Join us for our next Seminar Series. Sinead Kennedy with talk on:
Antigone’s Daughters: Feminism and the State in the Ruins of Neoliberalism.
ABSTRACT: Antigone is a figure that appears at the borders of the political, troubling the boundaries between politics and kinship, between the state and the individual and/or family. Antigone is an icon of defiance; a figure from classic antiquity who speaks to modernity, emerging as an archetype for the conflict between the individual and the modern capitalist state. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Wendy Brown, this paper will argue that the figure of Antigone offers a critical framework to think through the post-neoliberal state by orientating us, not to a politics of representation but towards the transformative political possibilities that emerge when the state’s limits to representation and representability are exposed. Furthermore, by foregrounding questions of gender, reproduction, and the body, we can make visible hidden structures of domination and exploitation. Can Antigone escape from the forms of power that she opposes, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to death? Can she offer a model for a feminism, and more generally a radical politics, that resists and redefines the state, rather than seeking to enlist the state for its complaints? What happens to Antigone if we redefine her legacy, recover her revolutionary significance, and liberate her for a transformative feminism sexual and socialist politics?