ontological order. In this sense, the ontological relates to the ontic in the same way as form relates to content. What Zizek wants to stress here is that it is not possible to find a concrete community that expresses the structure of community as such. So, for instance, he criticizes Heidegger’s assertion that the National Socialist State is the concrete expression of the structure of community and social being as such. Heidegger’s fault lies in the fact that he tries to establish a necessary connection between the ontological (the structure of social being as such) and a particular ontic being (the National Socialist State). We may be able to deconstruct community to show the conditions of possibility of community, but we cannot find the particular community that best expresses these conditions of possibility. Zizek develops this argument as a critique of Heidegger. The problem with Heidegger is that on one hand he insists on the distinction between the ontological and the ontic, but on the other hand he ends up looking for the particular ontic community that would realize the “essence” of the ontological structure of society as such, that is, for the ontic of the ontological. Zizek insists that there is an insurmountable gap between the ontological and the ontic, and that we are not able to move directly from one to the other. In other words, it is not possible to proceed directly from a formal argument to a particular substantial argument, from form to content. The question then becomes how the gap between them is filled or bridged. Here we encounter Zizek’s notion of the decision, which fills the gap between the ontological and the ontic. The decision cannot be grounded in any ontological structure, but this does not mean that you cannot give grounds for the decisions you make. What it means is that the decision can only...

This thesis sets out to critically reposition contemporary figurative sculpture through a re- articulation of the hero. It starts by identifying the removal of the human figure in minimal art and with notions of objectivity, repetition and indifference. Here I argue against Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Rosalind E. Krauss, by claiming that there is a necessity to reflect upon the sculptural object and the subject beyond that which is produced by the principles outlined by these artists and critics. Working through readings of Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, Hannah Arendt, Bernard Stiegler, Jacques Lacan and others, the argument establishes the contingency and polemics of the term hero, the way it pertains to the introduction of the new and how it coalesces action and narrative with constant negotiation. Using the philosophy of Richard Rorty as a scaffold, I propose in turn that the hero constitutes a necessary idealism for improving vocabularies, and along with Bruno Latour’s position on composition, that this can be translated into figurative sculpture as a dialectical becoming-object. Additionally, the problem of knowing what constitutes a subject of heroism is associated with the formation of an ethical subject. I conclude, in contrast to Simon Critchley and Jacques Derrida, that this subject can be articulated using the hero strategically as a conceit. I also suggest that, as such, it can be realized through the work of figurative sculpture and the agonist space it produces. Alongside this, the thesis rethinks the materiality associated with figuration in terms of construction, and elaborates on the importance of the hero to the post-mannequin condition of figurative sculpture based on how it combines invention with political determination. This is further examined by looking at the work of Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison and Mark Manders, and especially at the practice-based component of this thesis.

This paper tries to explain Butler's performative model of gender. This model has been widely applied in women and gender studies, because it offers a strategy of subversion against phallogocentrism. In order to elaborate how Butler develops her model based on theories of Lacan and Foucault, this paper will examine Butler's four concepts: no distinction between sex/gender; sexual difference; performativity of gender; and drag and parody. This paper finds that Butler's model is useful to develop micro-politics for feminists, because she sucessfully incorporates Focaultian notion of power and Lacanian notion of the imaginary into her model, thus being able to explain how the bodies come to matter through identificatory process and develop her strategy of deconstruction.

In this essay on Zoë Wicomb’s “When the Train Comes” from the collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), I read the short story as exemplary in its engagement at both the level of representation and the level of genre in the formation of the subjectivity of the central character, Frieda Shenton. The textual strategies and rhetorical tactics – which include delay, ellipsis, postponement and stoppage – fissure narrative discourse with its dependence on the conventions of time (story) and causality (plot) that ensures the smooth operation of a well-wrought fictional or literary text. The rupture of the traditional components of narrative curiously unconceals the originary moment of subject formation primarily based on Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire, the notion of the story as a unique and singular element, Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the genre of the novella and the tale, and Judith Butler’s term “gender performance”.

BOOK NOTES In a vivid and interesting tapestry, Bonn's last four chapters interweave Apollinaire 's reception in Old and New World Spanish-speaking cultures. Especially engaging are the subchapters on Guillermo de Torre's discussions ofApollinaire's iconoclasm, audacity, and revolutionary aesthetics (most notably in Literaturas europeas de vanguardia, with its focus on Cubism and Ultraism), as well as his final homage in "Epiceyo a Apollinaire" ("Elegy for Apollinaire"). Also striking are the sections on Bartolomé Galindez, the editor ofthe short-lived literary review Los Raros who connected Apollinaire with the latest discoveries in art and literature , on Ildefonso Perreda Valdes, one of the editors of Los Nuevos (The New Breed), who used Apollinaire's "Les Cloches" to establish thejournal's avant-garde credentials, and on the representatives ofla nueva sensibilidad ("the new sensibility "). Ofspecial interest here is Bonn's discussion ofBorges whose return from his sojourn in Spain marked the genesis ofUltraism in Argentina and whose enthusiasm and reservations about Apollinaire as poet and critic are fully analyzed. The information in this thoroughly researched book greatly increases our knowledge ofApollinaire's work and influence, establishing Bohn as a leading contributor to Apollinaire studies in the Americas. Ileana OrlichArizona State University JOSEPH LITVAK. Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1997. xi + 181 pp. Joseph Litvak, with great wittiness and self-awareness, takes up the matter of "sophistication"perse with all ofthe dubious associations to materialism, sensuality , aestheticism, literary elitism, and sexual unorthodoxy which it entails. Risking the censure of both colleagues and students, he notes in his opening chapter, he wishes to take on the gastronomically and epistemologically charged term of"taste" and to explore it in the context ofboth the nineteenth-century novel and modem literary theory. Behind his theoretical work are figures like Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, but his work moves in a different direction, taking the metaphor oftaste at its most semiotically powerful and at its most exactly literal. Litvak's notion of "sophistication," however, depends upon revising Bourdieu 's concept of"distinction" so as to eschew any tendency only to idealize or purify its vulgarity. Rather than merely deploying the image oftaste and consumption, he takes it at face value. Tracing a genealogy back to Hume and Kant, he moves through a strategically selected list ofcritical and narrative texts that allows him to trace the double trajectory from "late-eighteenth-century England to late-twentiethcentury Euro-American culture" ( 1 2) oftaste and melancholia and to focus on their textual moments ofintersection in epiphanies of"sophistication." The selection of texts is based upon Litvak's preoccupation with the combined constitutive and reflective properties ofthe nineteenth-century novel and the legacy ofthis double role in today's criticism. Litvak's emphasis upon the metatextuality ofthe narrative texts and the novelistic tendencies ofthe "theorists" is the further basis for the cohesion ofthe project which enters the energetic field ofthe revisionist interrogations of nineteenth-century textuality and its relation to identity construction by such critics as John Kucich, Judith Butler, Mary Ann O'Farrell, and Diana Fuss. With two chapters each on Austen, Thackeray and Proust, Litvak establishes a reading ofsix novels ofthe nineteenth century as a genealogy ofbourgeois selfVcH 23 (1999): 188 ??? COHPAnATIST definition through enactments ofinterpretive sophistication rather like those which he sees as characteristics both ofthe modern academy and ofqueer studies in particular . Litvak details a progression from self-conscious inscription within the context ofsocial politics and history in Austen, to the rejection ofa now ubiquitous sophisticated self-positioning in social terms in Thackeray, to Proust's sophisticated taste for waste and regressive sophistication which fuses a mature gay aesthetic with trenchant immaturity. The modem theorists, Adomo and Barthes, are viewed in relation to their disdain for mass culture, a standard sophisticate's pose, which forever leaves them outside ofmodem cultural studies proper. Elizabeth Richmond-GarzaUniversity ofTexas-Austin ARMANDO PETRUCCI. Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition. Trans. Michael Sullivan. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. xvii + 163pp. In his well-conceived book on ultimate writing, Armando Petrucci takes his leave with the hope that humankind will not abandon writing the dead. In fact, Petrucci...

The critical analysis of the concept of identity has marked implications for gender studies, specifically in relation to fragmenting the notion of static and metaphysical identity of sexualized subjects. This paper analyzes how gender identity can be constructed and reconstructed based on culture, periods in history, symbolism and the discourse of power. To this end, this article will discuss various concepts of gender identity described in the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, as well as the concepts of performativity and gender parody developed by Judith Butler. Finally, the concept of pastiche, developed by Fredric Jameson, will be discussed. Photographs of Cindy Sherman’s Centerfolds will be used as support.

How did women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun take up the question of female identity in terms of their own aesthetic and intellectual practice? What was the response of women analysts such as Joan Riviere to Freud's psychoanalytic construction of femininity? These are among the questions that Natalya Lusty brings to her sophisticated and theoretically informed investigation into the appropriation of 'the feminine' by the Surrealist movement. Combining biographical and textual methods of analysis with historically specific discussions of related cultural sites such as women's magazines, fashion, debutante culture, sexology, modernist lesbian subculture, pornography, and female criminality, the book examines the ambiguities and blind spots that haunt the work of more central figures such as Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer. Lusty's examination of a series of psychoanalytic Surrealist themes, including narcissism, fantasy, masquerade, perversion, and 'the double', illuminates a modernist preoccupation with the crisis of subjectivity and representation and its ongoing relevance to more recent work by Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler. Her book is an important contribution to modernist studies that will appeal to scholars and students working across a diverse range of fields, including literary studies, gender studies, visual culture, cultural studies, and cultural history.

Reviewed by: Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism by David Sigler Harriet Kramer Linkin FRACTURE FEMINISM: THE POLITICS OF IMPOSSIBLE TIME IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, by David Sigler. New York: State University of Albany Press, 2021. 320 pp. $95.00 hardback; $33.95 paperback. In Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism, David Sigler postulates the existence of a set of British Romantic women writers who envisioned the future in the present. Taking pains to differentiate these writers from those who prophesied or predicted the future, Sigler considers how they positioned themselves as if they already inhabited a future that enabled them to critique or comment upon the present. That complicated temporal or atemporal plane provided them with an opening—a fracture—that gave them the opportunity to move outside of the conventional expectations of what was perceived as culturally appropriate for women and women writers. He calls these writers "fracture feminists," a term I initially resisted because common usage makes us think of a fracture as something broken. Yet that is Sigler's point: not that they are broken but that they locate ruptures in their contemporary moments to present [End Page 345] the future, writing about what Sigler calls "the contemporary future" and later terms "contretempopia," which he acknowledges as a "deliberately silly term" that plays with Jacques Derrida's notion of "contretemporality" (pp. 4, 11). While he notes that the rich group of novelists, poets, essayists, and historians he examines—Mary Wollstonecraft, the anonymous author of "Ithuriel," Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, Hannah Cowley, Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Caroline Richardson, Felicia Hemans, the anonymous author of Gulzara, Princess of Persia (1816), and Mary Shelley—would, at most, identify themselves as female philosophers, his steady recognition of them as "feminists" rather than the hedging term "proto-feminists" is a local instance of his provocative and compelling argument in action. They are fracture feminists, living through intense contemporary political events such as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, plantation slavery, the push for women's rights, and parliamentary reform, but, Sigler posits,"instead of commenting on these matters directly, these feminist writers were responding as historians to the contemporary moment, as if they themselves were not fully subject to the demands of chronology" (pp. 16-17). The two theorists who consistently inform Sigler's readings are Jacques Lacan and Derrida. Though he recognizes that their psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches sometimes distrust one another, he invokes Hélène Cixous's conception of combining the two into a kind of philanalysis. He uses Lacan and Derrida to powerful effect, but it is somewhat surprising that twentieth-century philosophers such as Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Simone De Beauvoir make only occasional appearances in this otherwise enlightening discussion of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century feminists. One of the greatest strengths of Fracture Feminism, beyond its innovative thesis, lies in the brilliant juxtaposition of texts Sigler selects to demonstrate how fracture feminists not only engage in "contretempopia" but also establish intellectual connections with one another. He begins with Wollstonecraft and observes that though she is usually seen as writing for the future, she voices the thesis that shapes his work when she memorializes the recently deceased fracture feminist Catherine Macauley in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In Sigler's words, Wollstonecraft describes Macauley as "a woman from the future who must, in the future, be remembered" (p. 29) when she urges her readers to "remember that Catharine Macauley was an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex. In her style of writing, indeed, no sex appears, for it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear" (qtd. p. 29). Here (and elsewhere) Sigler pays wonderful attention to the way verbs instantiate temporal shifts by pointing out how Wollstonecraft tells her readers to remember Macauley in the present through the eternal present of her writings as an example of the future in the past. When he [End Page 346] then turns to Wollstonecraft's legacy, he quickly dispenses with William Godwin's problematic Memoir of the Author of the "Vindication of the...

Antigone's Voice Lior Levy (bio) She cried out bitterly, with a sound like the piercing note of a bird when she sees her empty nest robbed of her young. (Sophocles, Antigone, 1994, 423–424) For while fish are dumb in their element of water, birds soar freely in theirs, the air; separated from the objective heaviness of the earth, they fill the air with themselves, and utter their self-feeling in their own particular element. (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §351Zß, pp. 354–355) Introduction: Philosophers Reading Antigone—Action and Speech The stakes are high in reading Antigone. Oscillating between the figure of a daughter loyal to maternal ancestry and a symbol of disruption, or even the eradication of the meaningfulness of kinship structures, Antigone is read by philosophers and psychoanalysts alike as an image of sexuate identity caught in a web of psychic, familial, political, and social relationships. The stakes are high, of course, even when Antigone is not read, as George Steiner (1984) demonstrates, pointing to Freud's investment in Oedipus Rex, the first in Sophocles's Theban trilogy,1 an investment that leads to concern with vertical lines of kinship instead of the horizontal axis of relationships between siblings that is central to Antigone.2 The stakes are high, and so Luce Irigaray (1994), for instance, urges readers to "abstract Antigone from the seductive, reductive discourses and listen to what she has to say" (p. 70).3 What did she have to say? At least from the 19th century onward, readers of Sophocles's tragedy concentrated on Antigone [End Page 437] the agent, writing and thinking about what she does. Renowned, admired even, for her defiant acts of burying her brother, by which she self-consciously transgressed the ruler's decree, and mourned for her premature, self-inflicted death, Antigone's deeds were understood as dramatizing the possibilities—both the risks and the promises—of human existence. For Hegel, Antigone's actions, meant to protect divine law and familial bonds of love, were crucial for setting in motion the tragic conflict—the opposition between Antigone's one-sided commitments to the "unwritten laws" of the family, and Creon's one-sided commitment to the laws of the polis—out of which the ethical substance, where the two positions are mediated by one another, emerged.4 Others—for example, Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan—who challenge this Hegelian opposition, still emphasized Antigone's deeds. For Lacan (1992), Antigone's actions are central to articulating an ethics of desire for the Other; for Butler (2000), her actions reveal "the socially contingent character of kinship" (p. 6). The focus on Antigone's actions is not unfounded, given that out of the 1,338 lines that comprise Sophocles's tragedy, less than one-fifth (about 216 lines) are spoken by the play's eponymous character. But if her words are scarce, her deeds are even rarer. Antigone's acts of burial embody, for Hegel, her loyalty to family ties; for Butler, a defiance that put kinship into question; and for Lacan, the desire to recognize what lies beyond language. These acts, by which she comes to be what she is under these readings, are absent from the stage. They are retrospectively reported by the guard, who describes a "deed" (pragma) of an unknown doer (asemos), an agent leaving no marks on what was done. When Antigone's act is first introduced, recounted by the guard, it is left unclaimed, an unowned doing, whose results are plainly visible—the body "not buried in a tomb, but covered with a light dust"—but that do not disclose their author—"the doer left no mark" (253–255). This fact, of course, did not escape the readers of the play; commentators on the text readily acknowledge the fact that Antigone's acts are implicated by her speech. But moving from action to speech does not necessarily involve attentiveness to Antigone's voice. Butler (2000), for example, assimilates speech to action, linking the two under the heading of illocutionary [End Page 438] acts, a form of linguistic doing that subverts the "language of the state" from within (p. 6).5 Lacan (1992), in a twist on...