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Title: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection by Judith P. Butler ISBN: 0-8047-2812-7 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Psyche Meets Subject
Comment: I've read this book three times in the past several months in preparation for giving a talk on post-structural perspectives on early childhood gender and sexual development in psychoanalysis. As always, I find the effort it takes to understand Butler's writing to pay off richly in the brilliance of her arguments. In particular, I was drawn to two sections in this book: the first a reconsidering of who it is that turns to become a subject in Althusser's model of interpellation, and the second an exchange of papers with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in which both grapple with how her work might be informed by psychoanalytic practice and the practice might be informed by her work. Having read this book both prior to and after immersing myself in Freud, Lacan and some of their major commentators, I found that I got far more out of Butler's book with a stronger background in the language and assumptions of psychoanalysis.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Paradox of Subjection
Comment: In *The Psychic Life of Power* Judith Butler provides a critical inquiry into the process of subject formation that reveals the self-conscious subject as necessary paradox. Her main argument is that the emergence of the subject depends on subjection to power and yet the subject that is inaugurated exceeds this power, because subjection can never fully totalize the subject. In order to elaborate her theoretical movements Butler draws on Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser, and Freud. The main metaphors for understanding the works of subjection are the turning of the subject on itself and the interpellation of the subject by the other. Consciousness and desire function as guiding categories for the analysis. Taking on the much discussed question of the possibility of agency Butler shows that the normalizing effect of social norms always produces an inassimilable remainder in the subject from where resistance against those norms becomes possible. *The Psychic Life of Power* provides a very powerful rethinking of the question of subjectivity and self-consciousness, even though - or maybe because of - the individual chapters' appearance as separate essays. In the introduction, however, Butler reveals how the various explorations all fit together in her thinking. A new stage of Butlerian lucidity - in and on Butlerian terms, though.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Continuation of Thoughts on Subjectivity
Comment: This is a contituation from her earlier publications, "Gender Trouble," "Bodies That Matter." Those who read these two texts would find this book extremely interesting. Butler seems to move her theorization of subjectivity from the materiality of the body (in previous texts) to the psychic realm of subjectivity. Please note that this is NOT a reflection of Cartesian dichotomy of mind/body. Rather, I understand her move as strategic choice, in order to deepen her analysis of power and its relation to psychic realm, before delving into the inextricable reality of psyche and body. Here Butler draws on the works of various philosophers, such as Hegel, Althusser,Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and so on, to explicate the complex process through which power engenders a psychic form (see intro), and constitutes a self. As always, her eloquent rhetorical style and brilliant epistemological turns are amazing enough.
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Title: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek ISBN: 185984278X Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: July, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Gender Trouble (Tenth Anniversary Edition) by Judith P. Butler ISBN: 0415924995 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex by Judith P. Butler ISBN: 0415903661 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: October, 1993 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Subjects of Desire by Judith Butler ISBN: 0231064519 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: Antigone's Claim by Judith P. Butler ISBN: 0231118953 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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