Feminist Readings of Antigone

Edited by Fanny Söderbäck

Subjects: Feminist Philosophy
Series: SUNY series in Gender Theory
Paperback : 9781438432786, 272 pages, October 2010
Hardcover : 9781438432793, 272 pages, October 2010

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Antigone Today?
Fanny Söderbäck
Prologue: Nomadic Antigone
Moira Fradinger
I. Between Past and Future: Feminist Politics in the Private and Public Realms
1. After Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought
Catherine A. Holland
2. On the Body of Antigone
Adriana Cavarero
3. Impossible Mourning: Sophocles Reversed
Fanny Söderbäck
4. The Performative Politics and Rebirth of Antigone in Ancient Greece and Modern South Africa
Tina Chanter
5. The Eternal Irony of the Community
Luce Irigaray
6. “the celestial Antigone, the most resplendent fi gure ever to have appeared on earth”: Hegel’s Feminism
J. M. Bernstein
II. Incestuous Desire: Sexuality, Kinship, and Psychoanalytical Approaches
7. Promiscuous Obedience
Judith Butler
8. Antigone’s Line
Mary Beth Mader
9. Beyond Pleasure: The Other History of Sexuality
Cecilia Sjöholm
10. Transgressing With-In-To the Feminine
Bracha L. Ettinger
11. Antigone: Limit and Horizon
Julia Kristeva
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

New and classic essays on Antigone and feminist philosophy.

Description

Feminist Readings of Antigone collects the most interesting and provocative feminist work on the figure of Antigone, in particular looking at how she can figure into contemporary debates on the role of women in society. Contributors focus on female subjectivity and sexuality, feminist ethics and politics, questions of race and gender, psychoanalytic theory, kinship, embodiment, and tensions between the private and the public. This collection seeks to explore and spark debate about why Antigone has become such an important figure for feminist thinkers of our time, what we can learn from her, whether a feminist politics turning to this ancient heroine can be progressive or is bound to idealize the past, and why Antigone keeps entering the stage in times of political crisis and struggle in all corners of the world. Fanny Söderbäck has gathered classic work in this field alongside newly written pieces by some of the most important voices in contemporary feminist philosophy. The volume includes essays by Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Tina Chanter, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.

Fanny Söderbäck is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

Reviews

"These essays move beyond the critical aspect to consider the productive insights of Antigone for addressing contemporary political problems. Particularly remarkable because of its timeliness is the unity of the persistent themes of the political import of the relation of life to death, as well as of bare life to political life, and the state's need to have access to the body in order for the law to have force." — philoSOPHIA