ABSTRACT
Judith Butler's Foucaultian-feminist conception of power offers a solution to this conceptual problem. By integrating the Derridean notion of citationality or iterability into the Foucaultian account of subjection, Butler offers an account of what it is that mediates between the two poles of subjection. In this way, Butler resolves the Foucaultian paradox of agency. The chapter begins by considering the kinds of interests that feminists bring to the study of power. Myriad different, and in many cases contradictory, definitions of power are influential in contemporary social and political theory. In fact, the lack of agreement amongst social and political theorists about how to define power has led some to abandon the hope of arriving at a widely accepted definition. The background perspective, which focuses on the complex social relations that ground every particular power relation, is considerably more complex than the foreground perspective.
