In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler claims that her work challenges a common assumption in liberal thought that one simply needs to oppose political power in order to become liberated. She analyzes the social and psychological formation of the subject and argues, in a Foucauldian vein, that power is not just “what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings we are” (1997a: 2). Differently put, for Butler we become political subjects as we become subjected and subordinated to social and political dominant power.

Her argument has strong implications for a theory of political agency. Rather than perceiving political action only as refusing conventional political norms, as in, for instance, Rosa Parks's refusal to sit in the back of the bus in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, we can understand Parks's actions as generated by a set of conditions that preceded her intervention. Parks's actions had an enduring impact because they came from a woman who was perceived as having integrity and honesty. Her image as a hardworking black person helped the cause of black civic activism. Had she been seen as lazy and dishonest, the impact of her gesture of civil disobedience would have been different. Rosa Parks's act of resistance was a performative intervention. It was enabled by conventional racial assumptions even as she contested such assumptions and disrupted the normative order of Southern racism. Parks did not oppose racial discrimination in a vacuum; ideological and racial conditions provided the circumstances for her to act as a decent black woman and to contest the racist definitions of blackness. Her disruptive intervention was made possible by norms that constituted her as a viable political subject.

Power, in Butler's understanding of the term, is constituted by a constitutive tension. Political agency—and the possibility of an emancipatory politics—is inherently marked by a double bind. On the one hand, we are formed by power because power offers the condition of the subject's possibility and articulates its formation. Without previous conventions about social and linguistic existence, the subject would not exist.