put it differently -- the very 'peace' the absence of struggle, is already a form of struggle, the (temporal) victory of one of the sides in the struggle. In so far as the very invisibility of class struggle ('class peace') is already an effect of class struggle -- that is, of the hegemony exerted by one side in the struggle -- one is tempted to compare the status of class struggle to that of the Hitchcockian McGuffin: 'What is class struggle? -- The antagonistic process that constitutes classes and determines their relationship. -- But in our society there is no struggle between the classes! -- You see how it functions!, ³⁰

This notion of class struggle qua antagonism enables us to contrast the real of antagonism with the complementary polarity of opposites: perhaps the reduction of antagonism to polarity is one of the elementary ideological operations. Suffice it to recall the standard New Age procedure of presupposing a kind of natural balance of cosmic opposites (reason--emotions, active--passive, intellect--intuition, consciousness--unconscious, yin--yang, etc.), and then of conceiving our age as the age that laid too much stress upon one of the two poles, upon the 'male principle' of activity--reason -- the solution, of course, lies in re-establishing the equilibrium of the two principles . . . .

The 'progressive' tradition also bears witness to numerous attempts to conceive (sexual, class) antagonism as the coexistence of two opposed positive entities: from a certain kind of 'dogmatic' Marxism that posits 'their' bourgeois science and 'our' proletarian science side by side, to a certain kind of feminism that posits masculine discourse and feminine discourse or 'writing' side by side. Far from being 'too extreme', these attempts are, on the contrary, not extreme enough: they presuppose as their position of enunciation a third neutral medium within which the two poles coexist; that is to say, they back down on the consequences of the fact that there is no point of convergence, no neutral ground shared by the two antagonistic sexual or class positions. ³¹ As far as science is concerned: science, of course, is not neutral in the sense of objective knowledge not affected by class struggle and at the disposal of all classes, yet for that very reason it is one; there are not two sciences, and class struggle is precisely the struggle for this one science, for who will appropriate it. It is the same with 'discourse': there are not two discourses, 'masculine' and 'feminine'; there is one discourse split from within by the sexual antagonism -- that is to say, providing the 'terrain' on which the battle for hegemony takes place.

What is at stake here could also be formulated as the problem of the status of 'and' as a category. In Althusser 'and' functions as a precise theoretical category: when an 'and' appears in the title of some of his essays, this little word unmistakably signals the confrontation of some

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