Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West

by Jane Flax

Thinking Fragments provides a brilliant critique of psychoanalytic, feminist, and postmodern theory. Examining the writings of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, Chodorow, Irigaray, Derrida, Rorty, and Foucault, among others, Flax conducts a "conversation" among psychoanalysts, feminist thinkers, and postmodern theorists, evaluating the ways in which each group of thinkers succeeds in coming to terms with crises in contemporary Western culture. As she analyzes each theory in turn, the others are used to identify and interrogate its gaps and omissions. The result is a postmodern text of intertwined ideas, devoid of clear beginnings, endings, conclusions.

Flax addresses the question, "how is it possible to theorize in the contemporary West?" With the demise of objective notions of truth, knowledge, self and power, intellectuals have devised these new modes of thinking which both reflect and contribute to the uncertainties of the contemporary West. Each also addresses at least one aspect of what has become most problematic to modern How to come to terms with self, gender, knowledge and power without resorting to concepts that stress objectivity, universal knowledge, and a unitary self.

Flax finds that neither psychoanalysis, nor feminism, nor postmodernism is adequate to the task for which it was conceived. Each can illuminate certain aspects of problems of self, gender, knowledge, and power, but none is sufficient on its own. In fact, each incorporates characteristic blindnesses rooted in part in the very difficulties it addresses. Despite their failures, Flax concludes that these modes of theorizing are our best tools thus far, compelling us to use them even while we grapple with the problems they raise.

Thinking Fragments is a wide-ranging study that will elicit much discussion and debate. It is an essential text for social scientists and humanists alike, as well as anyone else who thinks about how to "do" theory in the contemporary West.

Genres: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Theory, Psychology, Theory, Gender, Philosophy

277 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 1 out of 5]

my advisor loves this book and talks about how smart this lady is. i don't doubt that she's brilliant--but i cannot understand what my advisor thinks is so great about this book. to me, it seems sloppy. lots of "poststructuralist" or "postmodern" theorists get pushed together, as though they represent a consistent, coherent school of thought. and the psychoanalysis stuff... i just don't get it. psychoanalysis is pseudoscience. while i can see that it was influential in the development of ideas, i do not see why people continue to turn to it as a theory of how the mind works when we actually have empirically tested theories of how the mind works. and there's also a general paucity of citations. she makes all the claims about what the "postmodernists" believe, but there are almost no references. when that's coupled with, what seems to me, an inaccurate reading of foucault, it's just too much for me to handle.

[Kristi Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Jane Flax's projects in Thinking Fragments is to deconstruct or at least question some of the premises of Western metaphysics, such as the mind/body split. In reading Rene Descartes’ philosophy from a feminist perspective, Flax posits that “Descartes’ philosophy can be read as a desperate attempt to escape from the body, sexuality, and the wiles of the unconscious.” To show the erasure of the body evident in Cartesian thought Flax first quotes from Descartes’ Discourse on Method, “so that this ‘I,’ that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, even that it is easier to know than the body, and moreover, that even if the body were not, it would not cease to be all that it is” (27).

Flax argues that Descartes’ philosophy rests on the “denial of the body,” and it therefore maintains the self is uninflected by the body and apparently “comes into the world whole and complete and, like a perpetual motion machine, clicks into operation.” Accordingly, the world is only perceptible through thought and concrete knowledge only attainable by mathematics and other exact sciences. This need for certainty, for a world governed by thought and precision, really indicates “a desire for control, control both of nature and of the body.”

For women, who have culturally/historically always been viewed as bodies, the dynamics of the mind/body split worked to exclude women from the intellectual sphere, in a way that was both insidious and tidy.


excerpted in part from a prior publication

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

was recommended to me along with lyotard's postmodern condition and foucault's archaeology of knowledge back in 1995 as the three main pomo texts to read. not a bad recommendation, as it turns out.

[Paul Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any contribution toward the understanding of society and human psychology from a less patriarchal and more nurturing point of view is more than welcome and should be well received in a spirit of justice.

[Leonardo]

Es difícil generalizar sobre los numerosos discursos que se sitúan bajo las banderas del posmodernismo, pero la mayoría se inscriben, aunque sea indirectamente, bajo la crítica a las narrativas de los maestros modernistas de Jean-Francois Lyotard, las afirmaciones sobre el simulacro cultural de Jean Baudrillard, o la crítica a la metafísica Occidental de Jacques Derrida. En sus formulaciones más básicas y reduccionistas, las teorías posmodernistas son definidas por muchos de sus proponentes como compartiendo un único denominador común: un ataque generalizado al Iluminismo.

Ver, por ejemplo, Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 29.
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