ABSTRACT
The convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the 'individual,' which-the tendential law of social life under capitalism-maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech itself. The assertion of a political unconscious proposes that authors undertake just such a final analysis and explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts.
