Introduction

In principle, the concept of the universal subject, delineated and implemented by Greek philosophy and politics and reformulated by Enlightenment rationalism and (post-) revolutionary politics, reserves differences among subjects to the private sphere. In order to undermine the prerogatives of universalist conceptions of subjectivity, postmodernist scholarship emphasizes the heterogeneity and mutability of subjects, the specific political interests that motivate their actions, and the irreconcilable differences that divide overdetermined gendered, ethnic, racial, sexual or national communities in democratic societies. Postmodernist and feminist scholarship point out the constitutive exclusions and contradictions of so-called universal subjectivity. Any theory of the "subject" will have been appropriated to the "masculine". Hence, current postmodernist and feminist critiques of universal subjectivity are inseparable from the ideological objectives of undermining the prerogatives of historically privileged subjects and the institutional structures and symbolic strategies that sustain or disseminate their power.