Abstract

Is history a category of reason, or is reason a category of history? These opposing questions have divided the structuralist from the materialist-but neither question is wrong. Analysis of the logic of oppositions challenges feminism, in particular, to find a logic-and a poetics-in which to render its values without historical or theoretical naiveté. I explore the question of the timing of feminism through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray