ABSTRACT
Judith Butler is best known as a political thinker, as an inaugural figure in queer theory, and as a Foucauldian theorist of gender. Yet her book The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) appears to fit uneasily within this political and theoretical trajectory. Many discussions of Butler's work either ignore, or alternatively characterize, Psychic Life as her most 'psychoanalytic' and least Foucauldian theory.2 However, Psychic Life should not be ignored or dismissed as a psychoanalytic aberration. The book presents a set of engagements that are integral to Butler's political and theoretical project. Psychic Life offers an important articulation of Butler's project of providing a political account of subjectivity. It presents a compelling argument for the importance of this project by contending that contemporary political thought needs to reconsider its emphasis upon a politics of identity, and instead should engage with the politics of the subjective performance of power. Central to this argument is Butler's development of her theory of the formation of the subject. Butler sketches such a theory in her previous work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (1993). However, she does not provide an elaborated theory of the constitution of the subject until Psychic Life.
