The woman’s nature (?): or the nature of the discursive selection

Résumé

In this paper, I aim at meeting two goals, which will be examined in parallel. On the one hand, touched by a controversy in relation to Michel Foucault’s perception of women, I will analyze discursive sequences that unveil the need for considering the (local) historicity of the discourse, in order not to assign to an author what cannot be assigned to him. On the other hand, in view of the selected sequences, I will attempt to show that much of what is said about women has a dated origin and that the erasure of the (global) historicity of meaning may claim as a-historical, timeless, universal and natural what is related only to its birth/production at a certain circumstance, thus avoiding making what is historical seem natural.