Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power.
Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. vii)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• "How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?" (p. 17)
• Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche (p. 36)
• The Desire to Live: Spinoza's Ethics under Pressure (p. 63)
• To Sense What Is Living in the Other: Hegel's Early Love (p. 90)
• Kierkegaard's Speculative Despair (p. 112)
• Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty (p. 149)
• Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon (p. 171)
• Notes (p. 199)
• Index (p. 213)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Senses of the Subject collects essays Butler published in journals between 1993 and 2012. The unifying theme is Butler's fundamental philosophical insight: that the self is permeable by and vulnerable to others rather than a discrete, whole individual. The collection demonstrates how Butler develops this insight within and against philosophical tradition through her readings of Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Malebranche, Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Irigaray, Sartre, and Fanon. Related to, but beyond, the feminist and gender theory that most people closely associate with Butler is the treatment of the "you" as constitutive of the "self." The self is awakened, put into action, by the touch, address, or even the oppression of a you. Ultimately, Butler's philosophy is ontological, about the nature of the matrix called the self, the human, consciousness, the body, and normative--about the ethic that such a self should be committed to. Judith Butler is one of the most important living philosophers and should be recognized as such. These essays show her value as a philosopher who challenges tradition through careful and critical readings. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Jennifer L. Eagan, CSU East Bay

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Judith Butler was born in 1956. She is nationally known for her writings on gender and sexuality. She argues that men and women are not dissimilar and that the notion they are is cultural not biological in books such as Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of "Sex" (1993), Excitable Speech: Contemporary Scenes Of Politics (1996), and The Psychic Life Of Power: Theories In Subjection (1997). In Gender Trouble (1990), the title a play on John Waters' camp classic Female Trouble (1975), Butler claims that both gender and drag are a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

A professor of philosophy at University of California at Berkeley, Butler attended Yale, receiving a B.A. in 1978 and a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984.

(Bowker Author Biography)