The Psychoanalytic Turn in Language: Antigone between the Semiotic and the Symbolic

Abstract

In recent decades, the notion of language, as a field of studies, has expanded to englobe different disciplines, well beyond the earlier Saussurian theorization of the social (langue) and the individual side (parole) of language. This thesis retraces such a remarkable turn to Julia Kristeva, who includes the idea of language within the psychoanalytic horizon. After an initial chapter that retraces this amplified language, this thesis will follow on the relevance of the figure of Antigone as the ideal source for a new exploration of language. The purpose of this dissertation is to apply Kristeva’s enlarged and reformed language to the character of Antigone. This thesis will consider how Antigone has often been associated to the speech of the other, particularly the speech of women and the feminine language of lamentation. In contrast with this view, the purpose of this research is to dispossess the figure of Antigone of the theories accrued around her, and to try to grasp Antigone as the symbol of a resisting core which eludes language and transcends time and space. In response to multiple readings of Antigone, this thesis will draw on Bonnie Honig (2013) who, by questioning the dichotomy of logos and phonê, takes Antigone to be the symbol of this undecidable space that is in the middle of language, a space that becomes the vantage point from which it is possible to investigate an expanded and renewed linguistic dimension.