Abstract

In the second part of this book, the political aesthetics of negativity is worked through from a different perspective. In Fredric Jameson’s writings on film, which are based on an idiosyncratic synthesis of Hegelian Marxism and psychoanalysis, the absent cause of the Lacanian real is that of a social totality which has become inaccessible to the subject under the conditions of late capitalism. For Jameson, the problem of a political film aesthetic refers primarily to an epistemological problem of aesthetically sensualizing the incommensurability between subject and totality.

Keywords: Totality, Subject, Capitalism, Epistemology

“Dialectical analysis is ultimately analysis of form, it endeavors to dissolve the positivity of its object in the totality of its formal mediations.”

There remains to be characterized the final transition to the situation of modern capitalism, and it is here more than anywhere else that Protestantism assumes its function as a “vanishing mediator.” For what happens here is essentially that once Protestantism has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of innerwordly life to take place, it has no further reason for being and disappears from the historical scene. It is thus in the strictest sense of the word a catalytic agent that permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms; and we may say that with the removal of the brackets, the whole institution of religion itself (in other words, what is here designated as “Protestantism”) serves in its turn as kind of overall bracket or framework within which change takes place and which can be dismantled and removed when its usefulness is over.