from and standing over against the object of knowledge. In Hegel's conception experience consists in the shifting reciprocal determinations of subject and object, and culminates in an awareness that the very distinction between the two is valid only from a restricted standpoint. As early as his essay on the difference between the systems of Fichte and Schelling, Hegel had established this fundamental principle of his philosophizing. 'The need of philosophy can satisfy itself, he writes, 'by simply penetrating to the principle of nullifying all fixed oppositions and connecting the limited to the Absolute. This satisfaction found in the principle of absolute identity is characteristic of philosophy as such.' ⁹ However, as this quotation makes clear, the dialectical mobilization of the relation between subject and object in Hegel does not entail the abandonment of the principle of identity. Hence, for post-structuralist thought the reliance on an Absolute which relativizes and reveals the 'reifying' character of conceptual dissection, the operation of the understanding, results in an even more ineluctable form of coercion, since the movement from standpoint to standpoint is orientated towards a predetermined goal. The voyage of consciousness is undertaken only with a view to the treasure of experience which can be accumulated and brought home: the individual moments of the voyage are not enjoyed simply for themselves. This critique of Hegel is also, of course, implicitly or explicitly, a critique of Marxism, which is seen as attempting to coerce the plurality of social and political movements into a single unswerving dialectic of history.

One of the fundamental problems confronting post-structuralist thought, therefore -- a problem which accounts for many of its distinctive features -- is how to reject simultaneously both the repressive rigidities of self-consciousness and conceptual thought, and the available dialectical alternatives. In the quest for a solution to this difficulty, it is Nietzsche who plays the most important role. This is because the central imaginative polarity in Nietzsche's work between the fluidity of the ultimate world of becoming, and the static systems of concepts laid over this fluidity, allows him to reveal the deceptiveness of all partial perspectives on reality, while also blocking the possibility of a historical totality of perspectives that would reveal what cannot be known through any one alone. Nietzsche's characteristic verbal compounds (hineinlegen, hinzulügen. . .) render unmistakable his view that all meaning, coherence and teleological movement is projected on to a world which, in itself, is blank, purposeless, indifferent, chaotic. This conception of the relation between thought and reality is common to much of the Nietzsche-influenced philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s in France. Its most striking and systematically elaborated exemplification is perhaps to be found in Lyotard's Économie Libidinale, which is