İktidarın Psişik Yaşamı

Judith Butler, an extremely important thinker who has shaped intellectual life with her studies on gender, sexual identity, psyche, subject formation and the body since the nineties; He walked on the horizon opened by thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan, and discussed the issues he addressed in the light of these thinkers. The thinker, who aims to add new dimensions to feminist thought with her works, advocates that the male-female polarity should not be taken as absolute, especially when discussing gender. Because, according to Butler, "woman" and "man" should not be seen as fixed categories determined by some essential qualities. The sexuality of the subject should be addressed not with such exclusionary and fixing categories, but with references to practices and the fluid identity formations they lead to. The Psychic Life of Power is a work in which Butler discusses the subject-power relationship, based on the Foucauldian understanding of the subject. In this book, Butler focuses on different sources and focuses on the important paradox that Foucault identified in his work: If power is not only the constraint of the subject, but also the fundamental element that establishes the subject, then we have to say that the subject cannot exist without any power relationship. So, if we cannot talk about a subject free from power relations, how is it possible to say that subjects can resist or are subject to power? Is the subject simply a product of power, or is there a more complex relationship between the subject and power? To solve this problem, Butler resorts to the theories of thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Althusser; By communicating concepts such as unhappy consciousness, dark conscience, evocation, identification and melancholia with Foucault's theory, he emphasizes that the psyche's relationship with power is not a simple acceptance and internalization. Thus, Butler tries to deal with the circularity we mentioned, but in doing so, he aims to deepen and refine it, not to disable it. Continuing the line he started in his other books, Butler examines the importance of practices, performance and variable identification relations in the establishment of the subject in The Psychic Life of Power. As a result, we encounter the picture of a subject that contains various possibilities of action and identification, that can violate all kinds of stabilizing boundaries thanks to its fluidity, and that is open to change: A subject that brings together the limiting and transformative possibilities of power within itself, and derives its active and productive energy from this conflict.
(From the Promotional Bulletin)



Number of Pages: 190

Year of Printing: 2015


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Details Publications

First Printing Year: 2005

Number of Pages: 190

Language Turkish