Abstract

This book is an attempt to bring together the theory of power and a theory of the psyche, especially, but not exclusively, the theories of Foucault and Freud. According to both Foucault and Althusser, the subject comes into being through submission to power. Yet Foucault does not address the question of the psychic form that power takes. Butler seeks to explore the perspectives from which these two theories illuminate each other. Later in the Introduction she formulates her task as twofold: to consider both “how the formation of the subject involves the regulatory formation of the psyche” and “how we might make such a conception of the subject work as a notion of political agency in postliberatory times”.