interesting. this is the point of butler's article i posted here a coupla daze ago. for those interested, i posted the pdf again because i noticed that the old link was broken:
http://cleandraws.com/butler_contingentfoundations.pdf
relevant excerpt:
"But my task is, I think, significantly different from that which would articulate a comprehensive universality. In the first place, such a totalizing notion could only be achieved at the cost of producing new and further exclusions. The term "~niversality" would have to be left permanently open, permanently contested, permanently contingent, in order not to foreclose in advance future claims for inclusion. Indeed, from my position and from any historically constrained perspective, any totalizing concept of the universal will shut down rather than authorize the unanticipated and unanticipatable claims that will be made under the sign of "the universal." In this sense, I am not doing away with the category, but trying to relieve the category of its foundatiohalist weight in order to render it as a site of permanent political contest.
A social theory committed to democratic contestation within a postcolonial horizon needs to find a way to bring into question the foundations it is compelled to lay down. It is this movement of interrogating that ruse of authority that seeks to close itself off from contest that is, in my view, at the heart of any radical political project. Inasmuch as poststructuralism offers a mode of critique that effects this contestation of the foundationalist move, it cab be used as a part of such a radical agenda. Note that I have said, "it can be used": I think there are no necessary political consequences for such a theory, but only a possible political deployment."
(from p. 8 of the essay included in _Feminists Theorize the Political_ (which is marvelously analyzed by Janet Halley in _Split Decisions_.)
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)