Drawing upon Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Althusser, this work offers a theory of subject formation that illuminates as ambivalent the psychic effects of social power.
Judith Butler's new book considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. It combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, and offers a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in her previous books.
"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."
