Can the Palestinian Antigone Grieve? A political reinterpretation of Judith Butler’s ethical turn

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that Judith Butler’s move from Antigone’s Claim to Precarious Life is not a move away from politics and towards ethics, but rather a refusal to separate ethics from politics when confronting the politics of queerness in a different geo-political context, that of settler colonialism. I thus criticize Bonnie Honig’s interpretation of that move and argue, instead, that Butler’s ethical supplement to politics is her way of addressing the speechlessness that prima facie disavows the Palestinian claim to equality by coding their mourning as an act of vengeance against the colonial order. Having questioned Honig’s oversight of the difference in the subject positionality of Butler’s move, I then show that Butler’s ethical-political frame of grievability functions as a theoretical performance of the kind of sororal conspiracy that Honig in fact offers as a more suitable model of democratic action.