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Book Cover for: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Judith Butler

The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection

Judith Butler

Paperback
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As 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. Although most readers of Foucault eschew psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche eschew Foucault, the author seeks to theorize this ambivalent relation between the social and the psychic as one of the most dynamic and difficult effects of power. This work combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, offering a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in such other works of the author as Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • Publish Date: May 1st, 1997
  • Pages: 228
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.50in - 0.75in - 0.64lb
  • EAN: 9780804728126
  • Categories: • Mind & Body• General

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"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

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