Private language schools in Iran are sites of unfavorable employment conditions and complex power relations between between teachers and higher ranking administrators.I investigate this situation in the case of one English teacher in Mashhad, Iran. I was acquainted with him from the time we were colleagues there in 2015. In 2018 I interviewed him a short time after he had resigned from one private school and then started work at another. Case study method is used to explore his experience in-depth, allowing us to view this process through a close-up lense while in a contextualized condition. In a broader context, Butler’s (1997) concept of subjection enabled this study to view the daily experiences of teachers in the private language schools of Iran. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler considers the way psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. In her critique to the Foucauldian account, she asserts that the subject cannot be reduced to the power by which it is occasioned, nor can this power be reducible to the subject. Subordination, however, is the very entity which allows the existence of the subject (to be something in order to not be something else). Butler’s concept of subjection enabled this ethnography to explore the daily experiences of these teachers. The current analysis focuses on how this teacher went through the resignation process, and how the context of private language schools in Mashhad, provided the grounds for that series of events. Regarding the participant observation in the context of private language schools in Mashhad, this study reveals that the relationship between language school and teacher is that of the power and subject relation, i.e. language teachers are both subject to and the subject of power. Regarding the context, the example of the language teacher's resignation demonstrates the period he had been undergoing subordination. Further, the data from the interview with him indicated both his subjection and the relation between power and psyche.