Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Columbia University Press, 2007.

This has just been newly published in paperback.

Publisher’s page

• Draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, and others
•    The book is both an analysis of power and an account of autonomy
• Up to now, most critical theorists have assumed that these two aspects of the politics of the self are incompatible with one another
• develops a theoretical framework that illuminates how the self can both be constituted by power and at the same time capable of being autonomously self-constituting.

Some theorists understand the self as constituted by power relations, while others insist upon the self’s autonomous capacities for critical reflection and deliberate self-transformation. All too often, these understandings of the self are assumed to be incompatible. Amy Allen, however, argues that the…