Antigone and the kinship-boundary. The family structure as a psycho-pedagogical product or social discourse

Abstract

From Sofocles to Hegel, going through Post-structuralist reinterpretations, the kinship codes founded the perimeter both of social discourse and symbolic order intelligibility, with all contradictions and aporias that, primarily form a psychopedagogic perspective, this claim for foundativity carried all it’s a-priori structures over time. In Seminar VII (1960), Jacques Lacan handles Sofocle’s Antigone as a symbol of the dialectic between the subject and society, and as an archetype of the conflict between the individual and the social sphere in the subjectivation processes. It’s really in the psychopedagogical question of kinship - that for Lévi-Strauss lies at the basis of civilization in a universal sense – that Butler argues a new reading of Lacanian Antigone, finally able to fit a new paradigm of family. Can family exist without the support and mediation of the State, and can a State survive without a family as its support and mediation? In the present article we aim to explore this question to respond such queries that concerns the challenges embodied in the formation of the contemporary subject.