Pizhuhish nāmah-i intiqādī-i mutūn va barnāmah hā-yi ̒ulūm-i insāni (Critical Studies in Texts & Programs of Human Sciences)

A Survey into the Premises on the Book The Political Unconscious

Document Type : Research

Author

Hossein Safi Pirlooje

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

https://doi.org/10.30465/crtls.2024.47242.2801
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

Subjects

Althusser, Louis et al. (1970), Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books.
Althusser, Louis (1971), Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster et al., London: New Left Books, and New York: Monthly Review Press.
Althusser, Louis (1971), “Freud and Lacan”, in; Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review.
Althusser, Louis (2008), Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Persian trans. Rouzbeh Sadrara, Tehran: Nashre Cheshmeh.
Benjamin, Walter (1996), “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Persian trans. Morad Farhadpoor, Arghanoon, no. 11-12.
Danius, Sara (2022), “In Search of Totality: On narrative and history in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious”, in: Metacommentaries on The Political Unconscious, Persian trans. Hossein Safi, Tehran: Nashre Nimaj.
Eagleton, Terry (2022), “Fredric Jameson: the politics of style”, in: Metacommentaries on The Political Unconscious, Persian trans. Hossein Safi, Tehran: Nashre Nimaj.
Ferretter, Luke (2007), Louis Althusser, Persian trans. Amir Ahmadi Aryan, Tehran: Nashre Markaz.
Frye, Northrop (1998), Anatomy of Criticism, Persian trans. Saleh Najafi, Tehran: Nashre Niloofar.
Georg, Lukacs (2013), Theory of the Novel, Persian trans. Hassan Mortazavi, Tehran: Nashre Ashiyan.
Georg, Lukacs (2017), History and Class Consciousness, Persian trans. Mohammad-Ja’far Pouyandeh, Mashhad: Entesharate Bootimar.
Jameson, Fredric (1986), “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, in: Social Text, no. 15, 58-88.
Jameson, Fredric (2008), “Marxism and Historicism”, in; The Ideologies of Theory, Essays, 1971-2008: Part 2 The Syntax of History, London and New York: Verso, 451-482.
Jameson, Fredric (2012), Aesthetics and Politics, Persian trans. Hassan Mortazavi, Tehran: Nashre Zharf.
Jameson, Fredric (2021), The Political Unconscious, Persian trans. Hossein Safi, Tehran: Nashre Nimaj.
La Capra (1982), “Review article on The Political Unconscious”, History and Theory, vol. 21, 1.
Myers, Tony (2006), Slavoj Zizek, Persian trans. Ehsan Nowroozi, Tehran: Nashre Markaz.
Ricoeur, Paul (1970), Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage, New Haven: Yale.
Roberts, Adams (2007), Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Literary Criticism, and Postmodernism, Persian trans. Vahid Valizadeh, Tehran: Nashre Ney.
Zizek, Slavoj (2009), Looking Awry, Persian trans. Mazyar Eslami and Saleh Najafi, Tehran: Entesharate Rokhdade Now.
Zizek, Slavoj (2021), Event: a philosophical journey through a concept, Persian trans. Mohsen Maleki and Behzad Sadeghian, Tehran: Nashre Baan.

  • Receive Date 27 October 2023
  • Revise Date 13 July 2024
  • Accept Date 13 July 2024

Guide for Authors

Submit Manuscript

Reviewers

Contact Us