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Collective Projects, Plural Pronouns
I’m just on the verge of finishing Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, and expect to write a larger post soon analyzing Jameson’s notion of “making History appear,” but I noticed one rather minute tendency of Jameson’s that I wanted to point out now, which is that Jameson frequently refers to a collective “we,” “us,” and “our” in his writing, particularly those sections that have a sort of messianic or utopian import. For example, at certain points throughout the book Jameson writes, “But pathos here will commit us to the attempt to transform Ricoeur’s project…,” “A few preliminaries before we can make so audacious a claim…,” “Our question must then turn on the affinity between…,” and so on.