Antigone and Abjection: The Ethics and Politics of Restlessness

One can trace, throughout Sarah Kofman’s body of work, a thread of continuity, a question about the unsayable, an enigma, a caesura, a riddle, a disruption, an aporia, the impossibility of saying that which nonetheless, according to an ethical exigency, demands to be said.

—Tina Chanter, “Playing with Fire: Kofman and Freud on Being Feminine, Jewish and Homosexual”

These are the opening lines of Tina Chanter’s essay on Sarah Kofman. To some extent, they could also be applied to Chanter’s own considerable body of work. Here, too, there is a thread of continuity that concerns “a question of the unsayable” and the ethical exigency of attending to that question. At the same time, these lines do not quite apply to Chanter’s own work, in ways that illuminate the distinctiveness of her approach and her contribution to contemporary philosophical thinking. For if her work foregrounds the necessity with which representation depends on a constitutive relation to the unrepresentable, it also insists on the contingency of what and who are made unrepresentable, on “the unstable content of excluded yet constitutive others” (Chanter 2011, 58; hereafter, WA). If the question of the unsayable concerns the impossibility of saying that which nonetheless demands to be said, Chanter’s work shows that what it is impossible to say is always made so by a particular order of representation. Thus, part of what demands to be said is this: That what is unethical is not simply failing to attend to the unsayable, but failing to attend to the ways in which that which is unsayable and unrepresentable within a particular order of representation becomes conflated with the unsayable and unrepresentable as such, and thus condemned, like Antigone, to a living death.

Chanter’s work parses the unrepresentable, while carefully avoiding two potential risks of critiquing the logic of representation. The first such risk is that of homogenizing all that is “other” to the subject within a single figure of excess: the unrepresentable or the unsayable. The second is of exposing the logic that identifies one specific mode of being as other—say, for example, the feminine—while not only failing to interrogate the production of other “others”—say, racialized others—but remaining implicitly dependent on their continued exclusion. In response, Chanter’s work patiently exposes the ways in which an exclusionary logic tends to silently reinstate itself in the very theories that seek to contest the logic of exclusion. This is not because we have not yet found the right solution, the ideal counter-theory to avoid once and for all the oppressive effects of the logic of the same. Rather, the logic of exclusion reasserts itself precisely to the extent that we continue to invest in finding a conceptual or theoretical resting place, rather than being willing to remain in the double bind of attesting to hitherto oppressed and marginalized differences, while asking which differences are occluded, silenced, or marginalized by our own attestations, by the contingent but unavoidably specific forms that such attestations take. Rather than appealing to either the unrepresentable as such, or to a privileged register of difference, Chanter asks us instead to take up the restless project of exposing the different logics of othering on which different subjects and orders of representation depend, and by which different—contingent yet constitutive—others are produced.

In what follows, I trace a line across several of Chanter’s key texts to explore the ways in which what I am calling an ethics of restlessness unfolds in her work. In so doing, I risk falling into the very trap that Chanter persistently exposes, for by tracing this particular trajectory, I inevitably occlude many other valuable insights she has to offer. Nonetheless, I am going to take this risk and commit—for now—to this reading, to try to articulate what it is that I have most learned from engaging with her work, knowing that our very exchange is likely to transform my understanding of and relation to that work, generating different interpretative commitments in the future.

Ethics and Alterity...