Download Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis djvu

Fraser is a uniquely perceptive theorist and scholar who has a deep and searching insight into the nature of postindustrial capitalism. She opens up doors of understanding for the way families, markets, businesses, and other institutions work. This is essential reading.

I used to be a fan of this author's works, but she really let me down with this book. In Chapter Five entitled "Against Symbolicism: The Uses and Abuses of Lacaniansim for Feminist Politics" she gets so many things wrong it becomes embarrassing.I even wonder why she felt the need the to include it. She begins the chapter with the following sentence: "This chapter grew out of an experience of sever puzzlement," which is her admission that she always felt a "disaffinity with Lacanian thought" both intellectually and politically. Fraser has a very limited understanding of the complexity of Lacanian structuralism, and she sets up a straw-man version of his theory which is then easily knocked down. She writes "In discussing 'Lacanianism', I shall bracket the question of the fidelity of this reading, which could be faulted for overemphasizing the influence of Saussure at the expense of other, countervailing influences, such as Hegel. For my purposes, however, this ideal-typical, Saussurean reading of Lacan is useful precisely because it evinces with unusual clarity the difficulties that beset many conception of discourse that are widely considered 'poststructuralist' but that remain wedded in important respects to structuralism." Without understanding that Lacan not only incorporated topology and mathematics (his extrapolation in the form of mathemes; and his own term linguisterie, which goes beyond Saussurean linguistics), but also Hegel, Kojeve, and so much more into his very original psychoanalytical theory, Fraser reduces her "feminist" critique to very simplistic understandings of his terms. One example is her take on the dimension of the Symbolic, which she reduces to Lacanian "psychologism," Here it is Fraser who uses psychologism (not understanding that Lacan created his own terms and his psychoanalysis is decidely opposed to psychology. She writes in perhaps her most grievous error: "Lacanianism equates this resolution [of gender identity, which shifts over time, acc. to Fraser] with the child's entry into a fixed, monolithic, and all-powerful symbolic order." Anyone who knows even the rudimentary dynamic of Lacan's three registers knows that the symbolic is anything but fixed and all-powerful; in fact, it is open-ended, and it is the Real (the empty marker) that ensures that the symbolic order is a field where everything is contested and remains at play/open. It's not as Zizek has said that the signifier can never reach the Real; rather, it's that the signfier can never reach itself. Instead of engaging and really understanding the essential paradoxes of the Lacanian subject, Fraser builds up a reading of Lacan that is simply easy for her to knock down and dismiss. This is regrettable as she has a lot of interesting things to say about the possibility of feminism today.

Although the scholarship of the author is unimpeachable, this collection would be hard-going for anyone new to feminist thinking and writing.