The Political Unconscious Quotes

“Always historicize!”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis...”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“the conventional sociology of literature or culture, which modestly limits itself to the identification of class motifs or values in a given text, and feels that its work is done when it shows how a given artifact “reflects” its social background, is utterly unacceptable.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

“We may suggest that from this perspective, ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“the individual narrative, or the individual formal structure, is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“As for conceptual thought, if we grasp the problem as one of escaping from the purely individualizing categories of ethics, of transcending the categories into which our existence as individual subjects necessarily locks us and opening up the radically distinct transindividual perspectives of collective life or historical process, then the conclusion seems unavoidable that we already have the ideal of a thinking able to go beyond good and evil, namely the dialectic itself.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

“For Marxism, however, the very content of a class ideology is relational, in the sense that its “values” are always actively in situation with respect to the opposing class, and defined against the latter: normally, a ruling class ideology will explore various strategies of the legitimation of its own power position, while an oppositional culture or ideology will, often in covert and disguised strategies, seek to contest and to undermine the dominant “value system.” This is the sense in which we will say, following Mikhail Bakhtin, that within this horizon class discourse—the categories in terms of which individual texts and cultural phenomena are now rewritten—is essentially dialogical in its structure.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act