Antigone/Mother: Second Death and the Maternal in Lacan and Cavarero

Abstract

Both Judith Butler and Lee Edelman-in spite of the many differences in their respective positions-see Antigone as an anti-natal figure who disrupts social order by refusing to perpetuate the heteronormative cycle of reproduction and reproductive futurism. In this essay, however, I will argue that in resisting what Jacques Lacan calls the "second death" of her brother, Antigone emerges in the maternal position precisely through her power both to suspend and to allow (re)generation. If the fantasy of "second death" is to push back generation to the realm of nothingness-an absolute extinction of the cycle of life-Antigone refigures this "nothingness" of ex nihilo as the maternal body in all its traumatic fecundity. Reading Lacan's Antigone alongside Adriana Cavarero's feminist explication of the Demeter myth, and resituating Lacan's notion of "second death" in the light of Cavarero's "birth-no-more" would, I hope, serve to enrich our understanding of the sexuate dimensions of Antigone's desire. I shall also engage with the writings of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Emanuela Bianchi in order to imagine a queer maternal politics that has place both for the mother and the child, even as it resists resorption into the normative logic of reproductive futurism.