Butler, Judith. "Bodies and Power Revisit."

Butler, Judith. "Bodies and Power Revisit." Feminism and the Final Foucault. Eds. Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 183-94.

In this essay, Judith Butler analyzes Foucault’s discourse dealing with bodies, power, subject, agency, and resistance through various periods of his life and work, and offers her interpretation and understanding of Foucault’s writing. Butler points out an ambiguity in Foucault’s account of the operation of power on and through bodies, or the process of subjection. Drawing on insights from Freud and Hegel, she argues that the subject becomes attached to itself, or its identity, through “mediating norms.” In other words, it is socially mediated – it desires recognition so that it is recognizable. It is this desire for recognition that makes us “vulnerable to exploitation” – “submission is one part of a social process by which recognizability is achieved.” This opens up the question of how we can subvert the very social norms that produce us, that “give form of our existence.” To Butler, Foucault finds “the seeds of transformation in the life of a passion (another term for “body” suggested by Butler) that lives and thrives at the borders of recognizability, which still has the limited freedom of not yet being false or true, which establishes a critical distance on the terms that decide our being” (italic mine). In other words, transformation is found in fluid, unstable bodies that is becoming rather than being.

Butler's account of Foucault is essentially Hegelian as she relies on the notions of "becoming," "recognition" and "transformation." However, Foucault's idea of power and its working on the subject obviously is a resource of her performative theory -- the body has to become and thus perform in order to resist the "mediating norms." Also see Kruks, "Reading Beauvoir with and against Foucault." and Sawicki, "Queering Foucault and the Subject of Feminism.".)