Thinking Fragments stages a provocative conversation among three of the most influential currents of late–twentieth-century thought: psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodern philosophy. Jane Flax traces how each illuminates but also distorts questions of selfhood, gender, power, and knowledge in a transitional West marked by cultural upheaval and the waning of Enlightenment certainties. With chapters on Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, feminist theory, and postmodern critiques, the book maps how fragmentation—of selves, of social orders, of theoretical traditions—becomes both a problem to be understood and a resource for reimagining intellectual life.

Refusing neat synthesis, Flax instead cultivates what she calls “conversations” across discourses, attentive to their blind spots and ambivalences. Her analysis highlights how psychoanalytic accounts of desire and repression, feminist critiques of gendered domination, and postmodern interrogations of truth and knowledge can enrich but also unsettle one another. The result is a work at once rigorous and self-reflective, committed to exploring how theory can be written in voices that are open-ended, nonauthoritarian, and responsive to difference. Thinking Fragments will appeal to readers in philosophy, women’s studies, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory seeking to navigate the disorienting but fertile terrain of contemporary critical thought.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.