Jameson's Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Utopian

Bibliographic Data

ID4071307
AuthorsJohn Pizer (corresponding author)
Year1993
Issue58
Pages127
Publication date1993-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew German Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/488391
OpenAlexW2322651441
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Fredric Jameson's 1990 monograph on Theodor W. Adomo, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic has generally met with harsh criticism ever since it first appeared. Peter Osborne's article, published recently in this journal, takes Jameson to task for willfully misappropriating and talsely characterizing Adomo's dominant epistemological categories (non-identity, mimesis, natural history, etc.) in the service of a single-minded attack on poststructuralist thought. In attempting to translate these conceptual constellations into an ideolect useful to his own unique project of creating a postmodemist Marxism, Jameson misconstrues Adorno's dialectic. As this negative dialectic was inscribed with a resistance to the sort of hegemonic programs espoused by theorists such as Jameson, Jameson's attempted assimilation of Adorno to his particular priorities ironically acts to undercut his own theoretical premises.' In earlier reviews, Eva Geulen accused Jameson of suppressing Adorno's conscious employment of a fragmentary writing style and his positing of unresolvable antinomies, a suppression motivated by Late Marxism's striving after totalities,2 and Robert HullotKentor launched a blistering sarcastic attack against what he believes is Jameson's facile commonsensicalness in this book, an approach incapable of articulating Adorno's immanent critical method.3 The antagonism directed against Jameson's book by these and other

Aesthetics · Art · Persistence (discontinuity) · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Geology · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub