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Fatima Festic
UCLA, California
'Antigone in (Post-)Modern Palestine'
The paper will explore the relation between culture, feminism and psychoanalysis, referring to the circle of suicide-bombing and revived Intifada in the recent developments in the Middle East and focusing on the death drive within these tragic and terrifying paradigms of self-disclosure.
While the recent studies of Antigone no longer focus on her (criminal and) suicidal desire but talk about the crisis of representation function, about the limits of the symbolic that itself produces the crisis for its own intelligibility, about the crisis in kinship and its reinstitution as a public scandal, about a legality prior to its codification on which the symbolic must founder or about the Antigonean revision of the psychoanalytic theory through challenging the incest taboo as the legitimization of family, the cross-cultural and horizontal transmission of this Antigone's legacy is still fully neglected.
Since the signs processing in the appraisal of the cultural Other comes only if the borders towards it are set and since all borders appear to fluctuate catachretically in our times, any attempt at grasping the representational logic of the horror-terror bond fails. It is rather in an irrecoverable psychic history of a socially instituted incommunicability and foreclosure that we see the reiteration of the Other's word and act. And if we bear witness to female utterance and repetitive act in 'a culture of suicides', and do that at the time of our utmost awareness of general threat, what kind of the symbolic can accommodate our dealing with it?
We well know that today the cursing Oedipus of (the Palestinian) Antigone is no longer (only) her endogamic father nor the sustaining web of relations in her life can be reduced to her family, her (extinguished) nation or religious script, so it is not only the condensed incest that she lives as her own death, but the cursing conditions where incest and non-incest appear as normatively indissoluble. If we again ask about the origin of the curse that resets her desire (into suicidal and murderous – for she goes a step further than her classic predecessor), which is not necessarily mimetic of her brothers, but defiant to all and abyssal of its own, than we have to recount the terms of a much broader protest that sinisterly reflects in our own attempts to ignore it. If Freudian 'pure culture of death drive' is cultivated by a symbolic order, can the graphematic terror in the feminine be narrated rather than performed? I will focus on the following issues: 1. what rereading of Antigone is demanded by the Palestinian women who become suicide bombers; 2. how do we conceptualize this violence in relation to that visited upon women in the form of systematic and/or ideologically driven rape; 3. what is the relation between this later violence and that implied by normative kinship; 4. what does it mean that the symbolic contract can be so rapidly dissolved, and what is the force which is responsible for its dissolution?
Bio: My field of interest is Comparative Literature and Philosophy, my specialization is postmodernism and post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, semiotics and visual culture. I have twelve years of teaching and lecturing experience at a number of universities in Europe including Sarajevo, Zurich, Fribourg and all over America (the Fall semester I was also at the University of Pretoria, South Africa). This Spring I have been a Guest Professor at GVSU in Michigan. I am a member of the Executive Boards of several international scientific organizations. I deal with women's issues in contemporary literature, culture and society and offer courses in a number of fields, in particular in theories of subjectivity, violence and mass rapes (I am from Bosnia originally), trauma, genocide, visual culture.