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.6I will subsequently return to the question if there is or can(not) be another perspective than the perspective of the situation and will ultimately argue that there is one, but it is a peculiarly impossible one.7It therefore follows the logic nicely captured by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who once noted: “An object possesses a property x”—for example to be possible or thinkable—“until time t; after t, it is not only that the object no longer has the property x; it is that it is not true that it possessed x at any time.The truth-value of the proposition ‘the object O has the property x at the moment t’ therefore depends on the moment in which the proposition is enunciated.” The same holds for the proposition “the object O is thinkable / unthinkable.” Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Quand je mourrai, rien de notre amour n’aura jamais existé,” unpublished typescript, cited in: Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2014, 187).8To my mind, this is why Jameson can justifiably call this no-man’s-land “also that of dual power.”9The sense in which I here characterize the different aspects of impossibility is very close to what Alain Badiou calls “the state (of a situation).” For this, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event, London: Continuum, 2005, 81–112.10Fredric Jameson, “Totality as Conspiracy,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 9.11Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, New York: Routledge, 1983, 171.It is here important to remark that Jameson leaves out the dimension of the symbolic—that is, for him, representation—a dimension to which I will return below.12One could, and I think should, supplement this diagnosis of saturation on the side of the “left” with a saturation on the other side, of the right, which opts for returning to a—generically fascist—variety of substantialisms (of race, religions, etc.) to counter the present situation and its self-proclaimed nonideological pragmatist-”realism” of what one can and cannot do.13This account of the limitations of the revolution/reformism distinction is consistent with the claim that the impossibilities one is here dealing with are (1) a historically specific, (2) make certain things unthinkable and therefore also (3) appear to be ontologically impossible.This generates (4) practical effects that are effectuated by determining (5) the imaginary.14Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 75f.15Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.16Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 232.17Jameson, “An American Utopia.” A similar claim—that everyone has become Marxist today—can already be found in the opening pages of Lenin’s State and Revolution.I analyze this in greater detail in Frank Ruda, “Was ist ein Marxist? Lenins Wiederherstellung der Wahrheit des Namens,” in Namen.Benennung, Verehrung, Wirkung (1850–1930), ed.Tatjana Petzer, Sylvia Sasse, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, and Sandro Zanetti, Berlin: Kadmos, 2009, 225–42.18Think of the omnipresence of the “scandal” in contemporary societies.It is everywhere—although its preferred domain remains, tellingly, the competitive domain of sports.On the function of the scandal, see Alain Badiou, A la recherché du réel perdu, Paris: Fayard, 2015.19This thesis was developed in Alenka Zupančičs magnificent reading of Jean Genet’s The Balcony: “Power in the Closet (And Its Coming Out),” podcast recording, Backdoor Broadcasting, May 21, 2015, backdoorbroad-casting.net.20That “knows falsehood very well … but still … does not renounce it.” Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 2008, 26.21This is another way of rendering Jameson’s claim that late capitalism is a system which makes the idea of totality—an effect reinforced by postmodernity and its theory in Jameson’s diagnosis—and thereby itself unthinkable and unimaginable (as a globalized system).For one rendering of this, see Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.C.Nelson and L.Grossberg, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990, 347–60 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]