This situation, which is the realm of what has also usefully been termed cynical reason, calls for a reinvention of the dialectic as part and parcel of the reinvention of politics itself (and, clearly enough, of Marxism): while the difference between the “solutions” of Adorno and Žižek might from another perspective be characterized as the distinction between modernist anti-narrative as such (Beckett!) and a kind of non-figurative play with multiple narrative centers (as in more properly postmodern literature).

—Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, p. 60

Derrida’s replay of long sections of Hegel [in Glas] might well stand comparison with Stravinsky’s classical borrowings and deformations; while Deleuze…deals with each concept as though it were a new kind of color and indeed a new kind of space (indeed, the two philosophers seem to stand to each other as anti-narrative versus a kind of non-figurative play with multiple narrative centers, respectively).

—Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, p. 112

I wonder: is this purely an editing error, a mere oversight due to the book’s recycling (at times) of past material for the various chapters? I’m tempted to say so. But at a deeper glance, could this in fact be read as a far more clever meta-commentary on the dialectic itself, on the necessity of error and the “objectivity of appearance,” and as a rhetorical device used to mimic the dialectic’s own notoriously spiral, self-referential structure? If so, the accidental (perhaps a kind of unconscious Freudian parapraxis) or intentional repetition could then be interpreted as a deconstruction of the very dichotomy, not only between modernist anti-narrative and postmodern non-figurative play as such, but also the dual dichotomy between Adorno and Žižek, the two great maestros of the dialectic, and Derrida and Deleuze, the two great anti-Hegelians posstructuralists, rendering it a false opposition (here we could then read Adorno and Derrida and Deleuze and Žižek together, or vice versa, thereby sublating the contradiction).

Now I’m curious whether Jameson has used this trope to characterize other thinkers in the past, and whether or not that could shed more light in this peculiarity.

(Oh, and unless you live under a rock or something, Lévi-Strauss died today.)