0804728119

9780804728119

0804728127

9780804728126

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.

Stubborn attachment, bodily subjection: Rereading Hegel on the unhappy consciousness

Circuits of bad conscience: Nietzsche and Freud

Subjection, resistance, resignification: Between Freud and Foucault

"Conscience doth make subjects of us all": Althusser's subjection

Melancholy gender/refused identification: Keeping it moving: Commentary on Judith Butler, by Adam Phillips: Reply to Adam Phillips

Psychic inceptions: Melancholy, ambivalence, rage.

Self > Social aspects.

Self > Social aspects.

Samuel R. Delany Library (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). Reading Library.

United States California Stanford.