Description
Book SynopsisAs a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what one is, one''s very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, it provides the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire. Power is not simply what we depend on for our existence but that which forms reflexivity as well. Drawing upon Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser, this challenging and lucid work offers a theory of subject formation that illuminates as ambivalent the psychic effects of social power.
If we take Hegel and Nietzsche seriously, then the inner life of consciousness and, indeed, of conscience, not only is fabricated by power, but becomes one of the ways in which power is anchored in subjectivity. The author considers the way in which psychic life i
Trade Review
"The emergence of self-consciousness is rooted in paradox—for becoming a subject is intricately bound up with being subjected. This insight . . . is explored and developed as [Butler's] book unfolds, taking the reader through a tour de force of its rhetorical, linguistic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and social and political implications." -- Modern Psychoanalysis
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. Stubborn attachment, bodily subjection 2. Circuits and bad conscience 3. Subjection, resistance, resignification 4. 'Conscience doth make subjects of us all' 5. Melancholy gender/refused identification keeping it moving 6. Psychic inceptions Notes Index.
