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

by Jane Flax

Book Overview

""Thinking Fragments advances theoretical dialogue across a number of difficult borders. Of special importance is its sustained interrogation of postmodern and psychoanalytic theory from the perspective of feminist theory. Flax's text helps to bridge the gap between postmodern and feminist theory, a gap which is largely the result of male theorists' failing to pay attention to feminist currents." --Christine Di Stefano, University of Washington "Flax's...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520065867
• ISBN13: 9780520065864
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 277 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"Thinking Fragments" is not fragmented thinking

It is always interesting to read discussions on postmodernist philosophy. It seems similar to reading a book about the failure of language to communicate information accurately - the project appears to fail before it gets off the ground. However, I believe Jane Flax does an admirable job providing someone who is admittedly a non-potsmodernist with what I believe to be an accurate snapshot of the status of postmodernism as best as perhaps it can be understood. She provides a nice (non-postmodernist) summary of postmodernism in her opening chapter. She argues that postmodernism is already replacing modernist thought and philosophy whether we realize it or not, and, whether we desire it or not. Postmodernism can be summarized as the Death of Man, the Death of History, and the Death of Metaphysics (particularly the concept of a universal and knowable Truth). The details are worth considering as you read the book. The main emphasis of the book explores how each proponent of psychoanalysis, feminism and postmodernism might understand the other two. This may be in fact the "a best" way to understand these topics. The title is correct from a postmodernist's viewpoint because, from that viewpoint, there is no overarching epistemology that can be known, only local "understandings" that result from local discussions - fragments perhaps of a larger unknowable something. Fragments are smaller and safer, lacking any power to force unification and therefore control over others. If she is correct, then one wonders if Alasdair MacIntyre is correct at the close of his book "After Virtue". He likens the present period as similar to the time immediately preceding the Fall of the Roman Empire when "men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium" and instead began "the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained", so that virtues and knowledge could survive the last dark ages. Are we really entering a new "fragmented" dark ages?