Reparations and the Human

Abstract

Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance--to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. --Judith Butler (1) I. necessary grief I would like to begin by returning to Antigone's Claim insofar as it traces a particular strain of thought in Judith Butler's writings about the relationship between social difference and the problem of the human. (2) Sophocles's Oedipus trilogy has been subject to a myriad of interpretations in philosophy, classics, literature, and political theory. Butler's reading of Antigone, the third installment of the Oedipus cycle, is singular, however, insofar as it reconceptualizes conventional understandings of the relations among the incest taboo, kinship, the state, and the possibilities for social change and belonging. (3) If the incest taboo might be reconceived outside of its normative Oedipal resolutions, Butler asks, what new forms of kinship and sociality might emerge outside of conventional heterosexual arrangements to challenge as well as incite state recognition of non-normative sexualities and communities? In the eyes of the law, what today counts as a livable and grievable life today, and what does not? These questions have consequential implications for war, violence, and mourning, as Butler shows us with increasing urgency in her more recent works, and for contemporary legal notions of reparations, the human, and human rights, as I hope to suggest in this article. To remind us: in Sophocles' drama, Antigone not only buries her brother Polyneices in defiance of the King's command, but also refuses to disavow her act of disobedience, even in the face of death. (4) In so doing, she figures a crisis in kinship and politics--indeed, a crisis between kinship and politics--in a state of war. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel reads Antigone as a figure who represents the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal rule. For Hegel, she represents the pre-political sphere of kinship that conditions but is ultimately foreclosed from the domain of the political proper, from the state and its ethical order. (5) Yet Antigone is not so compliant a figure. Her defiance of Creon's sovereign ban on mourning Polyneices, as Butler observes, transgresses both gender and kinship norms ... exposing] the socially contingent character of kinship, only to become the repeated occasion in the critical literature for a rewriting of that contingency as immutable necessity. (6) Antigone throws us into both gender and kinship trouble, with substantial implications for contemporary political struggles ranging from the legal recognition of same-sex marriage to the evolving constitution of the family of nations (a process occurring in large part today through the exclusion of Muslim societies, whose cultures are pathologized as irremediably misogynist and homophobic). (7) In a post-Oedipal tragedy in which the father is the brother, the sisters are the daughters, and the brothers are the sons, Antigone finds herself confounded by the terms of kinship. She is, in Butler's words: [C]aught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking, outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. Her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror. Kinship is not simply a situation she is in but a set of practices that she also performs, relations that are reinstituted in time precisely through the practice of their repetition. …