ABSTRACT
Frederic Jameson’s observations on the history of painting, however, although they will serve to establish the groundwork for his discussion of Conrad later in the book, are in no way essential to that system of abstract principles from which his main argument emerges. There one has, almost as a parable, an example of Jameson’s mode of dialectical analysis, one that sets even a few parenthetical remarks on the history of art against the background of a total theory of History from which nothing— the eye that views a painting, the mind that perceives it, the Nature of which it is a formal representation—can ever be exempt. For the genius of Freud in Jameson’s view has little to do with the hoary case histories or the body of precepts and practice that passed on to become the institution of organized psychoanalysis.
