ABSTRACT
In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler pays particular attention to the ways in which the “subjection of desire”—that is, the specifi c chain of objects and identifi cations through which we develop a sense of personal identity-comes to be inseparable from what she calls our “desire for subjection,” a kind of primary need to be affi liated with and subordinated to something or someone outside of and more powerful than ourselves.1 In Butler’s account, our very sense of self, that most apparently unique, intimate, and private of feelings, becomes unimaginable apart from the experience of its “dependency” on external forces; for Butler, this “dependency” itself functions paradoxically in that it “initiates and sustains our agency” at the same time that it delimits both the forms our agency can take and the effects that it can produce.2 One could make the case that the question prompting Butler’s postmodern political theory-how does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection?—is merely a recent, Foucauldian-psychoanalytic reiteration of the foundational problem out of which a recognizably feminist discourse initially emerged.
