ABSTRACT
French philosophy and social theory, in particular the deconstruction and poststructural theory of the Sixties and Seventies, became so influential in North America by the Eighties that they arguably established the main discursive connections in feminist thought and cultural theory. While J. Lacan's attack on the idea of a unitary ego scarcely affected its target, North American ego psychology; it has deeply imbued feminist thought. The critique of identity has often been reiterated in feminist thought as part of the rejection of essentialism As feminist theory has shown, the subject, more precisely the historically masculine subject, has always been constituted by its disavowal of dependency on the maternal, the subordination and control of what it needs. Politically, the possibility of mutual intersubjectivity is predicated on the very difference that also leads to continual misfiring of recognition, the very plurality that strains subjectivity.
