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.
