Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-212) and index.

"How can I deny that these hands and this body are mine?" -- Merleau-Ponty and the touch of Malebranche -- The desire to live: Spinoza's Ethics under pressure -- To sense what is living in the other : Hegel's early love -- Kierkegaard's speculative despair -- Sexual difference as a question of ethics : alterities of the flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty -- Violence, nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon.

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power.