In Subjects of Desire, her first book, Judith Butler explains that ‘[t]he unified subject with its unified philosophical life has served as a necessary psychological gesture and normative ideal in moral philosophy since Plato and Aristotle’. Rather than follow in this vein, she continues the poststructuralist critique of the foundational subject by calling into question the foundationalism that she takes to underpin this historical affirmation of unity. As she puts it, the purpose of her ‘critique of the subject is not [to offer] a negation or repudiation of the subject, but, rather, a way of interrogating the construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premise’. By engaging with the processes that give rise to the notion that the subject is foundational, she aims to show that the subject is a construction and, indeed, identify the ways in which this subject is created.

To do so, Butler takes as her primary source Foucault's work on power, sexuality and the subject, but departs from him in a number of important ways. These include her claim that his historical account is too simplistic in so far as it is based on ‘a single tension between the body and strategies of domination which give rise to events and values alike’; the identification of a contradiction between his accounts of the body and genealogical narrative; her rejection of his lack of awareness and attention paid to the sexual difference; and, most pertinent for our purposes, the fact that ‘the entire domain of the psyche remain[s] largely unremarked in his theory’. In contrast, she insists that an account of the psyche is required by his analysis of the relationship between power and the subject. After all, if the subject results from power relations, and this is not a onedimensional hierarchical process of imposition, then the subject must participate in its own subjection. As she explains, ‘[p]sychoanalysis enters Foucauldian analysis precisely at the point where one wishes to understand the phantasmatic dimension of social norms’.