The Doxa of Difference

t is Lempting, writes Derrida scholar Rodolphe Gasche, to read the philosophical history of difference as exemplifying the progressive emancipation of difference from identity (1994, 82). Our own time is uniquely prone to such a reading. As Gasch6 notes, difference reigns upreme in critical thought, whereas identity barely dares to show its face. Emblazoned on book covers, routinely invoked in intellectual debates, "difference" functions a an unassailable value in itself, seemingly irrespective of its referent orcontext. Difference has become doxa, a magic word of theory and politics radiant with redemptive meanings. Feminism has its own distinctive rsion of this story of the triumph of difference over identity. The origins of feminist thought are usually attributed to such figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, who drew on Enlightenment ideals to protest against the subordination fwomen. Yet such ideals, it soon transpired, were not congenial friends of feminism but merely masks for a phallocentric logic based on the tyranny of identity. Second-wave feminists sought instead to reclaim the feminine; women's liberation lay in the affirmation of their irreducible difference rather than in the pursuit of an illusory goal of equality. This gynocentric ideal in turn has lost much of its power, thanks to the ascent of poststructuralism as well as to extensive criticisms ofits political exclusions and biases. As a result, we are now in a postmodem condition, where female difference has fragmented into multiple differences and any appeal to general ideals or norms can only be considered politically questionable and theoretically naive. This story has been told on numerous occasions and in various registers. For some it is a narrative of progress, as feminism sheds its essentialisms and universalisms to achieve amore sophisticated stage of theoretical consciousness. For others it is a narrative of the fall, as feminism is lured from its true goals by internecine squabbles and the spurious prestige of French avant-garde thought. Many feminist cholars are familiar with this story;