The aim of the article is to further assess and develop feminist standpoint theory by introducing the notion of the `situated imagination' as constituting an important part of this theory as well as that of `situated knowledge'. The article argues that the faculty of the imagination constructs as well as transforms, challenges and supersedes both existing knowledge and social reality. However, like knowledge, it is crucial to theorize the imagination as situated, that is, as shaped and conditioned (although not determined) by social positioning.

The article explores various ways collectivity boundaries and territorial borders, as well as the act of crossing them, are experienced and imagined, particularly by women. In doing so, the article draws on autobiographical material collected by email from women in about 25 different countries.

Georg Simmel's "The intersection of social circles," a chapter in his 1908 Sociology, contains discussions of class, religion, ethnic, and gender relations that are highly relevant to contemporary sociological concerns. Simmel's argument is based on a notion of historical dynamic that interprets increasingly complex intersectionality as a sign of progressing civilization. The article establishes how Simmel describes "the intersection of social circles" and then looks at Simmel's account through the concept of "intersectionality" as developed in contemporary feminist theory. The article suggests that although some aspects of Simmel's account of women in modernity are incompatible with contemporary feminism, the shared use of the same image, "intersection," in Simmel and in contemporary feminist theory is the symptom of a shared concern with a particular aspect of the complexity of modern society. In Simmel, the increasing density of the intersections of social circles points to the increasingly complex individuality of modern subjects, whereas the use of the same image in contemporary feminist theory is part of a critique of inequality and oppression in the same modern society whose advent Simmel celebrated. Intersectionality is a characteristic of modern society that first became visible more than a century ago and has meanwhile become ever the more a signature of modernity.

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Mediation by abstract labour as the 'social mediation in capitalism' is the focal point of Moishe Postone's 'reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory'. Postone states that Marx's theory of capitalism is a critical theory of the nature of modernity itself, 2 namely of modern society as a directionally dynamic society based on a unique form of social mediation that is abstract and impersonal. It aims to show that labour in capitalist society plays a historically unique role in mediating social relations. 3 The real abstraction of life under capital is also the source of the typically modern intellectual reflections of abstraction: The peculiar nature of social mediation in capitalism gives rise to an antinomy-so characteristic of modern Western worldviews-between a 'secularized', 'thingly' concrete dimension and a purely abstract dimension, whereby the socially constituted character of both dimensions, as well as their intrinsic relation, is veiled. 4 In commodity-determined society, 5 the same labour appears twice, as concrete useful labour and as abstract value-creating labour. Abstract human labour is considered the 'social substance' 6 common to all particular forms of productive activity. This overall commonality appears to be the 'expenditure of human energy in (any) physiological form', 7 that is a transhistorical, physiological residue. But, as Marx stresses, the objectivity of values is 'purely social'. Being the core structure of a historically specific social formation, that of the capitalist mode of production, abstract labour is not a transhistorical substance, but a historically and socially determined one. The statement that, in any society, humans interact with nature is a truism of little explanatory power. The point is how interaction constitutes society: '[L]abor as such does not constitute society per se; labor in capitalism, however, does constitute that society'. 8 Concrete labour is understood hereby as any intentional activity that transforms material in a determinate fashion; abstract labour is the function of such labours HIMA 229_f14_261-283 11/18/04 1:39 PM Page 262 Postone's Marx • 263 9 Commensurability, the ability of two quantities to be measured by the same scale, implies that they are of the same (abstract) essence (value). Without the assumption of this essential identity, different products could not be exchanged as equivalents of