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The Jamesonian Impersonal; or, Person as Allegory

Hartley, Daniel

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Abstract

This article locates Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019) in the context of the broader trajectory of his career-long critique of the bourgeois centred subject. It argues that, for Jameson, the project of critique requires systematic depersonalisation at the level of thought. Contrary to negative liberal humanist interpretations of depersonalisation, Jameson stresses its hidden, revolutionary potential. Where his earlier work eschewed metanarratives of modernity premised upon shifts in subjectivity, preferring conjunctural or situational analyses, his more recent work – Antinomies of Realism (2013) and Allegory and Ideology in particular – develops a materialist version of just such metanarratives. The article concludes with a detailed application of Jameson’s allegorical method to the figure of the ‘person’ under capitalism, which can be sub-divided into the four levels of: individual, citizen/juridical person, infrastructural personifications, and the realm of social reproduction.

Citation

Hartley, D. (2021). The Jamesonian Impersonal; or, Person as Allegory. Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 29(1), 174-186. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12342004

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Jan 20, 2021
Publication Date 2021
Deposit Date Feb 2, 2021
Publicly Available Date Nov 4, 2021
Journal Historical Materialism
Print ISSN 1465-4466
Electronic ISSN 1569-206X
Publisher Brill Academic Publishers
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 29
Issue 1
Pages 174-186
DOI https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12342004

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