ABSTRACT
Traditional histories of logic trace an intermittent but steady progress toward logical truth. They point out where logicians in the past made mistakes and where they show their genius by correctly intuiting logical relations. If logic is words of power that proclaim an authoritative unitary truth, there is another power in words, the power to respond and so to challenge another’s discourse and refuse its pretensions to autonomy. Contemporary structuralist and poststructuralist theories of language have inscribed logical relations at the very heart of language. Trapped in a language that has its substance not in speech but in formal relations issued from the Name of the Father, women play a futile game on the outskirts of logic, trying again and again the blind spots of reflexivity, Gottlob Frege’s antinomy, Ockham’s mysteries, Aristotle’s intuitions, Parmenides’s Being. Regardless of an avante-garde of women’s language and women’s writing, logic remains a permanent and central part of the curriculum that represents knowledge.
