Date: Mon, 9 Dec 1996 00:14:08 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: M-TH: FREDERIC JAMESON - MYTH OR REALITY? Is Frederick Jameson for real? I met him once, when I was young and innocent. Though I can't pinpoint exactly why, at the time he struck me as a boneheaded bullshit artist. I just read the first and last chapters of THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS. I've never seen so much highfalutin piffle packed into each page. It's like reading an exercise in intellectual name-dropping, where the goal is: how many theoretical works can you mention before the buzzer sounds? Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-intellectual. I'm not Louis Proyect. I am sophisticated enough to be able to recognize intellectual content, no matter how abstruse. But Jameson appears to me to be a philosophical faker of the first water. He comes off as a person who lives in an abstract fog, without any contact with anything substantial. Sure, he has the ability to process abstract ideas through his cerebral sausage machine, like the expressive totality. But he comes off to me as naive, intellectually gullible, and fundamentally .... uncritical! I don't know what he stands for, but from the Althusserianism of the first chapter, I'll bet he's Stalinist to the core, even/especially while praising Althusser as an anti-Stalinist! Has Jameson written anything worth reading? Or is it all as bad as this? --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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