In the writing of James Joyce, we have an unusually complex and self-conscious articulation of the problem of justice and its representation as defined under modern or post-Enlightenment conditions of ethical and political practice. My work interprets his formal and stylistic evolution from Dubliners to Ulysses as a progressive attempt to negotiate among the most fiercely contested and structurally significant modes of social difference - racial, colonial, class, and, especially, sexual - without pretending to a false transcendence. The interconnectedness of my critical topoi - the problem of justice, the contextually determined operation of gender, and the historical position and textual production of Joyce-will be examined from several angles in order to illuminate three basic areas of theoretical and literary concern: (i) the nature and value of justice itself, particularly with respect to the politics of gender; (2) the fundamental mutation in the parameters of justice made possible by the bourgeois, democratic revolutions and visible by capitalist and colonialist expansion; (3) most intensively, the manifestation of these theoretical and material developments in a sexual/textual politics peculiarly situated to take account of them. I find that Joyce's struggle to transform the pathos of his own ambivalent subject position into an ethos of discursive justice reveals both the self-transformative potential and the profound limitations of that ideal.