J. Butler. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997 This is JB on page 99.
Resistance as an effect of power
Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power that it is said to oppose. This insistence on the dual possiblity of being both constituted by the law and an effect of resistance to the law marks a departure from the Lacanian framework.
For Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversions, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations.
The notion of “the symbolic” does not address the multiplicity of power vectors upon which Foucault insists, for power in Foucault not only consists in the reiterated elaboration of norms or interpellating demands, but is formative or productive, malleable, multiple, proliferative, and conflictual. … disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute a subject in Foucault, or rather if it does, it simultaneously constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution.
Indeed, I would add, a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character. This repetition or, better, iterability thus becomes the non-place of subversion, the possibility of a re-embodying of the subjectivating norm that can redirect its normativity (99).