ABSTRACT
We have already, in the last chapter, looked at some of the basic premises underlying Jameson’s 1981 book, The Political Unconscious. As was mentioned there, the project of coming up with some unified theory that takes advantage of these two hugely powerful and influential theories – Marxism and Freudianism – had occupied various thinkers throughout the twentieth century. Jameson was by no means the first person to attempt that particular synthesis. Nor is The Political Unconscious actually a ‘unification’ of dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis (which is to say its title does not translate as ‘The Marxist Freudianism’). Jameson does draw on Freud’s work, particularly as interpreted by Lacan, but the whole is firmly located within a specifically Marxist framework. Indeed, he is quite firm in stating his opinion that Marxism, as a philosophy, possesses ‘primacy’ amongst other ways of thinking and doing criticism: ‘Marxism is here conceived as that “untranscendable horizon” that subsumes such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations. . .at once cancelling and preserving them.’ These other non-Marxist critical operations (in addition to Freud, Jameson draws on thinkers such as Northrop Frye and Greimas) are ‘preserved’ because Jameson reserves a place for them within the framework of Marxism; but they are ‘cancelled’ because, in the final analysis, he considers that Marxism supersedes them.
