ABSTRACT
As a postscript to the essay written in September of 1990, I would like to respond to the criticisms articulated by both Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser and offer some remarks in response to Drucilla Cornell's contributions to this volume. In some ways, the publication of these essays in 1995 seems already outdated. "Contingent Foundations" was a lecture I wrote in a polemical style and it is not one that I would write again today in the same way. At the time I understood myself to be embattled: what I understood to be an unreasoned and anxious response to the entry of poststructuralist discourse into feminist theory was, I thought, to be countered through a reasoned set of rejoinders to the complaint.
