Jameson's Lacan by Steven Helmling

8/6/2019 Jameson's Lacan by Steven Helmling

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Jameson's Lacan

by

Steven Helmling

University of [email protected]

Postmodern Culture v.7 n.1 (September, 1996)

Copyright (c) 1996 by Steven Helmling, all rightsreserved. This text may be used and shared inaccordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.copyright law, and it may be archived andredistributed in electronic form, provided that theeditors are notified and no fee is charged foraccess. Archiving, redistribution, or republicationof this text on other terms, in any medium, requiresthe consent of the author and the notification ofthe publisher, Institute for Advanced Technology in

the Humanities.

[1] Fredric Jameson's career-long engagement with JacquesLacan begins in the pages on Lacan in _The Prison-Houseof Language_, with the declaration that Lacan's workoffers an "initiatory" experience rather than anexpository account. It is in the spirit of thatexperiential or "dialectical" emphasis that Jamesonproposes an off-standard response to what (he says) mostpeople 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 ameditation and offers itself as an object ofexegesis, instead of serving as the expression ofa single concept. (_PHL_ 170-1)

In this essay I want to indicate what seem to me to bethe parameters of Lacan's importance for Jameson. Ibegin with this passage, in which Jameson discriminatesLacan's "idea" from his "sentence," in order toemphasize that Lacan and Jameson share a centralproblematic: the indissociability of what Lacan callsthe "spirit" that motivates an enunciation and the"letter," at once spirit's vehicle and its betrayer, ofthe %enounce% that "*it* speaks" (%ca parle%). I aimnot to bracket "meaning" here, but to highlight whatseems to me Lacan's most immediate interest for Jameson,namely his sense, both as a problem for exposition andas the condition or "motivation" of his gnomic,enigma-mongering prose style, of what Jameson calls "themystery of the incarnation of meaning in language"(_PHL_ 169).

[2] Jameson subsequently elaborates this "mystery" into the


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antagonism between the inevitability of "meaning," itssocial, collective, constructed, conditioned, and thus(for Jameson) *ideological* character, and a Cartesianideology of the self or "subject" that is rooted in andimplies a speaker's desire (futile perhaps, but only the

more poignant for that) to "mean" things that haven'tbeen meant before, to make new and "original" meanings,to escape the entrapment (what Jameson calls the"ideological closure") imposed by the "order of thesignifier." 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 bothJameson's *and* Lacan's notoriously idiosyncratic prosestyles. For Jameson, Lacan's writing is exemplary innot merely enacting, but inflicting upon the reader, allthe dilemmas (inside/outside, same/different,surface/depth, written/spoken, temporal/spatial) to

which highbrow postmodernity finds itself returning likea dog to a bone. Reading Lacan, your bafflement can'tdecide whether you are trying to gain entry tosomething, or effect an escape from it--even if (indeed,

no matter how many times) you've already surmised thatthe best model this prose offers of itself is theLacanian "Real," whose definitive measure is the successor failure with which it "resists symbolizationabsolutely." This is a prose in which the law ofnon-contradiction does not prevail, a medium solventenough to diffuse, but also stiff enough to suspend,every precipitate released into or catalyzed withinit.^1^

[3] Jameson accesses the multifold issues entangled here byway of a term he borrows from the opening pages ofBarthes's _S/Z_, "the %scriptible%"--not the "culinary"pleasure of "the %lisible%," the "readerly" text so

consumably written that (so to speak) it does yourreading for you, but rather a "writerly" kind of writingthat is (Jameson's word, not Barthes's) "dialectical":"sentences," as Jameson puts it in "The Ideology of theText" (1975/6), "whose %gestus% arouses the desire toemulate it, sentences that make you want to writesentences of your own (_IT1_ 21; "sentence" here, aselsewhere in Jameson, is a code-word for "the%scriptible%"--as in the quotation above, "a sentencerather than an idea"). The notion of "%gestus%" heresuggests something physical, somatic: textuality as nota condition or premise of writing or language as such,but, more contingently, an energy, a contagion ofexcitement that prompts an "emulation" evidently free of

the "anxieties of influence" so potently featured inHarold 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 andintellectual.

[4] Barthes's "%scriptible%" opposes itself to "the%lisible%" as one style to another style; only byimplication does "the %lisible%" encode a wariness of


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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, inan older critical discourse, functioned as the termpolar or binary to "style," style's "other." Much ofJameson's effort has been to probe the possibilities offinding base-and-superstructure linkages between whathe 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 ofspectral versions of them.) Jameson's insistence on"content," on the "referent," is one of the largerthemes of his critique of "the ideology ofstructuralism," or any "ideology of text" that would"reduce" everything to textuality, %ecriture%, "textualproduction" or representation; and in this Jameson ishappy to find support in the nominally "structuralist"psychoanalysis of Lacan. Structuralist linguisticsprojects the binary of "signifier" and "signified" asrecto and verso of (a third term) "the sign"; but

between them the three terms delimit a domain strictlycoextensive with the field or problematic of"representation," with no access to (or, in somestructuralisms, interest in) any reality beyond it. Bycontrast, Lacan's linguistics-influenced, Saussurean,and to that extent structuralist account of mentalprocesses nevertheless situates their range from"Imaginary" to "Symbolic" *within* a largerextra-representational (and, indeed,extra-psychological) field, that of "the Real," which(for Jameson) guarantees the "materialism" of Marxismand psychoanalysis both. Jameson argues for aMarxism-friendly Lacan when he grandly pronouces of "theReal" that "it is simply [!] History [capital H] itself"

(_IT1_ 104; recall here as well Jameson's enthusiasm forSlavoj Zizek, whose project might be summarized as theattempt to elaborate a specifically Lacanian%Ideologiekritik%.)

[5] Thus does Jameson enlist Lacan in his "materialist"critique of structuralism, and the danger that heregards 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 inJameson from _The Prison-House of Language_ (1972)through the major essay, "Imaginary and Symbolic inLacan" (1977), and beyond. A more positive use of Lacan

appears in _Fables of Aggression_ (1979) and _ThePolitical Unconscious_ (1981), especially the latterbook's third chapter, "Balzac and the Problem of theSubject," which Jameson would later (1986) call aneffort at "Lacanian criticism."^3^ By this Jamesonmeant a criticism capable of achieving mediationsbetween the social and the individual that could draw onpsychoanalysis without reducing the social to thecategories of individual psychology. For Jameson'spurposes, that is, Lacan's structuralist psychoanalysis


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holds out the prospect of an analytically potentpsychology *not* grounded in categories of Cartesiansubjectivity, and thus (although Jameson nowhere puts itquite this way) able to fulfil Althusser's stipulationin being a psychology "without a subject." Jamesonseeks a psychology that would render the representationof "character" in works of fiction amenable to issues ofliterary history as "genre" and "form," and would thusinvite the sort of politically and socially informedattention called for in Jameson's famous imperative,"Always historicize!" (_PU_ 9).

[6] The success of Jameson's "Lacanian criticism" may beassessed in _Fables of Aggression_ and _The PoliticalUnconscious_; but I want to pass to another, morecomplex issue at stake for Jameson, especially in thelatter book, and best introduced by citing that book'ssubtitle, "Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act," whichencodes the premise that fictional (and other)narratives are "symbolic" of forces, tensions,contradictions in what Jameson calls "the vast text ofthe social itself," and thus that there must be some

access (again, on something like thebase-and-superstructure model) between the novel and"History itself." But the corrolary of this claim for"narrative as socially symbolic act" is that narrativecannot *escape* determination by what Jameson calls an"ideological closure." The more potently "symbolic" itis, the feebler becomes its potential as a liberatory"act." Which raises, implicitly, a question very closeto Jameson's quick indeed, that of whether critique canescape "ideological closure" any better than narrativecan. To ask the question another way, must "sociallysymbolic" mean "ideological"? Can it ever escapereduction to "ideology"? Can it ever mean or achieveanything else? (Note that the possible comforts of

such a notion as "relative autonomy" count for nothingin Jameson's all-or-nothing dramatization of the issue.)

[7] The question takes various forms, and tilts in thedirection of various answers, in _The PoliticalUnconscious_--suspended, and agitated, in Jameson'sinimitable fashion. But the general drift of the bookis melancholy: his very premise presupposes a negativeanswer--though never, to be sure, unequivocallynegative; the prose always evinces that "Dialectic ofUtopia and Ideology" named in the title of the book'sconcluding chapter. But among the largest hopes thebook entertains for critique *or* for "narrative" is onecast 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, takingnarrative's or critique's power as "Symbolic" in aspecifically Lacanian sense. Most of the book functions,that is, as if "narrative as a socially symbolic act"encodes narrative's "closure" *within* ideology; but atcertain moments, especially at the close of the Balzacchapter, Jameson seems willing to talk as if the term"Symbolic" might indicate the condition of a possible


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critical escape from the prison-house of ideology, abreak-out from the "ideological closure" the bookprotests. As if, in other words, "narrative [orcritique] as a socially Symbolic act" [capital S] would

mean surmounting a more normatively (and inescapably)ideological condition or closure in which culturalproduction could function only, inescapably, bydefinition, as "socially *Imaginary* act"--and from

which any critical or utopian "escape" would thereforebe sheer ideological (or "Imaginary") delusion (seeespecially _PU_ 183, where the locution "Symbolic texts"[capital S] is played off against "Imaginary" [capitalI] in a fashion to make the Lacanian freightunmistakable).

[8] We will shortly consider why Jameson's binary of"ideology" and "utopia" cannot be simply "transcoded"into Lacan's "Imaginary" and "Symbolic." But hisfitful readiness to hope that it might encodes anotherof Lacan's attractions for Jameson, namely hisHegelianism--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 HegelianFreud, in contrast to the (normatively) NietzscheanFreuds "theory" has mostly generated; but I thinkJameson overplays his hand here: Lacan's "Imaginary"and "Symbolic" don't quite bear the freight he wantsthem to carry; though Jameson's own caution againstdeploying the passage from "Imaginary" to "Symbolic"as a version of the Levi-Straussian nature-to-culture

motif perhaps says all that needs saying in anticipationof my reservations here (_IT1_ 97). But the (Hegelian)point is that for Lacan *and* Jameson, the "Imaginary/Symbolic" binary encodes a *narrative*, modeled on theHegelian course from "immediate" to "mediated," oftransit from a "lower" to a "higher" state, in which the

"lower" is %aufgehoben%, transcended yet preserved, inthe "higher." Lacan, in my view, plays the Hegeliandialectic ironically; hence the continual%Schadenfreude% of his textual voice, the continualirony at the expense of "the Symbolic" itself in itsvery aspiration ("stoic" and/or "tragic," to useJameson's terms of praise for Lacan [_IT1_ 98, 112], buteither way, doomed) to disintricate itself from "theImaginary."

[9] However all that may be, Jameson takes Lacan's Hegelian(and other) flourishes more straightforwardly, and thusfinds in Lacan's "Imaginary/Symbolic," notwithstandingthe essay's earlier denunciation of "ethics," something

like an "ethic"--"an implicit ethical imperative" (inJane Gallop's words), "to break the mirror...to disruptthe imaginary in order to reach the symbolic.'"^4^Indeed, the quasi-or crypto-Hegelian narrativization ofthis ethic projects a scenario of change and progress,development and %Aufhebung%: it provides, in other

words, for the continual coming-into-being of freshperspectives, different from or "outside" of thosepreceding them, and thus allowing for "critical"reconsideration of them--in the context of this


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discussion, allowing one of the larger "desires" (ormore Hegelian hopes) of _The Political Unconscious_,that the word "Symbolic" in its subtitle can mean thegenuinely "critical," and not merely "ideological" insense of "an Imaginary solution to a Realcontradiction."

[10] But where Hegel was, there shall Heidegger be--"there,"above all, in the field of what solicits Jameson'sinterest as a specifically Lacanian "%scriptible%."

And since, for Jameson, "interest" is proportional toproblematicality, 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 ofLacan, except (of course) much much more so. It'sarguable, in fact, that of the many high "theory"figures and issues Jameson has written about none hasso forced him into the "expository" mode as Lacan.Lacan's prose is calculated to confound every possiblelogic of "argument" or "position," yet Jameson is not

alone in the dilemma that discussion of Lacan is obligedto ascribe something argument- or position-like to himin order to conduct itself at all. Hence the ironicquotation marks with which Jameson refers to"Lacanianism" (_IT1_ 95)--a term, indeed, that getsfunnier and funnier the more you think about it. Wereturn herewith to the problem announced at this paper'sopening: 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 thelater Jameson calls, in a term borrowed from Paul deMan, "thematization"^5^--a term, in Jameson's usage, forthe form (or threat) of "reification" specific tointellectual work, and to properly "dialectical"

projects like his own (if, indeed, the word"dialectical" isn't simply an apotropaism, the sign of aproject's self-consciousness of the danger of, and itsdesire to escape, "thematization").

[11] "Thematization," indeed, could serve as the "other" of"the %scriptible%"--its "other" in the pointed sense ofits antagonist, or its special pitfall or danger.Jameson's sense of the energies of "the %scriptible%" indoomed agon with "thematization" may be read as anotherversion of his "dialectic of utopia and ideology"; itcan 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 anyparaphraseable doctrine or portable "thematization" ofLacan--from any "Lacanianism," in short--Jamesondiscerns in Lacan's oracular and evasive, but alsoingenious, witty, and energetic prose another instanceof a %scriptible% well worth "emulation," anotherexemplar of the effort to evade or disable in advancethe "thematizations" any discourse, however"dialectically" written, must suffer in an age of"consumerist" reification.


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[12] As noted above, Jameson in one of his aspects is anenforcer of "content" on those who would evade it; buthis stress on "content" means to facilitate analysis andprotest, perhaps even exorcism of, or breakout from, itspernicious "ideological closure." The motif of "the%scriptible%" encodes this protest against "the logic ofcontent," this hope or desire to escape the constraintsof "ideological closure," at its most utopian andlibidinal. And so it is as a prose stylist that I wantto feature Lacan's interest for Jameson in what remains--well aware as I do so that for many readers, preciselythe impenetrable prose of these two figures is theprimary stumbling block for any approach to their work.Such readers suppose, or hope, that the value of aJameson or a Lacan is in a "content" that would beavailable *after* the difficulties of "style" have beenobviated. But it is part of the appeal of "the%scriptible%" for Jameson to confound any such"thematizing" habit of reading that would aim at aninstrumental extraction of content from a stylistic skinthat, once evacuated, can be properly left behind. It

is one of the marks of "the %scriptible%" in Jamesonthat he does *not* judge its exemplars on thepropositional "content," or "argument," of their writing--as witness two of his favorite figures, Wyndham Lewisand Martin Heidegger, notoriously "right," and at timesexplicitly fascist, in their politics. The presence ofHeidegger in Lacan's work, of course, is evident;Jameson links the two as exemplars of atwentieth-century critique of subject-objectdichotomizing, "identity" thinking, correspondence or"adequation" theories of "truth," the devolution of%techne% into technology, the instrumentalization ofknowledge as "mastery," etc. (_IT1_ 103-5).

[13] In "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," Jameson gathersthese Heideggerian concerns under the Lacanian rubric,"the overestimation of the Symbolic at the expense ofthe Imaginary" (_IT1_ 95, 102; cf. _PHL_ 140).Heidegger an Lacan (and Jameson himself) thus stand aspetitioners for the claims of "the Imaginary" *against*those, already over-esteemed in our reifying culture, of"the Symbolic." And here we abut Jameson's twinenthusiasms for the sublime nutsiness of Lyotard's

_Libidinal Economy_ and for the Deleuze-Guattarithematic and practice, in _Anti-Oedipus_, of the"schizo" and the "delirious."^6^ Both of theseenthusiasms align with, though they can appear at timesto displace or eclipse, Jameson's announced admiration

for Lacan. And although neither Lyotard, on the onehand, still less Deleuze and Guattari on the other, areexactly fans of Lacan, Jameson's mediations proceed ata level--that of "sentence" rather than of "idea"--wheretheir substantive dissents from each other can remain inabeyance. In _Fables of Aggression_ and _The PoliticalUnconscious_ the libidinal and the schizo are assignedthe burden of the Heideggerian-Lacanian alternative to"the Symbolic"--in creative or imaginative writing, ofcourse, but as the examples of Lyotard and Deleuze and


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Guattari (and Lewis, if not quite so unreservedlyHeidegger and Lacan themselves) insist, in critical

writing as well. In the program chapter to_Postmodernism_, Jameson will project these affectiveproperties as "sublime," and as such, both a program anda problem for his own work.

[14] Yet above, the very possibility of critique, the verypossibility of its power to escape "ideologicalclosure," was figured as its potential to surmount "the[ideological] Imaginary" and ascend to "the [critical]Symbolic." Here, Jameson valorizes a desire to head inthe other direction. Here, "the Symbolic" itself is the"ideology" from which escape is hoped for, by way not ofthe stratospheric mediations of critique, but rather ofthe affective immediacies of "the Imaginary." I alludedabove to the difficulties of "transcoding" Lacan's"Imaginary/Symbolic" binary into Jameson's "ideology/utopia"; part of what obstructs that "transcoding" isthat 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 acerebral %ascesis% that will necessarily, even inutopia, 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 aliberatory narrative of progressive possibility; on theother (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 theexactions of %ananke%. In short: if "ideology" is ourstarting point, is the passage to the "schizo" a flightor a fall, an ascent or a descent, a progress or a

regress?

[15] 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 contradictionsbedeviling the Jamesonian "%scriptible,%" a prose whosepotency is at once analytical and libidinal. "Imaginaryand Symbolic in Lacan," indeed, ends by inferring fromLacan something like an ethic or ethos for "culturalintellectuals," one which would eschew the "Symbolic"critical "mastery" of "subject" over "object" in favorof a more *intersubjective* "articulated receptivity,"

for which Jameson enlists the Lacanian "discourse of theanalyst":

The "discourse of the analyst," finally, is thesubject position that our current politicallanguages seem least qualified to articulate.Like the "discourse of the hysteric," thisposition also involves an absolute commitment todesire as such at the same time that it opens acertain listening distance from it and suspends


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the latter's existential urgencies--in a fashionmore dialectical than ironic. The "discourse ofthe analyst," then, which seeks to distinguishthe nature of the object of desire itself fromthe passions and immediacies of the experienceof desire's subject, suggests a demanding andself-effacing political equivalent in which thestructure of Utopian desire itself is attendedto through the chaotic rhythms of collectivediscourse and fantasy of all kinds (includingthose that pass through our own heads). Thisis not, unlike the discourse of the master, aposition of authority...; rather it is a positionof articulated receptivity, of deep listening(%L'ecoute%), of some attention beyond the selfor the ego, but one that may need to use thosebracketed personal functions as instruments forhearing the Other's desire. The active andtheoretical passivity, the rigorous and committedself-denial, of this final subject position, whichacknowledges collective desire at the same momentthat it tracks its spoors and traces, may well

have lessons for cultural intellectuals as wellas politicians and psychoanalysts. (_IT1_ 115)

This "active and theoretical passivity, the rigorousand committed self-denial of this final subjectposition," forecasts Jameson's later recommendation thatcritique now must conduct itself "homeopathically," fromthe inside, suffering ideology's own virulences thebetter to turn them against it.^7^

[16] The ambition operative here, however, is for a mediationof "Imaginary" and "Symbolic" in an %ascesis% at onceactive and passive, of "listening" attention that canachieve contact with "the Real," which Jameson has

equated, "simply," with "History itself." Here thedemands Jameson makes of critique, and of his owncritical practice, rely less on Lacan's categories thanon his example as a writer, on that peculiar Lacanian"%scriptible%," so elusive and yet so evocative of a"Real" that, as Lacan says, "resists symbolizationabsolutely"--a formula in which the word "symbolization"bears not only the full Lacanian charge, but alsoobvious affinities to "thematization," the conditionJameson hopes his own writing practice may disable ifnot altogether prevent or escape. (Lacan's cagy prose,

we may note by the way, resists "thematization" moreeffectively--or resists "symbolization" more"absolutely"--than Jameson's own.) Granted that

critique, that utterance of any kind, cannot "resistthematization absolutely"; such is Lacan's stoic-tragic,but also comic and even sarcastic theme. Jameson'slater prose derives its effects from making much, the

most possible, both of the (imperative) attempt, and ofthe (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," andthus as "unrepresentable" and "unsymbolizable" in ways


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that, in _Postmodernism_, will require or justify, or"motivate," a rhetoric of "the sublime"--a designationapt, I think, for at least some of the grander effectsof the later Jameson's tortured "%scriptible%." Lacan'sterminology permits us to indicate the anxieties oftenpowering these passages by way of the question, CanJameson's critical "sublime" escape "the Imaginary" andbroach "the Real"? The difficulty, of course, is how toknow the difference--or even how to know whether thedifference itself is "Imaginary" or "Real."

[17] Oddly, however, although Lacan's prose is much more"difficult" than Jameson's, these particulardifficulties, signally, feel much more "difficult" inJameson's prose than in Lacan's. For all Lacan'ssarcasms at the expense of "%le sujet suppose savoir%,"it is just such a "knowingness" that Lacan's proseprojects: a knowingness, notably, from which the readeris excluded. ("The reader" here, of course, means*this* reader, who is happy to project himself, in thecontext of reading Lacan, as %un sujet suppose ne passavoir%.) The agitations of Jameson's prose, by

contrast, project its "difficulties" as difficultiesreader and writer have in common, dilemmas incurred bythe shared desire to know confronting the insecurity, orthe anxiety, incurred by Jameson's and our own criticalscruples. To this extent Lacan suggests one way ofgetting a handle on the "motivations" of Jameson'snotoriously agitated prose. Jameson often alludes to a"dialectic of utopia and ideology," but also operant inhis writing, as we have seen, is that other dialectic,that other binary, which projects as the "other" of"ideology" not "utopia" but "critique." Can critiqueever ascend beyond the closure of the "sociallySymbolic" 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 Jamesonand Lacan share an alignment programmatically rejectedby 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 ofDerrida, from _The Prison-House of Language_ (1971)

through "Marx's Purloined Letter" (1995). Of specialrelevance in the latter essay are the pages in whichJameson improvises a genealogy descending from Hegel forthe problem of how philosophical/critical writing is

written--a problem manifesting in Derrida as "a certainset of taboos" enforcing "an avoidance of theaffirmative sentence as such," and, hence, a prose"vigilantly policed and patrolled by the intent toavoid saying something" ("MPL" 81). Jameson goes on toinsist that somehow or other, nevertheless, "content


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[is] generated" in Derrida; but despite his mildlyironic tone at Derrida's expense, the problem is onethat he elsewhere, in connection with other writers,stages as quite an anguishing one (see, e.g., the pageson "dialectical writing" in _Marxism and Form_ [xii-xiiiand the Adorno chapter, %passim%]; the passage onBarthes's "writing with the body" in "Pleasure: APolitical Issue" [_IT2_ 69]; the lament against"thematization" in _Late Marxism_ [_LM_ 183]; theplangent reprise on the Barthesian %scriptible% in

_Signatures of the Visible_ [_SV_ 2-4]. I have writtenabout some of these problems at greater length in"Marxist 'Pleasure': Fredric Jameson and TerryEagleton," _PMC_ 3.3 [May 1993]).

Other Marxists (e.g., Eagleton) complain that Derridais "apolitical"; Jameson's take seems to be thatDerrida's proscription of "metaphysics" secures some ofits gains a bit too facilely: for Jameson, the largeststakes, the success or failure, of theory or critiqueare at play only when ideology and metaphysics figure

not as mere errors, or false consciousness (as ifbanishing false consciousness were as simple as callingit "false"), but as fated burdens: "sublime object(s),"or desired/hated "symptom(s)," in Zizek's cheerful,cheeky Lacanian terms, whose "closure" critique canonly fitfully protest--with the further irony that thevery protest only confirms them. Jameson seems to meto miss the degree to which Derrida has recently begunto spin his longstanding motif of "affirmativedeconstruction" in ways that suggest a greaterhospitality to such patently "metaphysical"constructions as "the mystery of the incarnation of

meaning in language"; I'm thinking especially of themotif of "the undeconstructible" in _The Gift of Death_

(trans. David Wills [University of Chicago Press:Chicago, 1992]) and _Specters of Marx_ (trans. PeggyKamuf [Routledge: New York, 1994]). "Theundeconstructible" encompasses such terms as "God,""responsibility," "spirit," "justice," and "a certainexperience 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 ofstructuralism, see _PHL_ %passim%, especially (forLacan) 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 "Lacaniancriticism" (the insertion of the subject into ideology),he foregrounds Lyotard's "libidinal apparatus" ratherthan any Lacanian vocabulary. (In like manner, as we

will see below, Deleuze and Guattari displace--orsublate: simultaneously "cancel *and* preserve"--Lacanin the opening chapter, "On Interpretation," of _The


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Political Unconscious_.) Lacan persists in _Fables ofAggression_ mostly via the mediation of Althusser.Still, the elision of Lacan, only two years after theprogrammatic claims based on him in "Imaginary andSymbolic 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 accommodatinglyreconsiders "ethics" in "Morality versus EthicalSubstance; or, Aristotelian Marxism in AlasdairMacIntyre" [1983/4], _IT1_ 181-5). For the Jane Galloppassage, see _Reading Lacan_ (Ithaca and London: CornellUP, 1985), 59. Gallop and Jameson acknowledge eachother's work, and make some show of taking exception toeach other, but on this their views are quite similar.

^5^ For a suggestive Jamesonian deployment of theterm "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 intelligenceof his sentences, requires a tireless effort--always onthe point of lapsing--to prevent the *thematization*[Jameson's italics] of his concept[s]..."

^6^ The most relevant Lacan texts in thisconnection are "The Subversion of the Subject and theDialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious" (1960)and, to a lesser extent, "On a Question Preliminary to

Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" (1958), in _Ecrits: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 thepastiche by using all the instruments of pasticheitself, to reconquer some genuine historical sense byusing the instruments of what I have called substitutesfor history." Jameson in a 1986 interview with AndersStephanson, "Regarding Postmodernism," in DouglasKellner, 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 MinnesotaP: Minneapolis, 1988.

_IT2_: _The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986,Volume 2: The Syntax of History_. U ofMinnesota P: Minneapolis, 1988.


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_M&F_: _Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century DialecticalTheories 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 CriticalAccount of Structuralism and Russian Formalism_.Princeton UP: Princeton, 1972.

_PU_: _The Political Unconscious: Narrative as aSocially Symbolic Act_. Cornell UP: Ithaca,1981.

_SV_: _Signatures of the Visible_. Routledge: NewYork, 1992.

Jameson's Lacan by Steven Helmling

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