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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.
Uniting Subject and Structure
Last night, as I was reading Adrian Johnston’s Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, I noticed an interesting isomorphism between Badiou and Kojin Karatani (Žižek fits here as well, I’m just too lazy to pull out efficacious quotes):
Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.
As Johnnya says, it’s about time that “mainstream” science finally catches up with basic psychoanalytic concepts. The mirror graphic in the article is also worth checking out.