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Stated succinctly, Judith Butler's central insight seems deceptively simple: the emergence of self-consciousness is rooted in paradox—for becoming a subject is intricately bound up with being subjected. This insight, which Butler ascribes to Foucault, is explored and developed as her book unfolds, taking the reader through a tour de force of its rhetorical, linguistic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and social and political implications. Butler, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at Berkeley, focuses on the paradoxical self-assertion and awareness of subjection which takes place when self-consciousness arises—the “self,” in a sense, both accepting and renouncing those external forces which exert power over it, in the very process of defining itself as an empowered subject. This involves a “turning in upon itself” which Butler compares to the rhetorical device of the “trope”—a stylistic deviation from the ordinary, logical use of language, which does, nonetheless, generate a new understanding, through a kind of turning or twisting of words or images. As such, a trope is a type of performative utterance—constitutive, rather than descriptive in its function. As Butler duly acknowledges, the “tropological” formation of the subject, giving rise to questions such as: “What or who is said to turn, and what is the object of such a turn?” (p. 4), obviates the possibility of describing the origins of self-consciousness in clear, unambiguous language. Thus, the reader looking for simple, easy characterizations of the formation of the self will not find them in this book.
What the reader will find who does perservere through the author's difficult, and sometimes perhaps unnecessarily obscure language, is a rather thought-provoking study of the process of becoming a subject—as Butler examines the theoretical approaches of the 19th century philosophers, Hegel and Nietzsche, linking their insights with those of Freud and Lacan, as well as the social theories of Fouc