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That one's body, one's desires, and even one's psychic lives are not separable from the way that norms and social power act on a person is not just an uncomfortable thought or a theory that adequately seems to sum up experiences that one might have had. The subject of moral philosophy is often cast as that of an agent who breaks with the power of these norms in rational deliberation. However, this capacity of rationality and its scope are called into question when one considers precisely how this subject of rationality is continuously formed and sustained through its subjection to social norms. The desire for the good life as a traditional resource for ethical thought becomes problematic if one takes seriously how this desire and the kind of good life that one can desire are socially formed and how the norms that determine what can be desired as good can make lives and bodies less rather than more possible.

This chapter examines the thought of Judith Butler. It argues that Butler is Nietzsche in drag. Not the bitter Nietzsche with the bad conscience that he promptly circuited into the essays comprising On the Genealogy of Morals but that other spectral, imaginary Nietzsche, his double, who, until now, lurking in the shadows at the side of the stage of philosophy, finally makes his dancing entrance in the theater of Judith Butler in the drag outfit of the “transvaluation of values.” Several of Butler’s texts are analyzed, including Giving an Account of Oneself, After Antigone, and The Psychic Life of Power.

Chapter 2 examines Freud’s persistent hesitation concerning the organicism of psychic life via his recourse to the figure of the pseudopodium, whereby the most elementary life-form, the amoeba, projects itself outside itself.

This chapter offers propositions that grow out of the way in which familiar theories of race take on new forms when cross-pollinated with ascendant biopolitical regimes. These familiar theories are (1) the labor theory of race, (2) the necropolitical theory of race, (3) the psychic life of racial projection, (4) racial minoritization as it relates to zoe/“bare life,” (5) racial critique forwarded through aesthetic forms, and (6) the worry and hope over racial distinction overridden by commonality of species. The propositions are hypotheses and invitations for further dialogue and discussion rather than established theories as of yet. The chapter concludes with a brief foray into the styling of this project on the surrealist figure of the exquisite corpse.

This chapter reviews four books by Judith Butler: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997); Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). For a long time, academic feminism in America has been closely allied to the practical struggle to achieve justice and equality for women. Feminist theory has been understood by theorists as not just fancy words on paper; theory is connected to proposals for social change. Thus feminist scholars have engaged in many concrete projects relating to issues such as rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment, trafficking of women and girls in prostitution, and social and political equality of lesbians and gay men. Some theorists have left the academy altogether, feeling more comfortable in the world of practical politics, where they can address these urgent problems directly. Butler's work relies heavily on some of history's leading thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, Monique Wittig, Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J. L. Austin, and Saul Kripke. Her main idea is that gender is a social artifice.

The introduction situates the argument of this book in relation to four recent books: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald; and The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Together, these five books articulate a consistent, overarching critical and theoretical project concerned with the pressures that structure psychic and political life in modernity, and with the remains of religion and political theology within an apparently secular world. In particular, the introduction charts the emergence of the central concept of the “flesh,” while also discussing its significance. It then concludes with reflections on the distinctive methodology that conjoins political theory and political economy with psychoanalytic and literary thinking.