Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Preface -- Introduction -- From the symbolic to sexual difference -- From sexual difference to essentialism, and a debate about psychical reality -- Returning to the symbolic -- The papers -- Notes -- Part One The story so far -- Chapter One Moving backwards or forwards -- Lacan and feminism: strange bedfellows? -- Women: the longest evolution -- Juliet Mitchell and the human sciences -- Feminism and the 'human' -- Feminism and the human sciences -- Notes -- Chapter Two Still crazy after all these years -- Blind dates -- Till death do drive us apart -- But we have so much in common -- Trivial pursuits -- Boy meets girl? -- Your place or mine? -- A thicker entanglement -- Three words in a boat -- Notes -- Trivial allusions -- Part Two The story framed by an institutional context -- Chapter Three The politics of impenetrability -- Notes -- Chapter Four Notes for an analysis -- Notes -- Part Three Towards another symbolic (1): the essential thing -- Chapter Five The politics of ontological difference -- Genealogical perspectives -- 'I', this other -- The body, encore -- Essentialism with a difference -- Notes -- Chapter Six Rereading Irigaray -- The mother/daughter relationship -- Women's relation to origin: Speculum -- The imaginary and the symbolic -- Notes -- Chapter Seven The gesture in psychoanalysis -- Notes -- Part Four Towards another symbolic (2): beyond the phallus -- Chapter Eight Thoroughly postmodern feminist criticism -- Psychoanalysis and gender -- From the marginal to the maternal -- From feminism to postmodernism -- Breaking the boundaries of discourse -- Notes -- Chapter Nine 'Their "symbolic" exists, it holds power-we, the sowers of disorder, know it only too well' -- Notes -- Chapter Ten Echo and Narcissus -- Notes -- Part Five Sexual difference (1): reason and revolution.

Chapter Eleven Patriarchal thought and the drive for knowledge -- Feminism, science, and philosophy -- The structures of knowledge: Michèle Le Doeuff -- Knowledge as analytical dialogue -- Epistemophilia or the drive for knowledge -- Knowledge, sublimation, the body, and the drives -- Notes -- Chapter Twelve Feminism and deconstruction, again: negotiating with unacknowledged masculinism -- Notes -- Part Six Sexual difference (2): the psychical in the social -- Chapter Thirteen Cutting up -- The death drive: Freud and Bergson -- Cause: Lacan and Aristotle -- Zenophilia -- Cause and the law -- Notes -- Chapter Fourteen Of female bondage -- Disavowal, fetishism, masochism -- There is disavowal and disavowal -- There is fetishism and fetishism -- There is masochism and masochism -- Notes -- Notes on the contributors.