One of the most challenging aspects of Judith Butler's philosophy concerns the relationship between power, subjection, and agency. If we are formed as subjects through power relations and social norms we didn't choose, how can we resist or transform those very structures? Doesn't this theory trap us in a deterministic framework where agency becomes impossible?
The Paradox of Subjection
Butler engages this problem most directly in The Psychic Life of Power, where she develops a theory of subjection drawing on Foucault, Althusser, Freud, and Hegel. The central insight is that subjection is paradoxical: the very processes that subordinate us are also the processes that form us as subjects capable of acting at all. We can't simply reject the power that subjugates us without rejecting the conditions of our own existence as subjects.
Consider Althusser's famous scene of interpellation: a police officer calls out "Hey, you!" and an individual turns around, recognizing themselves as the addressee. In that moment of recognition and response, the person becomes a subject—but a subject already positioned within a power structure, already subordinated to authority. We don't become subjects first and then encounter power; we become subjects through our subjection to power.
This creates what Butler calls the "paradox of subjection": we depend for our existence on structures that fundamentally constrain us. The norms that make us intelligible as subjects are the same norms that limit what we can be and do. Yet this very dependence creates a peculiar vulnerability for power itself.
Finding Agency Within Constraint
Butler finds resources for agency within this paradox. First, the power that forms us never fully determines us. There's always a gap between the norms that hail us into being and our actual living of those norms. We never perfectly embody the ideals we're supposed to conform to; there's always some remainder, some excess, some dimension of our being that escapes full capture by power.
Second, subjection creates what Butler calls a "passionate attachment" to the norms that subordinate us. We become invested in our own subordination because it's the basis of our existence as subjects. This attachment is psychically complex—we need recognition from the very norms and authorities that constrain us. But this need also means we can work to transform the terms of recognition, to make those norms more livable, to expand what counts as a viable subject.
Third, norms require repeated performance to maintain their authority, and every repetition contains the possibility of variation. When we cite norms, we might cite them imperfectly or with a difference. These small failures and variations can accumulate, gradually shifting the meaning and operation of the norms themselves. Agency emerges not from standing outside power but from working within and against it, using the instability inherent in all repetition.
Butler's account of agency is thus neither heroic nor defeatist. We're not autonomous individuals who freely choose our identities and actions, but neither are we cultural dopes mechanically reproducing our programming. Instead, we're subjects who come into being through norms we didn't choose, yet who possess the capacity to repeat those norms differently, to expose their contingency, and to open space for alternative ways of living. This agency is constrained, provisional, and never guaranteed success—but it's real, and it's the only agency we have.
See also:
Bodies That Matter: Materiality, Discourse, and the Limits of Construction
Judith Butler on Desire, Recognition, and the Subjects of Desire
Subversive Repetition: Drag, Parody, and the Possibility of Change
Why Your Body in the Street Is Already a Vote – Butler and The Politics of Presence
Homi Bhabha's Third Space: Where Culture Gets Weird and Wobbly
