There is something about indexing, especially indexing a book like Feminism Beside Itself, which forces you to go beyond treating each essay in isolation. You are led instead to do reading that goes beyond the diversity of personal styles and approaches, a reading that brings to your attention points of worry, themes, and questions which are common to all the texts. You also find yourself having fun with the logic of this indexing business because it is, after all, a rather fastiduous job. So you play with its logic, pushing it to absurdity. And you want to include a couple of joke-entries; you want to put side-by-side the names of such famous people as Aristotle and Madonna, Tina Turner and Shakespeare. Or you have fun registering Clarence Thomas under the "Anita Hill" entry of this strange directory: "Clarence Thomas: see Anita Hill"... She tells the story.

At one point, led by this indexing logic, I even found myself sending the reader from the "women" entry to a very succinct definition on page 187: "feminism's greatest problem." The phrase is taken from Rosalyn Delmar's "What is Feminism" where she argues that "Women, in a sense, are feminism's greatest problem."1 1

Feminism Beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) p. 187.

The point is, therefore, not to discard a previous, rather monolithic Idea of feminism for a revised, more appropriate one that could be agreed upon by more women, but to try instead to think of feminism without recourse to an Idea at all.3 3

Here I am making an argument suggested to me by my reading of Bill Readings' book on the question of the university, The University in Ruins (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Pushing this even further, I would argue that we need to do more than simply multiply the narratives that allow us to produce Identities, that is to say we need to do more than multiply /pp. 5-6/ histories or even Histories. We should question instead the very structural logic that guides our production of these individual narratives as well as the logic by which we make them fit into a larger narrative frame. In this sense, it is not enough to allow for the proliferation of a larger number of narratives; we must also pay attention to (and explore) new modes of narrativity—a work which has been done mostly through philosophical reflection but also–and I would suggest often more successfully–through poetic or literary experimentation. The idea is thus not only to allow for the production of more histories or Histories of feminism, or for the production of new revolutionary ones (the modernist temptation). Rather, we should irreverently divert the narratives with which we are already familiar from their assigned end, an end which, more often than not, has had to do with the construction of an identity. This may mean, for example, allowing for difference not within but from History as a narrative genre.

Here we may not be far from the call, made by Karin Cope and Alessandra Tanesini, that we pay attention to the question of ethics and politics, without waiting first for the "metaphysical" question of identity to be solved. At the same time, we should consider whether feminism must start thinking about this question of identities by paying attention to the "common sense" versions of feminism held by women who refuse to identify themselves as feminists, that is, start paying attention to a cluster of small narratives which do not fear contradiction. It may not be an uninteresting approach; it may map for us the kind of logic that is involved when one disregards—rather than attempts to "move beyond"—identity as a construct, refuses to go by an Idea of feminism, choosing instead to pay attention to the more urgent issues of ethics and politics.

/p. 6/