Apologia for academic radicals -- I: Powers, norms, and vocabularies of contestation -- 1. Foucault on modern power: empirical insights and normative confusions -- 2. Michel Foucault: a "young conservative"? -- 3. Foucault's body language: a posthumanist political rhetoric? -- II: On the political and the symbolic -- 4. The French derrideans: politicizing deconstruction or deconstructing the political? -- 5. Solidarity or singularity? Richard Rorty between romanticism and technocracy -- III: Gender and the politics of need interpretation -- 6. What's critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender -- 7. Women, welfare, and the politics of need interpretation -- 8. Struggle over needs: outline of a socialist-feminist critical theory of late capitalist political culture.