Paradoxically, perhaps as a result of the onslaught on diachronic thought, it becomes coterminous with philosophy.
To present his position I would like to quote “If post-structuralism’, or as I prefer ‘theoretical discourse’ is at one with the demonstration of the necessary incoherence and impossibility of all thinking, then by virtue of the very persistence of its critiques of the diachronic, and by way of the targeting mechanism itself, which continually forms temporal and historical conceptualities positioned at the centre of its objective, the attempt to think “history - in however confused or internally contradictory a fashion - at length becomes identified with the very vocation of thought itself.”
In this quotation I would like to point out the phrase… ‘ which consistently finds temporal and historical conceptualities positioned at the centre of its objective’ - this to me sounds very much like the Foucauldian concept of the episteme as a historically noticeable conceptual structure that may be witnessed homologically in disciplines. To be clear here, Foucault in using terms more akin to his work would describe an episteme as that apparatus which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but rather of what may or may not be characterised as scientific. This formulation, even within the Foucauldian conception of disciplinary apparatuses and power-knowledge would appear to me to hinge principally on the reproducibility of a finding, and hence its falsifiability.
In returning to deconstruction however - what may be the chief features or gestures of this procedure in thought? Two broadly are identified 1. An attempt to isolate the intent of an act, an act which necessarily entails a reading 2. To separate from an act what may crudely be described as its later historical embellishments - restoring to itself as it were the crudeness of its emergent generalisations. In other words it would mean returning to ‘the act of thinking as practice and stripping away the reifications that sediment around the act when it has becomes an object.’
This isolation of the initial gesture or expression of a thinker are however often not merely an episteme or the structurality of structures as it were, but rather the conditions of their possibility, or their historical schema as it were - and we do find this in Paul DeMann, author of ‘The Resistance to Theory”. In his work the difference between the enlightenment and romanticism still remain in force, as do the distinction between romanticism and modernism.
These periodizations as it were call for a historical specificity which requires contextualisations to be made, if only to allow for parallels to be drawn between epochs. The relationship of the 18th century to transition debates, bourgeoise revolution and the relationship of state power to capitalism being what Jameson points to as a relative unfamiliarity in DeMann.
On reading Jameson and his consideration of deconstruction it is important to note perhaps the only defining principle that I can think of as to why this literary or interpretive practice choose to downplay when not ignore historically rooted arguments and that has to do with its uses.
How are we to think of narrative or relatability between two (or more) distinct though not necessarily discrete modes of production, perhaps more familiar to pre-revolutionary Europe than anything the new world has seen. Also evident in moments of cultural contact - such as the American involvement in the Middle East here - in such encounters history is not a useful register or plane to draw from. ‘Precedents’ to use a juridical idiom are presented when not performed with an attention to what is live in a situation, not cited with the authority of a diktat or pronouncement. Literary criticism has long, and perhaps classically so included rhetoric amidst its ambit of study and political oration or rather its performativity on platforms which is what it today is effectively reduced to - is where we are; as it would hence be a critique of such assemblages from where we would have to begin. It was the dawning of such an understanding which incited Baudrillard’s text - ‘The Gulf War did not take place”. Indeed it was this willingness to set aside the facts to make room for reason that endears Rousseau, perhaps the only figure from the Enlightenment readily adopted by liberals and progressives - to Paul DeMann. In a gesture I might add which echoes a perverted inverse of what was Kant’s plea to the Kaiser - that he sought to use reason to make room for faith.
In his appraisal of Rousseau’s account on the origin of language however Jameson seems to rather disparagingly elbow Rousseau out of the way - “The problem is that Rousseau has talked himself so powerfully into the proof that language could never have come into being in the first place that he must break off in embarrassment, since it obviously did.”
Perhaps due to an inadequacy in my reading - what I glean to be Rousseau’s intent and indeed why he cannot pin down an origin to language is rather because he chose to represent their conditions of possibility and of course their motivations. Reading the original here, as in many cases would be advised.
On another note where Jameson is truer is his identification of passions that are conceived as pathological needs in Rousseau’s essay, and with this of course comes their valorisation, perhaps even vulgarised in terms of pleasure and pain.
Yet regarding the history of deconstruction, particularly as it may be remembered in the American Academy a crucial difference is marked between the position adopted by DeMann and that of Derrida. DeMann for instance characterises the state of nature as a fiction, Rousseau’s political philosophy as a set of promises and his narratives of his own past as a set of excuses.
Analogically, Jameson points out that to think of the Constitution of the United States as a promise, for example, however defamiliarising such as gesture may be, invisibleizes so to speak, the force of institutions (And of Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses). Fiction, perhaps the most modern abode of the literary theorist becomes oddly antiquated, amidst Baudrillardian simulacra, and image-society theory. Indeed, as far as the ability of words and narratives to be compelling to us, even psychoanalysis would attest to the force which fantasy and the imaginary have, often superseding reality and reason. And indeed, in historiography - where various empirical pasts are often no more compelling than Rousseau’s ‘fictions’.
Fiction and even irony remain operative categories in DeMann, just as they are foregone by Derrida. Derrida’s own focus is admittedly less a focus on the fictionality of the experiences of the past, as on the internal contradictions of its formulations.
This tracing of internal contradiction as it were appears to be working backwards, via its archeology of the failures of language, to a place where it may have once emerged from early hominids. This is where the emphasis on such seemingly dramatic categories such as the rupture or scream gain their discursive conceptuality in Derrida, who carefully plies apart the unsaid premises supporting ready interpretations.
The scene presented is one where a person who possesses speech or writing is forced to imagine a situation, using and depicted by these two ‘properties’ - what their absence may entail. Perhaps akin to the history of breakdowns in communication.
Yet each new form, temporality, genre and indeed interpretation brings with it a seemingly narrative altering difference; which when left unrecorded, unarchived - renders the past inaccessible, and hence unimaginable.
The question which we literary theorists should ask however, concerning judgements even in an aesthetic register is what is the mechanism via which view points, romantic, modernist, etc. become ideologies - that is as aesthetic judgements or tastes which are socially prescribed or censured. The concept which DeMann offers and works with here is metaphor; that is metaphors that have lost their metaphoricity, in the sense of irony produced by the difference between the subject of enunciation and the subject that is enunciated, becoming hence ultimately mere denominations if not dead categories.
This produces as it were, the presentation of ideologies as fixated metaphors hence schema on its way to becoming doxa - is far removed from the Rousseau who seeks to present the genesis of the process of abstraction itself. “The repeated contact between man and various entities, and between the entities themselves, must necessarily engender in the mind of man the perception of relationship.” To which Jameson adds - ‘such relationships - first comparisons (long, small, strong, weak) and then number itself - mark the birth of true conceptualisation and abstraction, or if you prefer, of an abstraction that grasps itself as such (unlike nomination, which still purports to respect the particular, and not to compare.)’
To frame this differently, concepts as it were make possible comparison - and this would be true even when dealing with quantitative magnitudes. Two trees of different sizes for instance would not be comparable without first positing their conceptual equivalence - or at least resemblance.
Indeed it would appear that it is only within this domain of comparability, that the reign of the name ends, and that of the word, the concept, abstraction and the universal begins. DeMann we are told identifies this transformation as the operation of metaphor.
In term of visions which are comparable to that of DeMann’s we are guided to Adorno, whose own project of Negative Dialectics, in its featuring of the tyranny of the concept - and by extension - Reason; in its imposition on the heterogeneous - a likening gesture, is itself comparable as it were to Derridean deconstruction.
These two projects as it were, that of Deconstruction and Negative Dialectics are themselves set up or constructed very differently notwithstanding the similitude presented above. Observing this difference however would require us to adjourn the ontological priority of language over consciousness.
Jameson however does read a ‘greater internal narrativity’ in DeMann than anything like the external narrativity in the dialectic of enlightenment. A differentiation, if I might add would be tempting to question. What this external narrativity is likened to is the alleged ‘enlightenment mastery over nature’, in Adorno and Horkheimer. Adorno, perhaps in the legacy, critical or otherwise of that break “feels able to reconstruct an external historical narrative which can account for the emergence of abstraction, a step which you will find he shares with Rousseau.
Rousseau himself, in a text such as ‘The Social Contract’ does much to raise issues which would be championed by the Jacobins. For Marxians the importance of this text in broaching issues such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the need to project a vision of a more advanced socialist democracy beyond bourgeoise forms of parliamentary representation is alluded to.
Instead of getting into debates of comparative political philosophy however, Jameson does pay heed to DeMann’s suggestion to sort through the text’s linguistic tissues or values, without which, we are told - The Social Contract would remain incomprehensible.
In returning to the title of this section however: Deconstruction as Nominalism - our attention is finally brought to the overlap between Marxism and DeMannian deconstruction, which Marxists probably recognize as the ‘theory of value.’
In Capital itself - Jameson does point out that the whole question of the form of value remains hidden, ‘behind the even more mysterious phenomenon of equivalence’ - constituting as it were the possibility of exchange value and the substitution of one object for another different one “use value” as it were marking our existential relationship to unique things, drops out in the first pages of Capital, as it is not in that sense subject to the law of value or of equivalence.’ In framing this within the parlance of contemporary criticism, Jameson would assert that ‘use value’ is the realm of difference and differentiation whereas ‘exchange value’ will come to be described as the realm of identities.
Marx at this point hence would equate value with exchange value.
Regarding value itself however, or its conception - Jameson would differentiate between the four stages of value in Capital, and Adam Smith’s labour theory of value. It is the other dimension to this however, or other face if you will, in which we would see and recognize production, grounding the market and exchange - culminating in the emergence of money.
The function of a metaphor, as we all may know is to represent the likeness between two unlike things, or if you prefer to represent one thing in terms of another. As Jameson puts it, ‘the mystery consists in trying to fathom what a pound of salt could possibly have in common with three hammers… and in what way it makes sense to affirm of them that they are somehow the same.’
This lays the stage for the rather different problem of the production of new value which is to be his central concern later in Capital.
The positing of equivalence hence in a non-mediated sense is not thinkable or at least not articulated in Capital by Marx. This at least is Jameson’s reading of it.
In characterising Rousseau’s discourse two essential principles are identified - the identity of the object, and the apprehension that the other person is somehow the same as myself. We are also alerted to how DeMann’s own reading of Rousseau may entail conflating our relation to objects with our relation to people. Indeed this is a tendency which has been noticed by even more contemporary transatlantic criticism - ie. the personification of capital.
In terms of Marx’s approach here - read by Jameson, he has this to say - ‘that we do not build up complex ideas out of simple ones, but rather the other way around, that it is the intuition of the complex form that gives us the key to grasping the simpler one.’
In another ‘vulgarity’ we hear ‘philosophical and linguistic abstraction is itself an effect and byproduct of exchange.’ And here I must object to ask - why not of the process or indeed mode of production? And the answer would be because this would in itself, at this stage not feature as a process of exchange but perhaps as a narratorial process, the fact that this is not an exchange per se but rather a productive process means that the form of temporality in question is not reversible. Citing Marx’s example - the linen expresses its value in the coat; the coat serves as the material in which that value is expressed. To put it differently, this is the process that exchange presupposes. Jameson likens the way the coat and the linen are said to be the same, and even the irreversibility of it, to DeMann’s account of the generation of narrative out of metaphor and the subsequent allegorical forms that result from that structural tendency.
The temporality presented in this reading however is not necessarily real, lived or existential time, nor of historical time either. Nor is it so by implication. It is possible, we are told, of reading Marx’s account of the four forms of value as a genealogical narrative, “continuing” or in a historical way.
The subsequent forms in question are described, barring the first as that entails the use of the material to make the commodity in question, even if it is a service. As such it is not an equivalence per se but a transformation. It appears here that Jameson begins by presenting the subsequent step of exchange proper - where for instance salt, which has no value in a tribe is traded for metal. When such a comparative moment is drawn within an autarchic social formation new equivalents are posited, seizing on a great range of objects. These seem to be other equivalents the moment a mediatory medium facilitates the transaction between two objects. Here, apart from the first step which Jameson appears to skip - jumping to exchange itself, where the actual transformation of a material into a commodity, for example is posited - termed by Marx the elementary form of value, we find the determination of the relative magnitudes of value also left out, as this would be of more interest to an economist.
The transactionary moment however, and its various mediatory mechanisms, credit, money, rent, deeds and titles - enable as we have presented, a range of polyvalent equivalences. Jameson describes it as “a kind of infinite and infinitely provisional chain of equivalences that course through the object world of a social formation.
In this world, if you notice - of the exchange and polyvalence of objects what was once thought to be irreversible inasmuch as how a commodity or service is rendered, becomes reversible but in terms of its transactional equivalents - and I guess where Jameson is going with this is the spatialising of temporality; reversing it as it were, in terms of presence at least, the issue of irreversibility.
Prior to the institutionalisation of the law of value - its solidification in a medium, this description corresponds to what Baudrillard terms symbolic exchange.
The interminable chain of exchanges, to be standardized - and its inexhaustibility to be quantified forces the thinking and appearance of the general form of value, ‘to seal the uniformity of the process of producing’. This new object expresses the values of the rest of the world commodities ‘through one single kind of commodity set apart from the world.’ Evans Pritchard, the anthropologist notices the adoption of cows by the Neuer for this function.
We are also informed that Gayatri Spivak has proposed that we rethink the formation of the literary canon in terms of a dialectic of the stages of value - a notion which some metaphysicians may find interesting, if not troubling.
Fredric Jameson himself however does attest that he would be tempted to correlate this third stage of equivalences, ‘where an inner worldly object comes to do double duty as the nascent universal equivalent with the symbol and symbolic moment of thought.’ This, may be witnessed on the cultural front with the endowment of artistic representation of a worldview with a kind of universal force. This gesture may perhaps even retain a sense of its experimental polyvalence via the simulation of literary styles in an older work - creating perhaps some of the signature works of the modernist avant-garde with James Joyes’ Ulysses serving as an example.
There are worrying signs of this however, as with the diminution of any direct use values cited, with the process of production and its mode as it were not being a live totality what we are left with, at some level is the disappearance of narrative - and what Fredric Jameson has elsewhere cited as a reduction of time to the present.
Perhaps in this light we may better appreciate Fredric Jameson’s words in this book published in 1991 - “what follows then, will not only be an abstraction; it will be allegory, and a desperate effort to reach the ‘concept’ which necessarily fails and thereupon marks itself as a failure in order to succeed despite itself.”
Yet within the form of mechanical reproduction prevalent in our late capitalist society, and were the singularity of a form in terms of its preponderance at least to be insisted on, we may be well advised by Guy Deboard’s formulation of the image as “the final form of commodity reification”, citing the ‘Society Of The Spectacle’. And we are pointed out to the relevance of this theory to contemporary society, media and apparently post-modernism itself, which is encompassedly knit.
At this point the only possible meeting point between DeMann’s exploration of the consequences of the inaugural metaphorical moment, and Marx’s staging of the emergence of value would be in the affinity opened up between the former’s textuality and the more post-modern concerns of the dynamics of media signification.
Yet without this individuated narrative we are left to piece together genealogical reconstructions, apparent in Marx’s work on the stages (or should I say forms) of value. Darstellung however - determinative as it may yet be, does not yield an account of its own genesis.
As for Marx’s critique however, of political economy as we readily understand it, we are told that it has a value comparable to language itself, a dynamic which Levi Strauss would notice - being as it is a system and not an index of abbreviated interruptions.
Paul DeMann does not insist on staging the drama of the universal and the particular, as in Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’. Having himself moved on to the inter-determinacy of legal language. A tension is alluded to between the constative and the performative; we are told that “grammatical logic can function only if its referential consequences are disregarded.” - a quote from ‘Allegories of Reading.’
We are warned however that it is more difficult following Rousseau to redescend from the universality of law on the level of the general will to the contingent decisions whereby that law is adjusted to specific conflicts, which include referential circumstances. Jameson registers a missed encounter here with Marxism which he believes would have led to some scrutiny of the relationship between ‘economic abstraction’ ie. value, and the other abstract and universal instance which is the state or the general will.
Political rhetoric of any kind is often built on fixations to certain demands - and these are often what feature in the field of value. In any of these situations, it is not the fixation itself that is the goal - but rather the comprehension of how such an objective may further a cause. As such, a perfunctory role of criticism is to weed out errors, illusions and misrecognitions as perhaps has been customary with ideological critique. Here - we should willingly comprehend that it is only a radical transformation of the social system, and by extension - history itself ‘that the possibility of thinking new kinds of thoughts and concepts arise.’ This, as you can imagine remains foreclosed in any synchronous system such as perhaps DeMann’s view of language.
The notion of value in the economic sphere, while subject to changes, is an abstraction that is historical and institutional. Redirecting our critique of abstraction.
Indeed so much of what we deem progress often turns out to be mere repetition. We are presented however in DeMann, in whose reading of Rousseau the birth of allegory may be witnessed out of the primal metaphoric dilemma.
Jameson does attest that DeMann is at the very least post-contemporary in his belief that a transcendent theory is undesired and undesirable. He adds that it is not the aim in itself but rather a conceptual distance that allows a reader the apprehension of a language.
At the level of reading we can hence see two levels operating - one of the speech act itself, be they promises or excuses - and allegories or figures which may possibly be drawn from or are immanent to them. This at least is DeMann’s effort in ‘Allegories of Reading’ to present a mediatory code that may encompass personal life and history itself.
Such a gesture is identified by Jameson to be a form of dialectical narrative. Contemporary criticism has been faced with the problem of reflexivity and its staging in such scenarios, particularly post the phenomenological notion of the self having been problematized. With this is also noted the temptation to turn it back into a form of self-consciousness.
What is ‘valorised’ here, to use a term which has perhaps been appropriated as the subaltern left’s version of ‘objectified’ is of course - self-consciousness. Yet, whether this is a legitimate charge, and whether it takes cognisance of dialectical narratives, such as in Hegel’s moments for instance - where something very different seems to be occurring is a question left open.
Perhaps in the same vein - Jameson adds, that the loss of consciousness or even self-consciousness would not necessarily be fatal for agency. This I think is an unavowable position as the infringement on the self, under conditions of surveillance capitalism for instance would work precisely by instrumentalizing agency against self-consciousness, nullifying its field as it were, and here we would be well reminded to recall the corporations referred to earlier.
Regarding the issue of nominalism, alongside deconstruction - headlining this section as it is, there seems to be a tendency, dangerously articulated though perhaps useful, put forth in these ways: 1. Derrida - the interminability of interpretability 2. Spivak - the impossibility of a full undoing; which Jameson observes, “meet the problem of self consciousness head on by acknowledging it as a necessarily thwarted aim and drive. Here, I think what is crucial if not vital is the possibility of nomination which surely must be the foundation of any nominalism. The question then becomes, to me at least, as to how this nomination is to be bracketed ie. as a sensory perception, recollection, or projection etc. Inasmuch as nominations can be bracketed - this set, consisting of our framing and the nominations would necessarily be incomplete, were we to think our act of bracketing that is our nomination or rather demarcation of nomination to be truly subjective. Alain Badiou makes this point differently drawing from set theory, which explains why a null set is a subset of any set, philosophically interpreting this as incompleteness as such.
DeMann, we read “was an eighteenth century mechanical materialist” - this statement I assume is made regarding the origin of language and theories of its conception, where I gather that following Herder, he would see a situation where language doesn’t exist, and try to deduce how it may have come about. A kind of logic not entirely alien to deconstruction, which Jameson adds, is as closely related to Marxian ideological analysis as Islam is to Christianity.
DeMann himself in his reading of Rousseau’s Profession, presents a displacement of the idea of good out of notions concerning theism, and to the faculty of judgement, or rather to its act (?) though DeMann might argue that it was Rousseau himself, reflecting much of his Enlightenment brethren’s horror of religion, who does this. Yet were we to follow the argument that it is the deconstructive reader himself who does this, would be to recognize “our old friend” the metaphoric act, and the linguistic affirmation of resemblance and identity.
Regarding Rousseau’s Profession itself however - these linguistic and conceptual forms, are not argued for inasmuch as their conditions of possibility are investigated into. We are told that this may make the text into a pre-Kantian one, from what would otherwise have been neo-Cartisian.
Regarding the presentation of the DeMannian reading of Rousseau, I would here insist that you read the original.
In terms of Rousseau’s engagement with religion however, despite accounting for it in his ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’, does seem to subtract from the tradition of Revelation in Christianity and Judaism - and in this sense may be interpreted as pessimistic or as some may like nihilistic. As a trait this may be apparent, or rather transferred to DeMann himself inasmuch I suppose as Rousseau is read via “Allegories of Reading”.
DeMann’s affinities however, probably do have an earlier link or precedent if you prefer - in Kant whose own likeness to Rousseau, as Enlightenment philosophers go is characterised. And while its most outward and recognized appearance may have been the horror of religion, philosophically it finds voice in the very Kantian distinction between the thing as it is for us, and the thing in itself: or phenomena and noumena.
Here, and perhaps unlike the direction of focus in later philosophical figures, Kant’s focus on noumena - or the thing itself, independent of our perception - is where we may find a correspondence to the uncanny, and with the atomistic visions of earlier philosophy.
The significance of this moment for philosophy cannot be overstated. For it was this break, between Kant and Hegel - if it can be reduced to a signpost between proper names; that a figure as contemporary as Zizek claims that philosophy becomes self-conscious of itself and formally begins. To be clear this is not exactly Jameson’s view of it, not explicitly the vision of his own project - which following Marx and Freud - he may like to call theory. Yet the break as it were has already been opened, the point of impossibility touched, for after Kant, all subsequent philosophy attempted to represent the thing in itself as it were.
This, in science as in the arts, is subject to the development of new technologies, and film may perhaps be a defining one for our generation. Here, the ability to visualize our process of abstraction as it were is rendered pictorially - and this has rather spectacular possibilities for our imagining of the matter. Though we would be well advised to recall that this is not an entirely new phenomena, and that everyone, from Sartre to perhaps more recently with object oriented ontology championed by Graham Harman, has confronted it. Though Jameson here cites Stanley Cavell. The cinematographic process however does present the chance to render the noumenon depictable in a properly filmic Unheimlichkeit. And here Kubrick’s early work such as the shot of the flight through dimension in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ serves as a milestone. Can we identify in this the longings of the early materialists who sought to gaze into the very pores of matter? Yet Jameson also marks the Hegelian break with Kant which I alluded to earlier, characterised here as “that deeper level of Hegelian essence, that truer dimension beneath phenomenal appearance into which Marx invites us on leaving the marketplace.” And perhaps now would be when we should add the injunction that perhaps Marx’s hidden abode of production, be it the factory floor, the artisan’s studio, or his own dwelling - is not the same as Hegelian phenomenology, in whose light and whose staunchest critics perhaps came to represent as a philosophy of the encounter.
The abode as it were is not one which corresponds to Kant’s things-in-themselves, or Rousseau’s Vicar, since we are told that they contribute to categories ‘beyond anthropomorphism’, or as ‘what is here before us or without us’. What Jameson does bring forth however is the dualistic world which Kant presents, where human appearance coexists and is ‘impossible superimposed’ with an unthinkable and nonhuman world of things-in-themselves - and this is said to present a useful set of coordinates for DeMann, whose linguistic categories replace Kan’t cognitive ones. This gesture as it were also closes the door to Rousseau’s theistic solution.
We are finally guided as it were, to where DeMann is not an 18th century materialist, (inasmuch as he is no longer seeking to determine as origin I presume.) Even though Jameson does not explicitly state this, it is entailed in his casting aside of the effort to make a link between the universal and the particular, which might have been, alas Rousseau’s final ‘religious’ gesture. Having said this he is not relegated to the cardboard box of nihilism, a bracketing which does have its votaries, but is rather said to be a nominalist. A position whose reference to the object of representation, to me at least is not clarified in any discreteness from the subject who may see it that way.
We are reminded that modern art almost certainly engages with this logic of nominalism, a study which among others, Adorno has pursued.
It is possible in the reading presented before us to think of DeMann as something of a restorationist or archivist. In Fredric Jameson’s words “ a last minute rescue operation and a salvaging of the aesthetic - - even a defence and valorisation of literary study…” This we are told is secured via a strategic redefinition of the concept of a text, and we are provided an inkling of what they may be in reference to when we see a distinction marked between two basic types of writing - allegories of figure and allegories of reading. Expelled from the DeMannian aesthetic valorisation are the ideologists Herder and Shiller who are ‘blissfully unendowed’ with such ideas.
Regarding the distinction between modernity and post-modernity - terms which serve a periodising function put in place by Jameson, it is observed where DeMann’s own approach, ie. his philosophical view of language would differ. Perhaps not unlike Baudrillard, we would witness the use of temptation and seduction conceptually. And this is where his work would intersect with the above cited movements even if he were not to agree with the terms.
And this gesture can be witnessed in his disposition towards Romanticism and Modernity as such, between which he would be inclined to mark a continuity rather than a radical break.
In terms of figures of analysis Rilke is taken up in ‘Allegories of Reading’ where we see something like the giving way of great philosophical poems, to a spacer verse which would appear to foreshadow Celan. DeMann in his own terms would seem to privilege the spoken word - when he says that sound is the only property immanent to language. This phonetic primacy is his askesis as it were, mediating between the formal peculiarity and Rilke’s religions thematics. This however does coincide with the reification and the separation of the senses in modern times, which also paves the way for their autonomization, perhaps best exemplified in modern painting. In this melee of sensorial perception what deconstruction’s chief critical gesture is to be are identifications and unmasking of linguistic seductions.
What this phonetic isolation does usher forth however, in a morality which Jameson claims is prophetic of the 80’s is a declaration of bankruptcy on themes such as liberation, the body, desire, and the senses - which were one of the principal gains made through the battlefield of the 60’s.
So far Jameson has avoided remarks on DeMann’s complicity with the Germans during their occupation of Belgium as a cultural journalist. We are pointed out to a possible overstatement of this feature as north American intellectuals generally haven’t had any correlative experience of the choices of people under military occupation. Also, their focus on anti-semitism ignores the other prominent feature of the Nazi period, namely anti-communism. Jameson would say however that DeMann was neither an anti-communist nor a right winger. He does however detect a certain period corporatism operating in the background across his texts which are devoid of any personal originality.
As an apolitical aesthete he would appear to be a very different figure from Heidegger who genuinely believed that the Hitlerian seizure of power would usher forth a genuine national revolution. Their twin scandals may have been raised simultaneously however to delegitimate Derridean deconstruction. In his reactionary spirit however Heidegger did much to purge Freiburg University of its ‘doubtful’ elements, although there were very few radical leftists in the university system those days.
In his mythopoetic he may have failed to understand Hitler’s pragmatist position as a centrist and his relation to big business.
Heidegger’s turn however, of his existentialism to matters of being may coincide with what Vargos Llosa describes as the self censorship one installs upon being ‘burned by history (in his case upon being beaten up after a political demonstration with students) and how this fosters an avoidance of any future political commitment.
Regarding DeMann’s antisemitic article, Jameson recognizes it as commonly misread, that it is an expression of anti-semitism rather than its undermining. It is suggested that his deconstructive turn may well have been a ‘calculated attempt to undo this disaster, by forming readers capable of nuanced interpretation, hence avoiding such vulgarities.
No comments:
Post a Comment