To live in a metropolitan colony such as turn-of-the-century Ireland was to experience acutely the always double inscription of justice. Joyce's awareness of the condition of differend manifests itself near the outset of his career, in an undergraduate essay on the poet James Clarence Mangan, the very type for many modern Irish literati of a colonized creativity. Writing of the deeply ambivalent attitudes held by Celtic revivalists toward a considerable, recognizably Irish poet who was “so little of a patriot,” Joyce declares, “ Certainly he is wiser who accuses no man of acting unjustly… seeing that what is called injustice is never so but as an aspect of justice” (CW 76). In context, Joyce's statement points up how the idea of justice participates in the doubleness inherent in the sociopolitical circumstance of Ireland in general and particularly of its eastern pale. So too does Stephen Dedalus' theory that the domestic politics of colonial Ireland operate according to a “compensative system” in which would-be patriots manage to extract a measure of economic “justice” for themselves from an imperial regime whose injustice they otherwise deplore (SH64).

A more general or sweeping instance of the differend informs the divisions haunting modern Ireland, what has since come to be known as phallocentrism. Because the gender system at large is organized with reference to norms and values that privilege masculinity, the binary syntax in which issues of sexual identity and difference can be raised at all tends to appropriate and subordinate the figure of woman to a phallic standard.