Antigone’s Legacy: A Feminist psychoanalytic of an Other Sexual Difference

• Main Author: Sheila Lynn Cavanagh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2017-08-01
• Series: Studies in the Maternal
• Online Access: https://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/4269/

Much has been written about Antigone who buried her brother Polynices in Theban soil despite the prohibition issued by King Creon (her uncle) in the Sophocles tragedy. In order to understand the magnitude of Antigone’s radical act in the play by the same name I engage the scholarship of Israeli feminist psychoanalytic scholar Bracha L. Ettinger. By engaging Ettinger’s theory of the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference, I consider how ways of being in the Feminine tap into the matrixial domain, thus expanding the bounds of what counts as subjective experience in psychoanalysis. I situate Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial in relation to Lacan’s analysis of Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII). I also focus on Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘debinding’ (2010) and Judith Butler’s (2002) writing on gender and kinship disorder in the tragedy. My objective is to build upon Ettinger’s analysis of Antigone to better understand how it is not death, exactly, that is at stake in the drama, but rather the status of the Feminine dimension in the Theban city-state. If Antigone’s transgression can be understood through a matrixial lens it behooves us as feminist scholars to more fully understand the affective landscape and maternal ethics of difference enacted in the play.