The Antigone-Effect and the Oedipal Curse: Toward a Promiscuous Natality

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The Antigone-Effect and the Oedipal CurseToward a Promiscuous Natality Bonnie Honig Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition In Judith Butler’s book Antigone’s Claim, “promiscuous obedience” is the proposed response to a world constituted by “unwritten laws, aberrant transmissions” (Butler 2000). The worldly condition of “unwritten laws, aberrant transmissions” names an aspect of Antigone’s situation unmentioned by Sina Kramer in her essay on Butler’s New Humanism: the curse. Antigone mourns and desires under the sign of a curse that consigns her forever to a desire that will be unrequited, and a mourning that will never achieve what we now call closure. What is the curse identified by Butler? In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus says to his daughters (speaking about himself), “From none did you have love more than from this man, without whom you will now spend the remainder of your life” (Trans. H. Lloyd-Jones 1994, 1

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