ones. The moral of Kuhnian philosophy of science is important: there is no discipline called 'critique' that one can practise to get strikingly better politics, any more than there is something called 'scientific method' that one can apply in order to get strikingly better physics. Critique of ideology at best, mopping-up, rather than pathbreaking. It is parasitic on prophecy rather than a substitute for it. It stands to the imaginative production of new descriptions of what has been going on (e.g. of what men have been doing to women) as Locke (who described himself as 'an under-labourer', clearing away the rubbish) stood to Boyle and Newton. The picture of philosophy as pioneer is part of a logocentric conception of intellectual work with which we fans of Derrida should have no truck.

One reason why many feminists resist this pragmatist view of the political utility of philosophy is that masculinism seems so thoroughly built into everything we do and say in contemporary society that it looks as if only some really massive intellectual change could budge it. So lots of feminists think that only by taking on some great big intellectual evil of the sort that philosophers specialize in spotting (something on the scale of logocentrism, or 'binarism', or 'technological thinking') -interpreting this evil as intrinsically masculinist and masculinism as standing or falling with it -- can they achieve the radicality and scope their task seems to demand. Without such an alliance with a campaign against some large philosophical monster, the campaign against masculinism seems to them doomed to some form of complicity in present practices. ¹⁵

This view seems to me to get the relative sizes all wrong. Masculinism is a much bigger and fiercer monster than any of the little, parochial monsters with which pragmatists and deconstructionists struggle. For masculinism is the defence of the people who have been on top since the beginning of history against attempts to topple them; that sort of monster is very adaptable, and I suspect that it can survive almost as well in an anti-logocentric as in a logocentric philosophical environment. It is true that, as Derrida has acutely noted, the logocentric tradition is bound up in subtle ways with the drive for purity -- the drive to escape contamination by feminine messes -- symbolized by what he calls 'the essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality'. ¹⁶ But that drive for purity and that 'sublime figure' are likely to survive in some still more highly sublimated form even if we philosophers somehow manage an overcoming (or even just a Verwindung) of metaphysics.

Pragmatism -- considered as a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge, objectivity, and language -- is neutral between feminism and masculinism. So if one wants specifically feminist doctrines about

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