Segmented Foundations and Pluralism 225of the twentieth century.^24 In this sense, it can be understood as another, if subtly
distinct, manifestation of the broader debate between universalist and conventionalist
arguments in political theory.
The third phase of feminist difference had no biological or psychological trappings.
Its roots were in postmodern theory. This perspective developed initially from French
feminists, such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray—although it has
much broader following in North America and Britain.^25 They were suspicious of
notions of formal equality, and even of the title feminism. Although influenced by
deconstructive and genealogical methods and suspicious of the biological conceptions
of difference, they nonetheless repudiated the masculine ‘phallocentric’ domination
of language and called for a unique recoding of language away from masculinity—an
écriture feminine. Language was thus seen as a primary mode of male domination.
In this argument, difference settled upon the theme of language and the manner
in which identity is constructed. Postmodern theory, in general terms, has been
standardly critical of theories of identity and language. The beginnings of this critical
unease can be found in ‘critical theorists’, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, who
focused critically on the ‘logic of identity’ present in Enlightenment thought and
consequently, what they referred to, as the ‘terrorizing unity’ implicit in such identity.
Unified identity is revealed through what it excludes. Identity, qua Enlightened reason,
is thus indifferent or hostile to difference. This latter focus also clearly resonates with
the early work of both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. For Iris Marion Young—
following this line—rationality, impartiality, and neutrality, within current mainly
neo-Kantian inspired justice and rights-based theory, ‘expresses a logic of identity that
seeks to reduce differences to unity’. Identity abstracts from particularity in order to
generate the universal. The reduction to a single unified substance represses difference
denying the uniqueness or character of the ‘different’. For Young, ‘difference...names
both the play of concrete events and the shifting differentiation on which signification
depends’. She continues that ‘reason...is always inserted in a plural, heterogeneous
world that outruns totalizing comprehension’. In summary, for Young, ‘the logic of
identity flees sensuous particularity’ (Young, 1990: 97–9). It is worth noting here
that Young’s work on difference is a blend of radical feminism, critical theory and
poststructural theory. The problem for postmodern difference-based theory though
is where feminism is to go next.^26 Once one has acknowledged the heterogeneous
public and ‘revisioned’ or ‘re-sited’ the political, where do we go next (see Coole
2000: 350)? As has recently been observed, the strategy of postmodern displacement
‘largely adopts a critical perspective...but has few of the theoretical tools necessary
to assert a practical alternative’ (see Squires 1999: 224).
The fourth major form of difference is embodied in poststructural and postmod-
ern theory—although as indicated, it also underpins a great deal of contemporary
feminism, anthropology, and some postcolonial theory.^27 The rational human agent
is seen by, for example Foucault, as an accidental phenomenon, which takes little
or no account of the contingencies of human nature. Whereas neo-Kantians and
utilitarians, to the present day, think of rationality as universal and transcending
contingency, Foucault considers it a highly specific social and historically contingent