Book, Psychic Life of Power Theories of Subjection[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Reconciling social theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis in a very original way, Judith Butler proposes here an analysis that was already implicit in her other works, such as Bodies that count: on the discursive limits of “sex” and Gender problems: feminism and subversion of identity . The author uses Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Althusser to propose a theory of subject formation that understands the psychic effects of social power as ambivalent. Although most of Foucault's readers avoid psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche avoid Foucault, Butler seeks here to theorize the relationship between the social and the psyche as one of the most dynamic and complex effects of power. Considering the issue of subjectivity and self-awareness, the author carries out a critical investigation into the process of subject formation that reveals the self-aware subject as a necessary paradox; it interrogates how power produces subordinates and how they come to understand themselves as such.