in a nutshell, irene, Butler makes resistance subordinate to power and
then explores this apparent contradiction that our resistance is
always already determined with power. in fact, for Foucault,
resistance is precisely what is not determined by power, the excess.
Mark,
Forgive me for butting in, but i don't think that's a fair reading of Butler.
Butler's reading of Foucault, far from being "incorrect", is arguably as good, if not better, than any other secondary source doing the rounds. Her summaries of Foucault on power and the human subject are concise without mutilating the theory. What she then does *from* that reading, the uses she makes of Foucauldian principles, do diverge in a number of fairly significant ways... but she's not "incorrect", she's just not Foucault, and nor should she be.
For Butler, *agency* is "precisely what is not determined by power, the excess". Conceptually, Butler's "agency" and Foucault's "resistance" are roughly interchangeable -- it's mostly that the language and the emphasis are different, not the basic principles of their context and operation.
The first sentence (above -- "in a nutshell" etc) is not quite right: Butler makes *the human subject* always already subordinate to power, and then explores our attachment to this subjection, and, more difficultly, how agency and resistance are even possible within such a highly deterministic frame (a determinism that was already lurking in Foucault, and which she's just made more explicit).
It should be borne in mind that when Butler talks about the subject's "subordination to power" she's not using an instrumentalist or even reified model of power, she primarily using a (slightly unorthodox) Foucauldian model -- for example, one form of power that the subject is "subordinated to" is the requirement that their utterances remain intelligible within their culture's dominant regimes of truth/truth games/whatever. That kind of always-already subordination to power is well within the bounds of Foucauldian orthodoxy.
amy.