《权力的精神生活:服从的理论》对黑格尔、尼采、弗洛伊德、福柯、阿尔杜塞等有关服从理论的论述进行了比较研究，以读书笔记的形式阐述了作者对服从的观点：权力在主体的屈从与生产中的双重作用与权力所采取的精神形式。作为权力的一种形式，服从是自相矛盾的。被一种外在于自身的权力所支配是权力所采取的一种熟悉的和苦恼的形式。但是，为了发现“某人”是什么，某人作为一个主体的形成，所依赖的权利却完全是另一种权力。按照福柯的说法，如果我们理解了权力同样形成了主体，它就提供了它存在的条件和它欲望的轨迹。权力不仅仅是我们的存在所依靠的东西，它也形成了自反性。利用黑格尔、尼采、弗洛伊德、福柯和阿尔杜塞，这本富有挑战性和明晰的著作提供了主体形成的理论，它阐明了矛盾的社会权利的精神作用。

What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions What have I done?and What ought I to do?She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, Who is this 'I' who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as fallible creaturesto create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness. Judtith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The most recent of her books are Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender.