JB. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997 pp. 18-19
If power works not merely to dominate or oppress existing subjects, but also to form subjects, what is this formation?
… and account of subjection, it seems, must be traced in the turns of psychic life … in the peculiar turning of a subject against itself that takes place in acts of self-reproach, conscience, and melancholia that work in tandem with processes of social regulation 18-19
🙂 Remember! The formation of the subject takes place through the incorporation of norms.
How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection? … how are we to account for the desire for the norm and for subjection more generally in terms of a prior desire for social existence, a desire exploited by regulatory power?
a) the formation of the subject involves the regulatory formation of the psyche, including how might we rejoin the discourse of power with the discourse of psychoanalysis: and
b) make such a conception of the subject work as a notion of political agency in postliberatory times.
Incorporation? page 19, she says:
And yet, if we refuse the ontological dualism that posits the separation of the political and the psychic, it seems crucial to offer a critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power. If forms of regulatory power are sustained in part through the formation of a subject, and if that formation takes place according to the requirements of power, specifically, as the incorporation of norms, then a theory of subject formation must give an account of this process of incorporation, and the notion of incorporation must be interrogated to ascertain the psychic topography it assumes. How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection?
In claiming that social norms are internalized, we have not yet explained what incorporation or, more generally, internalization is, what it means for a norm to become internalized or what happens to the norm in the process of internalization (19).
The prior desire for social existence
Where social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all (20).
But if the very production of the subject and the ofrmation of that wil are the consequences of a primary subordination, then the vulnerability of the subject to a power not of its own making is unavoidable. That vulnerability qualifies the subject as an exploitable kind of being.