ABSTRACT
I. Space and Woman as Metaphors Many contemporary thinkers have adopted spatial metaphors to represent particular hypotheses or relationships between various theoretical concepts. As Jacques Derrida suggests above, this choice is perhaps not a new one-the whole history of meta physics coinciding with the history of these very metaphors. Michel Foucault concurs, adding that "[a] whole history [could be and] remains to be written of spaces/'6 Yet the preponderance of these metaphors at this particular time should not be passed over as merely another moment in this history, as if the importance of space as a theoretical model has remained constant. Foucault, through his historical analyses of the human sciences, recognizes a period, from which we are now emerging, in which space was less useful to philosophy:
Among all the reasons which led to spaces suffering for so long a certain neglect, I will mention just one__ At the moment when a considered politics of spaces was starting to develop, at the end of the eighteenth century, the new achievements in theoretical and experimental physics dis lodged philosophy from its ancient right to speak of the world, the cosmos, finite or infinite space. This . . . reduced philosophy to the field of the problematic of time. Since Kant, what is to be thought by the philosopher is time. (EP, 149)7
If indeed space has been reappropriated, it remains to be deter mined why this neglected characterization of the world has now be come, to philosophy, at least acceptable and perhaps even necessary. What can the construct of space offer the post-structuralist philoso pher? Alice Jardine provides a preliminary response in describing the current inclination of philosophy toward self-reflection:
In general, this [recent crisis in legitimation] has brought about, within the master narratives . . . a questioning and turning back upon their own discourse, in an attempt to create a new space or spacing within themselves for survivals__ [The] otherthan-themselves [which the, most often male, narratives work to incorporate] is almost always a "space" of some kind (over which the narrative has lost control), and this space has been coded as feminine, as woman.8
