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Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection is the sixth book for this prolific author whose work has established her as one of the foremost theorists of identity in the American academy. This most recent book closely follows her 1996 release, Excitable Voices, and her four previous books: Bodies that Matter , Feminists Theorize the Political (ed., ), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , and Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France .
Butler cannot be pigeon-holed as a Lacanian, but this book is certainly important reading for anyone with an interest in Lacan and his critical interlocutors, notably Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. Here Butler provides an exegesis of the concepts and inter-texts that inform Freud's thoughts about “guilt” and “conscience” in chapters 7 and 8 of Civilization and its Discontents. Yet her explicit project is to attempt a synthesis of Foucault's notion of power and what she terms the “psyche.” Analogies between Foucault's thought and psychoanalysis are not easily established, however, as many Foucaultian and psychoanalytic commentators have made clear, and she is careful to offer a proviso that “thinking the theory of power together with a theory of the psyche … offers no promise of a grand synthesis” (3). Instead, with this book Butler simply “explore[s] the provisional perspectives from which each theory illuminates the other.”
But she is doing more than that. In examining the psychic form power takes, Butler implicitly argues that identity politics needs an understanding of the subject that can account for psychic phenomena and attachments. Secondly, she asks whether political agency “may do more that reiterate the conditions of subordination” (30). The book attempts to answer this question by interrogating the category of the subject and by offering a genealogy for it through Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan.
The synthesis of Foucault and psy