ABSTRACT
Placing feminism beside itself, then, is a way of facing the challenge of what Michel Foucault called "critical ontology", a "permanent critique of our historical era."2 In this sense, critique is a transgressive working at the frontiers of what appears to us as the very condition of our being; it is, in other terms, a "limit-attitude." Thus, to return to the volume's title once again, feminism's limit-attitude would be neither purely inside itself nor outside itself, but more properly beside itself. Neither fully of the past nor of the present, feminism's consciousness of itself would be contingent: It would be by no means clear what could be assumed in a discussion of the temporality or historicity of feminism.
