earticle

영어

In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler grapples with the Hegelian legacy of Antigone interpretation in an attempt to reclaim the heroine as an occasion to rethink the stability of the conceptual distinction between kinship and the state. In Hegelian interpretation, the figure of Antigone is significant not only because she represents the dialectic process but more importantly because she is painfully conscious of the contradictions as well as utopian impulses inherent in the process. In consciously performing her awareness that the ethical is the actualization, not “an accident,” of substance, Antigone epitomizes the importance of contingencies and conscious actions of specific individuals in fulfilling/actualizing the unity of being and substance, subject and the world. In this sense, Antigone functions as the unconscious of Hegel’s idealist-teleological system of dialectic and provides, as Butler insists, the occasion to rethink the boundaries of cultural (un)intelligibilities. In this article, I briefly examine the figure of Antigone as a chiasmic moment in Hegelian dialectic and take this occasion to read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee as an instance of negating the idealist-teleological process of Hegelian dialectic. In thinking together a “canonical” figure of Antigone from ancient mythology with a post-colonial space/history of Dictee, I hope to ponder upon both the utopian promises and contradictions inherent in Hegelian dialectic.