Cornel West has recently called Judith Butler ‘the leading social theorist of our generation’ (West 2011: 92), and while I agree completely with the spirit of West's claim, here I plan to dissent from the specific content of his laudatory description. Doubtless Butler takes her place today as one of the foremost theorists and public intellectuals; her work is widely recognised as helping to reshape a number of fields across the humanities; and she speaks with a powerful voice to a variety of national and international political contexts. Nonetheless, I contend that precisely a social theory - or better, a richer account of what I call the social formation - is lacking in Butler's work. In order to defend this claim and to show why it matters, the core of this chapter examines the location in Butler's corpus where, I argue, she expunges a conception of the social formation from her very own sources, thereby calling more conspicuous attention to its absence in her own work. I also articulate the significance of this move in relation to her broader intellectual trajectory, particularly in terms of her post-2001 writings. I read Butler with the working hypothesis that her putative turn to ethics has little to do with the questions of moral philosophy per se. Rather, while something is missing in Butler's early work, that something is not ethics, but rather an account of the social formation.

Butler's early fascination (indeed, at times, a fixation) with the problem of subject-formation produces, within The Psychic Life of Power (1997a), a series of blind spots concerning the larger question of society, of the social whole; Butler's intense focus on producing a ‘theory of subjection’ leads her to purge a viable account of the social formation from the very texts she draws from. This subtraction of the social formation in Butler's reading helps to explain her explicit efforts in recent works to offer an account of ‘the social’ - an account, I argue, that merely falls back on a liberal, aggregative model (one that Butler would otherwise eschew).

The chapter focuses on a close engagement with Butler's selfnamed 'theory of subjection'. Butler derives that theory from her readings of Freud, Foucault, Lacan and Althusser, but here I centre my analysis specifically on Butler's reading of Hegel and Althusser.