ABSTRACT
Butler never ceases to write within what one might call ‘the shadow of
Hegel’. Yet a strong case can be made that from the first book to the most
recent Foucault remains the most important thinker in Butler’s work. And,
like Foucault, Butler has made a recent, late ‘turn’ toward the question of
ethics and, perhaps, away from her earlier, more polemical political cri-
tiques. Some would say that Foucault turned to ethics to answer his critics –
those who saw significant gaps in his more critical writings, those who cea-
selessly accused Foucault of ‘doing away with the subject’ or at least robbing it of ‘agency’. Close attention to Foucault’s late works indicates that he
offered a coherent, tenable response to those criticisms. However, the fact of
such a reading does not seem to have solved the problem: many, if not
most, of Foucault’s critics continue to hurl the same charges at him, and
many, if not most, of Foucault’s followers continue to rely more on his
earlier works for formulating their own political arguments.
