ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show that modern political thought is characterized by a fundamental repression of sexual difference, that the very theoretical structure of the modern system of power ignores female sexual difference by absorbing it into an abstract paradigm of the individual, which is understood as male and universal.1 This amnesia arises at various levels, and in this essay I shall be concerned with a model of the modern power system. The first and decisive formulation of this model is found in seventeenth-century theories of natural law, which divide state from society: and since it suits the purposes of my enquiry, I shall make use of this schematic distinction.
