On the Question of the Ground of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodern Dialectic

Authors

  • Liam O'Donnell UNSW

Keywords:

Jameson, transcendent, transcendental, dialectic, postmodernity

Abstract

This paper examines Fredric Jameson’s attempt to formulate a postmodern dialectic in his text, Valences of the Dialectic. Such a project is necessary, according to Jameson, because dialectical thought is immanent to the movement of history, and the latest epoch of history that we find ourselves caught within is that of postmodernity. Epochality and history are totalising concepts, and so we can see immediately that there is a tension between Jameson’s historicist method (and presuppositions), and the prioritising of difference and non-identity that characterises postmodernism. What Jameson aims to do, therefore, is to reveal how the dialectical concepts of totality and contradiction can be thought in such a way that they are compatible with the postmodern prioritising of difference and non-identity. He aims to do this by arguing that history itself, understood in its most profound sense rather than its everyday sense, is an unrepresentable ground existing behind, and beyond, the manifold beings of our world as their condition of possibility. Jameson claims that our access to this deeper reality of history can only emerge indirectly through our awareness of the antinomies of thought and experience.

References

Badiou, Alain (1999), Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, (Trans: Louise Burchill), The University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota.

Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, (Trans: Paul Patton), Colombia University Press, New York.

Deleuze, Gilles (2006), Nietzsche and Philosophy, (Trans: Hugh Tomlinson), Continuum, London.

Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology, (Trans: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, (Trans: Alan Bass),The Harvester Press, Brighton, Sussex.

Derrida, Jacques (1982), Positions, (Trans: Alan Bass), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Derrida, Jacques (1985), Writing and Difference, (Trans: Alan Bass), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Melbourne and Henley.

Derrida, Jacques (1994), Specters of Marx, (Trans: Peggy Kamuf), Routledge, New York & London.

Descombes, Vincent (1979), Modern French Philosophy, (Trans: L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Dews, Peter (1990), Logics of Disintegration, Verso, London.

Hallward, Peter, (2006), Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, Verso, London & New York.

Hart, Kevin, The Trespass of the Sign, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin (1998), Pathmarks, (Trans: Various), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Jameson, Fredric (1971), Marxism and Form, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

Jameson, Fredric (1981), The Political Unconscious, Methuen & Co. Ltd., London.

Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London.

Jameson, Fredric (1998), The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971-1986, Volume 1, Situations of Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Jameson, Fredric (2005), Archaeologies of the Future, Verso, London.

Jameson, Fredric (2010), Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, London.

Plotnitsky, Arkady (1993), Reconfigurations. Critical Theory and General Economy, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Protevi, John; Smith, Daniel; Voss, Daniela, "Gilles Deleuze", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),

URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/deleuze/> Accessed 16/01/2023

Protevi, John (2007). “Review of Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2007 (8). URL = <https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/out-of-this-world-deleuze-and-the-philosophy-of-creation> Accessed 16/01/2023

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1963), Search for a Method, (Trans: Hazel E. Barnes), Vintage Books, New York.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1976), Being and Nothingness, (Trans: Hazel E. Barnes), Methuen and Co. Ltd., London.

Downloads

Published

26-12-2023

How to Cite

O’Donnell, L. (2023). On the Question of the Ground of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodern Dialectic. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 19(2), 279–303. Retrieved from http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1094