Steven Helmling

University of Delaware
helmling@brahms.udel.edu

 

Fredric Jameson’s career-long engagement with Jacques Lacan begins in the pages on Lacan in The Prison-House of Language, with the declaration that Lacan’s work offers an “initiatory” experience rather than an expository account. It is in the spirit of that experiential or “dialectical” emphasis that Jameson proposes an off-standard response to what (he says) most people receive as Lacan’s “programmatic slogan,” that “L’inconscient, c’est le discours de l’autre“:

 

This seems to me a sentence rather than an idea, by which I mean that it marks out the place of a meditation and offers itself as an object of exegesis, instead of serving as the expression of a single concept. (PHL 170-1)

 

In this essay I want to indicate what seem to me to be the parameters of Lacan’s importance for Jameson. I begin with this passage, in which Jameson discriminates Lacan’s “idea” from his “sentence,” in order to emphasize that Lacan and Jameson share a central problematic: the indissociability of what Lacan calls the “spirit” that motivates an enunciation and the “letter,” at once spirit’s vehicle and its betrayer, of the énouncé that “it speaks” (ça parle). I aim not to bracket “meaning” here, but to highlight what seems to me Lacan’s most immediate interest for Jameson, namely his sense, both as a problem for exposition and as the condition or “motivation” of his gnomic, enigma-mongering prose style, of what Jameson calls “the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language” (PHL169).

 

Jameson subsequently elaborates this “mystery” into the antagonism between the inevitability of “meaning,” its social, collective, constructed, conditioned, and thus (for Jameson) ideological character, and a Cartesian ideology of the self or “subject” that is rooted in and implies a speaker’s desire (futile perhaps, but only the more poignant for that) to “mean” things that haven’t been meant before, to make new and “original” meanings, to escape the entrapment (what Jameson calls the “ideological closure”) imposed by the “order of the signifier.” At issue are the ways in which how “it” is said may change or affect what is said–an issue, or “motivation,” fundamental to the deliberate, self-conscious, and exorbitant “difficulty” of both Jameson’s and Lacan’s notoriously idiosyncratic prose styles. For Jameson, Lacan’s writing is exemplary in not merely enacting, but inflicting upon the reader, all the dilemmas (inside/outside, same/different, surface/depth, written/spoken, temporal/spatial) to which highbrow postmodernity finds itself returning like a dog to a bone. Reading Lacan, your bafflement can’t decide whether you are trying to gain entry to something, or effect an escape from it–even if (indeed, no matter how many times) you’ve already surmised that the best model this prose offers of itself is the Lacanian “Real,” whose definitive measure is the success or failure with which it “resists symbolization absolutely.” This is a prose in which the law of non-contradiction does not prevail, a medium solvent enough to diffuse, but also stiff enough to suspend, every precipitate released into or catalyzed within it.¹

 

Jameson accesses the multifold issues entangled here by way of a term he borrows from the opening pages of Barthes’s S/Z, “the scriptible“–not the “culinary” pleasure of “the lisible,” the “readerly” text so consumably written that (so to speak) it does your reading for you, but rather a “writerly” kind of writing that is (Jameson’s word, not Barthes’s) “dialectical”: “sentences,” as Jameson puts it in “The Ideology of the Text” (1975/6), “whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own (IT1 21; “sentence” here, as elsewhere in Jameson, is a code-word for “the scriptible“–as in the quotation above, “a sentence rather than an idea”). The notion of “gestus” here suggests something physical, somatic: textuality as not a condition or premise of writing or language as such, but, more contingently, an energy, a contagion of excitement that prompts an “emulation” evidently free of the “anxieties of influence” so potently featured in Harold Bloom’s conception of literary transference. What is in question is not a point-for-point verbal “imitation” of distinctive stylistic effects, tics or mannerisms, but a sympathy at once libidinal and intellectual.

 

Barthes’s “scriptible” opposes itself to “the lisible” as one style to another style; only by implication does “the lisible” encode a wariness of too lazy or complacent a reception of the usual “other” of “style,” namely “content.” Hence, Jameson cautions, another “repression” encoded in the “scriptible/lisible” binary, that of “content” itself, which, in an older critical discourse, functioned as the term polar or binary to “style,” style’s “other.” Much of Jameson’s effort has been to probe the possibilities of finding base-and-superstructure linkages between what he calls the “logic of content” in a given work and the “ideological closure” it enforces. (Despite his wariness of “our old friends, base and superstructure,” Jameson’s work cannot help continued deployment of spectral versions of them.) Jameson’s insistence on “content,” on the “referent,” is one of the larger themes of his critique of “the ideology of structuralism,” or any “ideology of text” that would “reduce” everything to textuality, écriture, “textual production” or representation; and in this Jameson is happy to find support in the nominally “structuralist” psychoanalysis of Lacan. Structuralist linguistics projects the binary of “signifier” and “signified” as recto and verso of (a third term) “the sign”; but between them the three terms delimit a domain strictly coextensive with the field or problematic of “representation,” with no access to (or, in some structuralisms, interest in) any reality beyond it. By contrast, Lacan’s linguistics-influenced, Saussurean, and to that extent structuralist account of mental processes nevertheless situates their range from “Imaginary” to “Symbolic” within a larger extra-representational (and, indeed, extra-psychological) field, that of “the Real,” which (for Jameson) guarantees the “materialism” of Marxism and psychoanalysis both. Jameson argues for a Marxism-friendly Lacan when he grandly pronouces of “the Real” that “it is simply [!] History [capital H] itself” (IT1 104; recall here as well Jameson’s enthusiasm for Slavoj Zizek, whose project might be summarized as the attempt to elaborate a specifically Lacanian Ideologiekritik.)

 

Thus does Jameson enlist Lacan in his “materialist” critique of structuralism, and the danger that he regards as inherent in its linguistic or textual focus, of entrapment in its own central metaphor, so that “language” becomes a “prison-house.”² This negative, or critical, deployment of Lacan remains constant in Jameson from The Prison-House of Language (1972) through the major essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977), and beyond. A more positive use of Lacan appears in Fables of Aggression (1979) and The Political Unconscious (1981), especially the latter book’s third chapter, “Balzac and the Problem of the Subject,” which Jameson would later (1986) call an effort at “Lacanian criticism.”³ By this Jameson meant a criticism capable of achieving mediations between the social and the individual that could draw on psychoanalysis without reducing the social to the categories of individual psychology. For Jameson’s purposes, that is, Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis holds out the prospect of an analytically potent psychology not grounded in categories of Cartesian subjectivity, and thus (although Jameson nowhere puts it quite this way) able to fulfil Althusser’s stipulation in being a psychology “without a subject.” Jameson seeks a psychology that would render the representation of “character” in works of fiction amenable to issues of literary history as “genre” and “form,” and would thus invite the sort of politically and socially informed attention called for in Jameson’s famous imperative, “Always historicize!” (PU 9).

 

The success of Jameson’s “Lacanian criticism” may be assessed in Fables of Aggression and The Political Unconscious; but I want to pass to another, more complex issue at stake for Jameson, especially in the latter book, and best introduced by citing that book’s subtitle, “Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,” which encodes the premise that fictional (and other) narratives are “symbolic” of forces, tensions, contradictions in what Jameson calls “the vast text of the social itself,” and thus that there must be some access (again, on something like the base-and-superstructure model) between the novel and “History itself.” But the corrolary of this claim for “narrative as socially symbolic act” is that narrative cannot escape determination by what Jameson calls an “ideological closure.” The more potently “symbolic” it is, the feebler becomes its potential as a liberatory “act.” Which raises, implicitly, a question very close to Jameson’s quick indeed, that of whether critique can escape “ideological closure” any better than narrative can. To ask the question another way, must “socially symbolic” mean “ideological”? Can it ever escape reduction to “ideology”? Can it ever mean or achieve anything else? (Note that the possible comforts of such a notion as “relative autonomy” count for nothing in Jameson’s all-or-nothing dramatization of the issue.)

 

The question takes various forms, and tilts in the direction of various answers, in The Political Unconscious–suspended, and agitated, in Jameson’s inimitable fashion. But the general drift of the book is melancholy: his very premise presupposes a negative answer–though never, to be sure, unequivocally negative; the prose always evinces that “Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology” named in the title of the book’s concluding chapter. But among the largest hopes the book entertains for critique or for “narrative” is one cast in specifically Lacanian terms: that, somehow (unspecified), it might become a “socially symbolic act” in a fashion that would merit capitalizing the S in “Symbolic”: that would merit, in short, taking narrative’s or critique’s power as “Symbolic” in a specifically Lacanian sense. Most of the book functions, that is, as if “narrative as a socially symbolic act” encodes narrative’s “closure” within ideology; but at certain moments, especially at the close of the Balzac chapter, Jameson seems willing to talk as if the term “Symbolic” might indicate the condition of a possible critical escape from the prison-house of ideology, a break-out from the “ideological closure” the book protests. As if, in other words, “narrative [or critique] as a socially Symbolic act” [capital S] would mean surmounting a more normatively (and inescapably) ideological condition or closure in which cultural production could function only, inescapably, by definition, as “socially Imaginary act”–and from which any critical or utopian “escape” would therefore be sheer ideological (or “Imaginary”) delusion (see especially PU 183, where the locution “Symbolic texts” [capital S] is played off against “Imaginary” [capital I] in a fashion to make the Lacanian freight unmistakable).

 

We will shortly consider why Jameson’s binary of “ideology” and “utopia” cannot be simply “transcoded” into Lacan’s “Imaginary” and “Symbolic.” But his fitful readiness to hope that it might encodes another of Lacan’s attractions for Jameson, namely his Hegelianism–a recurrent, if undeveloped, theme in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” It is shrewd of Jameson to have noted that Lacan’s Freud is a Hegelian Freud, in contrast to the (normatively) Nietzschean Freuds “theory” has mostly generated; but I think Jameson overplays his hand here: Lacan’s “Imaginary” and “Symbolic” don’t quite bear the freight he wants them to carry; though Jameson’s own caution against deploying the passage from “Imaginary” to “Symbolic” as a version of the Levi-Straussian nature-to-culture motif perhaps says all that needs saying in anticipation of my reservations here (IT1 97). But the (Hegelian) point is that for Lacan and Jameson, the “Imaginary/ Symbolic” binary encodes a narrative, modeled on the Hegelian course from “immediate” to “mediated,” of transit from a “lower” to a “higher” state, in which the “lower” is aufgehoben, transcended yet preserved, in the “higher.” Lacan, in my view, plays the Hegelian dialectic ironically; hence the continual Schadenfreude of his textual voice, the continual irony at the expense of “the Symbolic” itself in its very aspiration (“stoic” and/or “tragic,” to use Jameson’s terms of praise for Lacan [IT1 98, 112], but either way, doomed) to disintricate itself from “the Imaginary.”

 

However all that may be, Jameson takes Lacan’s Hegelian (and other) flourishes more straightforwardly, and thus finds in Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic,” notwithstanding the essay’s earlier denunciation of “ethics,” something like an “ethic”–“an implicit ethical imperative” (in Jane Gallop’s words), “to break the mirror . . . to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach the symbolic.'”⁴ Indeed, the quasi- or crypto-Hegelian narrativization of this ethic projects a scenario of change and progress, development and Aufhebung: it provides, in other words, for the continual coming-into-being of fresh perspectives, different from or “outside” of those preceding them, and thus allowing for “critical” reconsideration of them–in the context of this discussion, allowing one of the larger “desires” (or more Hegelian hopes) of The Political Unconscious, that the word “Symbolic” in its subtitle can mean genuinely “critical,” and not merely “ideological” in the sense of “an Imaginary solution to a Real contradiction.”

 

But where Hegel was, there shall Heidegger be–“there,” above all, in the field of what solicits Jameson’s interest as a specifically Lacanian “scriptible.” And since, for Jameson, “interest” is proportional to problematicality, we must again acknowledge–indeed, insist on–the inextricability of Lacan’s “scriptible” from his “content.” This sketch so far, for example, has required brief exposition of “arguments” or “positions”; likewise Jameson’s own discussions of Lacan, except (of course) much much more so. It’s arguable, in fact, that of the many high “theory” figures and issues Jameson has written about, none has so forced him into the “expository” mode as Lacan. Lacan’s prose is calculated to confound every possible logic of “argument” or “position,” yet Jameson is not alone in the dilemma that discussion of Lacan is obliged to ascribe something argument- or position-like to him in order to conduct itself at all. Hence the ironic quotation marks with which Jameson refers to “Lacanianism” (IT1 95)–a term, indeed, that gets funnier and funnier the more you think about it. We return herewith to the problem announced at this paper’s opening: the desire of the “speaking subject” to speak (or write) a way out of the entrapment, the necessity, the “ideological closure” of “meaning,” or what the later Jameson calls, in a term borrowed from Paul de Man, “thematization”⁵–a term, in Jameson’s usage, for the form (or threat) of “reification” specific to intellectual work, and to properly “dialectical” projects like his own (if, indeed, the word “dialectical” isn’t simply an apotropaism, the sign of a project’s self-consciousness of the danger of, and its desire to escape, “thematization”).

 

“Thematization,” indeed, could serve as the “other” of “the scriptible“–its “other” in the pointed sense of its antagonist, or its special pitfall or danger. Jameson’s sense of the energies of “the scriptible” in doomed agon with “thematization” may be read as another version of his “dialectic of utopia and ideology”; it can also be read as a version, indeed, a less “irreversible” (i.e., less narrative, and less Hegelian) version, of his account of “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” But my point here is that quite apart from any paraphraseable doctrine or portable “thematization” of Lacan–from any “Lacanianism,” in short–Jameson discerns in Lacan’s oracular and evasive, but also ingenious, witty, and energetic prose another instance of a scriptible well worth “emulation,” another exemplar of the effort to evade or disable in advance the “thematizations” any discourse, however “dialectically” written, must suffer in an age of “consumerist” reification.

 

As noted above, Jameson in one of his aspects is an enforcer of “content” on those who would evade it; but his stress on “content” means to facilitate analysis and protest, perhaps even exorcism of, or breakout from, its pernicious “ideological closure.” The motif of “the scriptible” encodes this protest against “the logic of content,” this hope or desire to escape the constraints of “ideological closure,” at its most utopian and libidinal. And so it is as a prose stylist that I want to feature Lacan’s interest for Jameson in what remains–well aware as I do so that for many readers, precisely the impenetrable prose of these two figures is the primary stumbling block for any approach to their work. Such readers suppose, or hope, that the value of a Jameson or a Lacan is in a “content” that would be available after the difficulties of “style” have been obviated. But it is part of the appeal of “the scriptible” for Jameson to confound any such “thematizing” habit of reading that would aim at an instrumental extraction of content from a stylistic skin that, once evacuated, can be properly left behind. It is one of the marks of “the scriptible” in Jameson that he does not judge its exemplars on the propositional “content,” or “argument,” of their writing–as witness two of his favorite figures, Wyndham Lewis and Martin Heidegger, notoriously “right,” and at times explicitly fascist, in their politics. The presence of Heidegger in Lacan’s work, of course, is evident; Jameson links the two as exemplars of a twentieth-century critique of subject-object dichotomizing, “identity” thinking, correspondence or “adequation” theories of “truth,” the devolution of techne into technology, the instrumentalization of knowledge as “mastery,” etc. (IT1 103-5).

 

In “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” Jameson gathers these Heideggerian concerns under the Lacanian rubric, “the overestimation of the Symbolic at the expense of the Imaginary” (IT1 95, 102; cf. PHL 140). Heidegger and Lacan (and Jameson himself) thus stand as petitioners for the claims of “the Imaginary” against those, already over-esteemed in our reifying culture, of “the Symbolic.” And here we abut Jameson’s twin enthusiasms for the sublime nutsiness of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and for the Deleuze-Guattari thematic and practice, in Anti-Oedipus, of the “schizo” and the “delirious.”⁶ Both of these enthusiasms align with, though they can appear at times to displace or eclipse, Jameson’s announced admiration for Lacan. And although neither Lyotard, on the one hand, still less Deleuze and Guattari on the other, are exactly fans of Lacan, Jameson’s mediations proceed at a level–that of “sentence” rather than of “idea”–where their substantive dissents from each other can remain in abeyance. In Fables of Aggression and The Political Unconscious the libidinal and the schizo are assigned the burden of the Heideggerian-Lacanian alternative to “the Symbolic”–in creative or imaginative writing, of course, but as the examples of Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari (and Lewis, if not quite so unreservedly Heidegger and Lacan themselves) insist, in critical writing as well. In the program chapter to Postmodernism, Jameson will project these affective properties as “sublime,” and as such, both a program and a problem for his own work.

 

Yet above, the very possibility of critique, the very possibility of its power to escape “ideological closure,” was figured as its potential to surmount “the [ideological] Imaginary” and ascend to “the [critical] Symbolic.” Here, Jameson valorizes a desire to head in the other direction. Here, “the Symbolic” itself is the “ideology” from which escape is hoped for, by way not of the stratospheric mediations of critique, but rather of the affective immediacies of “the Imaginary.” I alluded above to the difficulties of “transcoding” Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic” binary into Jameson’s “ideology/utopia”; part of what obstructs that “transcoding” is that it requires, on one side of the bar, an equation of “utopia” with “critique” that feels counter-intuitive, insofar as “utopia” says pleasure and the libidinal, and embraces the collective; whereas “critique” implies a cerebral ascesis that will necessarily, even in utopia, be the concern of specialized elites. To put it more schematically: on one pass (call it the Hegelian), the Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic” binary seems to align with Jameson’s “ideology/critique,” implying a liberatory narrative of progressive possibility; on the other (the Heideggerian), it aligns rather with that of “utopia/ideology,” a story in which what masqueraded (and seduced) as progress eventuates at last, ironically, in decline, loss, nostalgia, and abjection before the exactions of ananke. In short: if “ideology” is our starting point, is the passage to the “schizo” a flight or a fall, an ascent or a descent, a progress or a regress?

 

This difficulty (not to call it a “contradiction”) indicates much of the conflictedness Jameson registers when he describes the Lacanian “ethic” as “stoic” and “tragic”; it indicates as well the ambitions of, the mediations proposed in, and the contradictions bedeviling the Jamesonian “scriptible,” a prose whose potency is at once analytical and libidinal. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” indeed, ends by inferring from Lacan something like an ethic or ethos for “cultural intellectuals,” one which would eschew the “Symbolic” critical “mastery” of “subject” over “object” in favor of a more intersubjective “articulated receptivity,” for which Jameson enlists the Lacanian “discourse of the analyst”:

 

The "discourse of the analyst," finally, is the subject position that our current political languages seem least qualified to articulate. Like the "discourse of the hysteric," this position also involves an absolute commitment to desire as such at the same time that it opens a certain listening distance from it and suspends the latter's existential urgencies--in a fashion more dialectical than ironic. The "discourse of the analyst," then, which seeks to distinguish the nature of the object of desire itself from the passions and immediacies of the experience of desire's subject, suggests a demanding and self-effacing political equivalent in which the structure of Utopian desire itself is attended to through the chaotic rhythms of collective discourse and fantasy of all kinds (including those that pass through our own heads). This is not, unlike the discourse of the master, a position of authority . . . ; rather it is a position of articulated receptivity, of deep listening (L'écoute), of some attention beyond the self or the ego, but one that may need to use those bracketed personal functions as instruments for hearing the Other's desire. The active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position, which acknowledges collective desire at the same moment that it tracks its spoors and traces, may well have lessons for cultural intellectuals as well as politicians and psychoanalysts. (IT1 115)

 

This “active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial of this final subject position,” forecasts Jameson’s later recommendation that critique now must conduct itself “homeopathically,” from the inside, suffering ideology’s own virulences the better to turn them against it.⁷

 

The ambition operative here, however, is for a mediation of “Imaginary” and “Symbolic” in an ascesis at once active and passive, of “listening” attention that can achieve contact with “the Real,” which Jameson has equated, “simply,” with “History itself.” Here the demands Jameson makes of critique, and of his own critical practice, rely less on Lacan’s categories than on his example as a writer, on that peculiar Lacanian “scriptible,” so elusive and yet so evocative of a “Real” that, as Lacan says, “resists symbolization absolutely”–a formula in which the word “symbolization” bears not only the full Lacanian charge, but also obvious affinities to “thematization,” the condition Jameson hopes his own writing practice may disable if not altogether prevent or escape. (Lacan’s cagy prose, we may note by the way, resists “thematization” more effectively–or resists “symbolization” more “absolutely”–than Jameson’s own.) Granted that critique, that utterance of any kind, cannot “resist thematization absolutely”; such is Lacan’s stoic-tragic, but also comic and even sarcastic theme. Jameson’s later prose derives its effects from making much, the most possible, both of the (imperative) attempt, and of the (inevitable) failure. Much: but what exactly?–a “socially Symbolic act”? a “socially Real act”? In The Political Unconscious, Jameson will elaborate “History itself” (“what hurts”) as “absent cause,” and thus as “unrepresentable” and “unsymbolizable” in ways that, in Postmodernism, will require or justify, or “motivate,” a rhetoric of “the sublime”–a designation apt, I think, for at least some of the grander effects of the later Jameson’s tortured “scriptible.” Lacan’s terminology permits us to indicate the anxieties often powering these passages by way of the question, Can Jameson’s critical “sublime” escape “the Imaginary” and broach “the Real”? The difficulty, of course, is how to know the difference–or even how to know whether the difference itself is “Imaginary” or “Real.”

 

Oddly, however, although Lacan’s prose is much more “difficult” than Jameson’s, these particular difficulties, signally, feel much more “difficult” in Jameson’s prose than in Lacan’s. For all Lacan’s sarcasms at the expense of “le sujet supposé savoir,” it is just such a “knowingness” that Lacan’s prose projects: a knowingness, notably, from which the reader is excluded. (“The reader” here, of course, means this reader, who is happy to project himself, in the context of reading Lacan, as un sujet supposé ne pas savoir.) The agitations of Jameson’s prose, by contrast, project its “difficulties” as difficulties reader and writer have in common, dilemmas incurred by the shared desire to know confronting the insecurity, or the anxiety, incurred by Jameson’s and our own critical scruples. To this extent Lacan suggests one way of getting a handle on the “motivations” of Jameson’s notoriously agitated prose. Jameson often alludes to a “dialectic of utopia and ideology,” but also operant in his writing, as we have seen, is that other dialectic, that other binary, which projects as the “other” of “ideology” not “utopia” but “critique.” Can critique ever ascend beyond the closure of the “socially Symbolic” to “act” upon the elusive, absent, unsymbolizable “socially Real”? That is the form in which Lacan enables Jameson to dramatize the ambitions, or agitate the desires, both critical and “writerly,” of his writing.

 

Notes

 

1. It may be helpful here to observe that Jameson and Lacan share an alignment programmatically rejected by many, most saliently Derrida, for whom any talk of “the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language” would be almost too caricaturally deconstructible. Hence at least some of Jameson’s evident wariness of Derrida, from The Prison-House of Language (1971) through “Marx’s Purloined Letter” (1995). Of special relevance in the latter essay are the pages in which Jameson improvises a genealogy descending from Hegel for the problem of how philosophical/critical writing is written–a problem manifesting in Derrida as “a certain set of taboos” enforcing “an avoidance of the affirmative sentence as such,” and, hence, a prose “vigilantly policed and patrolled by the intent to avoid saying something” (“MPL” 81). Jameson goes on to insist that somehow or other, nevertheless, “content [is] generated” in Derrida; but despite his mildly ironic tone at Derrida’s expense, the problem is one that he elsewhere, in connection with other writers, stages as quite an anguishing one (see, e.g., the pages on “dialectical writing” in Marxism and Form [xii-xiii and the Adorno chapter, passim]; the passage on Barthes’s “writing with the body” in “Pleasure: A Political Issue” [IT2 69]; the lament against “thematization” in Late Marxism [LM 183]; the plangent reprise on the Barthesian scriptible in Signatures of the Visible [SV 2-4]. I have written about some of these problems at greater length in “Marxist ‘Pleasure’: Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton,” PMC 3.3 [May 1993]).

 

Other Marxists (e.g., Eagleton) complain that Derrida is “apolitical”; Jameson’s take seems to be that Derrida’s proscription of “metaphysics” secures some of its gains a bit too facilely: for Jameson, the largest stakes, the success or failure, of theory or critique are at play only when ideology and metaphysics figure not as mere errors, or false consciousness (as if banishing false consciousness were as simple as calling it “false”), but as fated burdens: “sublime object(s),” or desired/hated “symptom(s),” in Zizek’s cheerful, cheeky Lacanian terms, whose “closure” critique can only fitfully protest–with the further irony that the very protest only confirms them. Jameson seems to me to miss the degree to which Derrida has recently begun to spin his longstanding motif of “affirmative deconstruction” in ways that suggest a greater hospitality to such patently “metaphysical” constructions as “the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language”; I’m thinking especially of the motif of “the undeconstructible” in The Gift of Death (trans. David Wills [University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992]) and Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Routledge: New York, 1994]). “The undeconstructible” encompasses such terms as “God,” “responsibility,” “spirit,” “justice,” and “a certain experience of the emancipatory [elsewhere, “messianic”] promise…”–motifs you could fairly call “specters of (late) Derrida.”

 

2. For Marxism and psychoanalysis as “materialisms,” see IT1 104-5; for this critique of structuralism, see PHL passim, especially (for Lacan) 169-73.

 

3. IT1 97, and 195 n45. Note that Jameson does not nominate Fables of Aggression as an example of “Lacanian criticism”–perhaps because though it deals with the problems he regards as belonging to “Lacanian criticism” (the insertion of the subject into ideology), he foregrounds Lyotard’s “libidinal apparatus” rather than any Lacanian vocabulary. (In like manner, as we will see below, Deleuze and Guattari displace–or sublate: simultaneously “cancel and preserve”–Lacan in the opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” of The Political Unconscious.) Lacan persists in Fables of Aggression mostly via the mediation of Althusser. Still, the elision of Lacan, only two years after the programmatic claims based on him in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” is at the very least surprising.

 

4. For Jameson’s denunciation of “ethics” in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977), see IT1 58, 87, 95; cf “Criticism in History,” ibid., 123-6; FA 56; PU 59, 234. (Jameson more accommodatingly reconsiders “ethics” in “Morality versus Ethical Substance; or, Aristotelian Marxism in Alasdair MacIntyre” [1983/4], IT1 181-5). For the Jane Gallop passage, see Reading Lacan (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985), 59. Gallop and Jameson acknowledge each other’s work, and make some show of taking exception to each other, but on this their views are quite similar.

 

5. For a suggestive Jamesonian deployment of the term “thematization,” see, e.g., Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (1991), 182-3: “Proving equal to Adorno . . . doing right by him, attempting to keep faith with the protean intelligence of his sentences, requires a tireless effort–always on the point of lapsing–to prevent the thematization [Jameson’s italics] of his concept[s]…”

 

6. The most relevant Lacan texts in this connection are “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960) and, to a lesser extent, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958), in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 292-325, 179-225.

 

7. “To undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself, to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I have called substitutes for history.” Jameson in a 1986 interview with Anders Stephanson, “Regarding Postmodernism,” in Douglas Kellner, ed., Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (Washington DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989), 59.

 

Works Cited

 

• FA: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. U of California P: Berkeley, 1979.
• IT1: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. U of Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 1988.
• IT2: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. U of Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 1988.
• M&F: Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton UP: Princeton, 1971.
• “MPL”: “Marx’s Purloined Letter.” New Left Review 209 (January/February 1995), 75-109.
• PHL: The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton UP: Princeton, 1972.
• PU: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP: Ithaca, 1981.
• SV: Signatures of the Visible. Routledge: New York, 1992.