In Antigone’s Claim Butler suggests that although the incest taboo works in much the same way that the repressive hypothesis on sexuality constrained variable constructions of sexual alterna-tives, it nevertheless requires an alternative reading, one that not so much reverses itself, (sanc-tioning incest between family members is not what Butler has is mind), but instead Antigone signifies a crisis, a breakdown in signification that occurs when one pushes the very limits of kinship. By placing the very term ‘kinship’ in crisis, Antigone thus makes herself ‘monstrous’ and unrecognizable, and signals the conditions under which a radical deconstitution is the un-avoidable outcome.

Butler’s reading of Antigone illustrates a complex unfolding of all the principal concepts of her oeuvre, notions such as ‘abject’ ‘constitutive outside’ ‘melancholia’ all combine to articulate her notion of a ‘new field of the human’. In particular her notion of catachresis and iteration informs one’s understanding of how she develops her postoedipal political framework.

Butler argues that the heteronormative Oedipal drama is a forced drama of sorts, established as it is on the foreclosure of the diverse ways of doing kinship that exist outside of the narrow struc-turalist binary frame laid out by Lévi-Strauss and later by Lacan. Antigone commits to pushing the very borders of her very being, and placing into crisis the intelligibility of the Oedipal discursive framework. To this end Antigone’s Claim makes an "imaginative leap" in thinking the pos-sibility of a postoedipal subjectivity. Butler exposes the Lévi-Straussian/Lacanian symbolic law as thoroughly social or ‘pre-political’ and argues that Antigone figures as the epistemological limits of a kinship based on an oedipal law. Not only does she lack a language with which to articulate and gain meaning in the current oedipal symbolic frame and is forced into what But-ler’s terms ‘catachresis.’

Forced in political catachresis, Butler argues that Antigone figures a postoedipal subjectivity, a poststructuralism of kinship posited variously as: monstrous and as pushing the epistemological boundaries of one’s very being. Significantly this appears in Butler’s later work as her post-humanist attempt to articulate a non-anthropomorphic anthropology in doing so she is trying to grasp the theoretical co-ordinates of this “new field of the human” which she argues Antigone has become. But this new field of the human to emerge requires a radical desubjectivation, a draining of the subjective coordinates that held one in place and the instating of a totally new ‘symbolic’ order. ( )