ABSTRACT
A culture has the truths it deserves; it is therefore significant that the notion of ‘difference’ has been on the western theoretical agenda for over a century. Since Freud and Nietzsche it has emerged as one of the main vehicles of critique of the metaphysical, idealist, Hegelian vision of ‘the knowing subject’ cast in the image of ‘the man of reason’. 1 As a sign of western culture’s will-to- know, the overriding importance granted to ‘difference’ in the age of modernity marks a double shift, away from the belief-like notion that the subject coincides with his conscious, rational self but also away from the overwhelming masculinity of such notions as subjectivity and consciousness.
