The Terrain of Kinship

P.R. Manalo

For Judith Butler, Antigone as the symbol of kinship represents not only its transgression,
but the violation of state power through the performance of certain acts. Incorporated with this
reading are Hegels and Lacans similar interpretations that kinship [is] the sphere that
conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it. In this sense, kinship is the
realm of the prepolitical, an intelligibility removed from the sphere of the social, because kinship
is viewed as a blood relation than anything else. So ultimately, for Hegel, Lacan, as well as
Irigaray, kinship and the law if the household that comes with it, no matter how their
preexistence is essential for the state to persist, must necessarily give way for the authority of the
state to enact justice.

But what Butler finds notable in Antigones act of burying his brother despite the kings
prohibition against it is less the actual act than the inquest that succeeded. Though she refused to
deny her act, Antigone did not expressly admit that she actually buried her brother twice. This
then becomes an act which symbolizes (1) the failure of state power, through the kings (Creon)
word; and (2) a reclaiming of individual liberty/sovereignty. Antigones defiance, thus, creates in
her a kind of masculinity that necessarily renders the other feminine and inferior. The point here,
however, is fluid performativity and acting through language. By responding to Creons question,
Antigone asserts her position, uses the kings language, and, in effect, disrupts gender, and by
extension, kinship relations. Antigone might be seen as someone who desired her brother, yet
thinkers have interpreted her as feeling otherwise. Indeed, Antigone does not represent kinship
quite straightforwardly; for Butler, she represents its deformation and displacement.

Michael Cobb, for his part, sees incest as something that is conflated yet again with
homosexuality, but this time, with religion as another adversary. Aside from the bourgeois
class, much of disgust, or better still, hatred for homosexuals comes from the Christian church.
Put together, a family that is bourgeois and Christian could be very powerful. In his essay, Cobb
questions the seemingly irrational hatred for homosexuals because they are seen as a threat
either to the family, in terms of children, and religion. For society views that part of being a
moral individual is being healthy and health can only be ensured through faith to the family,
heterosexuality, and the Christian religion. Somehow, Cobb sees this hatred as connected to a
broader argumentthat permitting homosexuality and all its actuations would eventually lead to
the tolerance and authorization of pedophilia, lesbianism, and other perverse sexualities. And all
these, of course, are threats to the future of the family.