Document Type : Research

Author

• Hossein Safi Pirlooje

Associate Researcher, Faculty of Linguistics, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Jameson has laid the foundation of his Political Hermeneutic on the assumption that the unconscious might take social and historical connotations into its usual reference to current individualized life. Any evidence of the social implications of the unconscious, according to Jameson, is to look for its content rather than the form of cultural text. Despite all the reliance Jameson puts on the notion of ‘reification’ and the socio-historical connotations it may have for the production of cultural texts, it is still possible in his view to detect, drawing on Freudian psychology, some faint traces of humanity left in our socially alienated way of life under complicated dehumanizing effects of present capitalist context – traces which are repressed, but not fully obliterated, beneath cultural superstructure of late capitalism. We are here to investigate, by the way of a dialectical reading through “The Political Unconscious” (1981), Jameson’s own dialectical extensions of the unconscious from, its ordinary psychological sense to the realm of mythology and literary criticism, as he aligns his own conception of History first with the Lacanian notion of the Real, and then, with Althusser’s notion of ‘structural causality’. We will also see how History, the Real, or ‘absent cause’ is discernible just after getting narratively textualized by ideology. At the end of our venture to unveil the unconscious behind “The Political Unconscious”, we will see two equivocal dimensions of The Political Hermeneutic: the relationship between History and narrativization, on the one hand, and Jameson’s diachronically analyzing the coincidence of non-synchronic-social-structures, on the other hand.

Keywords

• The Political Hermeneutic
• The Unconscious
• The Real
• Absent Cause
• Cultural Texts

Main Subjects

• Philosophy