Allegory and Ideology

Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome conflict of interpretations - a discursive, ideological struggle - therefore needs to be supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings, rather than an abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book about "method", but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.

Review: Praise for Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. -- Terry Eagleton * Irish Times *
Praise for Postmodernism: For anybody hoping to understand not just the cultural but the political and social implications of postmodernism . Jameson's book is a fundamental, nonpareil text. * Sunday Times *
Praise for Postmodernism: The scope and profundity of Postmodernism, covering theory, architecture, film, video and economics, is truly staggering . Brilliant. * Independent *
Praise for The Hegel Variations: Yields a series of audacious reading of a 'non-teleological' Hegel, throwing a distinctive light on such themes as master-slave dialectic, linguistic subjectivity, expressive production ('the animal kingdom of spirit'), normative division in the Antigone (inaugurating chapter 6, 'Spirit'), and the French Revolution. * Choice *
Praise for The Hegel Variations: Jameson establishes the revisionist nature of his latest study from the very outset. For a work on a Hegel it is a conspicuously short but nonetheless fascinating work, one which encompasses all of the elliptical nuances, digressions and expansive inter-disciplinary scholarship which has characterized his past studies. * Glasgow Review of Books *
Praise for The Hegel Variations: Variations shows how tenaciously Jameson wrestles with his angel to complicate further his relationship to Hegelian Marxism. -- Peter Hitchcock * Meditations *
Praise for Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality: Jameson, now 82, has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth. This bravura book stems from a long engagement - we might say obsession - with Chandler; what had been a footnote 30 years ago now unfolds with full force. Jameson makes every strand of Chandler's oeuvre glisten with significance. -- Angela Woodward * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Praise for Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: The scope and profundity of Postmodernism, covering theory, architecture, film, video and economics, is truly staggering.Brilliant. * Independent *