Fragmented Thinking

In the opening chapter of her book, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Jane Flax states that “the conversational form of the book represents my attempt to find a postmodern voice, to answer for myself the challenge of finding one way (among many possible ways) to continue theoretical writing while abandoning the ‘truth’ enunciating or adjudicating modes feminists and postmodernists so powerfully and appropriately call into question.” Flax does many things with her book, but she never attains such a voice, a problem which I think is related to the difficulty of resolving the relationship of the chosen themes and to the absence of personal experience within the book.

What it seems Flax wants to do is something akin to what Chris Weedon did in her foundational book, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory—explicate and critique the three schools of psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism, and show how they interrelate to achieve a kind of cohesive whole. What Flax lacks, particularly in comparison with Weedon, is any political agenda that spurs the arguments in some positive direction. Her aptly named final chapter, “No Conclusions,” seems sadly accurate as she weaves aimlessly in her “search for intelligibility and meaning.”

Flax’s seeming lack of focus is, ironically, rooted in the strength of the book, which is the comprehensive treatment of the writings of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, Chodorow, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty, Dinnerstein, and Foucault to show how each has contributed to Western thinking and culture. Thinking Fragments is exhaustive in fleshing out the basic tenets and contradictions of each thinker. Flax also understands and reminds us of the tension of the postmodern writing task: the tendency, in the process of presenting theoretical constructs, of reifying them in the very way postmodernist thinking encourages us not to.

If Flax wishes us to use the book as a basic primer in the origins of poststructuralist thinking, it would be helpful for her to provide more explicit signposts for the reader, such as chapter/book part headings that match the chosen theoretical categories, and more guidelines for the reader as to what purpose the incessant questioning serves. In other words, if the sections “The Selves Conceptions,” “Gender(s) and Dis-contents,” and “Knowledge in Question” carried the more explicit and accessible titles of “Psychoanalysis,” “Feminism,” and “Postmodernism,” then the book would serve as a more useful reference and less like a wandering journey. If the book is indeed intended to be an open-ended, less organized journey of sorts, then the form needs to be opened up more completely. Flax swims somewhere in between, and it is not always clear what the issues are, except that she allows each sentence to bounce off of itself—the book is riddled with disclaimers of “yet,” “however,” and “but” that follow firm assertions.

Flax claims in her early chapter on “Transitional Thinking” that her muddiness results from the fact that when she discusses one theoretical category “the other two voices will interrogate and critique the predominant one.” Thus, she excuses herself from rigorous, decisive explication of the “voices” and of inherent issues. How psychoanalysis fits into “transitional thinking,” given its conservative tradition of biological focus, seems an important issue to address—feminists have been questioning such essentialist viewpoints for awhile. The tension of Enlightenment-based theories and the feminist deploring of rationalism and its rigidity needs also to be addressed. It is not that Flax is unaware of these tensions, but she assumes that they have been addressed elsewhere, finished, and discarded. Her assumption, for instance, that the reified categories of Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism justify themselves as a chosen framework for such a book is unspoken and suspect. Why do they represent “our own time apprehended in thought” and why are they the crucial “voices” necessary to address issues of self, gender, knowledge, and power?

One of the most important questions for women, and yet one of the hardest for them to answer, is WHAT DO YOU WANT? Since the impetus of feminism originally grew out of women’s need to have choices...