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The abyss of representation: Marxism and the postmodern sublime

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Post-contemporary interventionsPublication details: Duke University Press 2003 DurhamDescription: xiii, 338 p.: ill. Includes bibliographical references and indexISBN:
  • 9780822331148
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 121.4 H2A2
Summary: From the Copernican revolution of Immanuel Kant to the cognitive mapping of Fredric Jameson to the postcolonial politics of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, representation has been posed as both indispensable and impossible. In his pathbreaking work, The Abyss of Representation, George Hartley traces the development of this impossible necessity from its German Idealist roots through Marxist theories of postmodernism, arguing that in this period of skepticism and globalization we are still grappling with issues brought forth during the age of romanticism and revolution. Hartley shows how the modern problem of representation—the inability of a figure to do justice to its object—still haunts today's postmodern philosophy and politics. He reveals the ways the sublime abyss that opened up in Idealist epistemology and aesthetics resurfaces in recent theories of ideology and subjectivity. Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-abyss-of-representation
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Item type Current library Item location Collection Shelving location Call number Status Date due Barcode
Books Vikram Sarabhai Library Rack 4-B / Slot 128 (0 Floor, West Wing) Non-fiction General Stacks 121.4 H2A2 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 203392

Table of contents

ONE Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity
TWO Presentation beyond Representation: Kant and the Limits of Discursive Understanding
THREE The Speculative Proposition: Hegel and the Drama of Presentation
FOUR Marx's Key Concept? Althusser and the Darstellung Question
FIVE Figuration and the Sublime Logic of the Real: Jameson's Libidinal Apparatuses
SIX The Theater of Figural Space
SEVEN Can the Symptom Speak? Hegemony and the Problem of Cultural Representation


From the Copernican revolution of Immanuel Kant to the cognitive mapping of Fredric Jameson to the postcolonial politics of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, representation has been posed as both indispensable and impossible. In his pathbreaking work, The Abyss of Representation, George Hartley traces the development of this impossible necessity from its German Idealist roots through Marxist theories of postmodernism, arguing that in this period of skepticism and globalization we are still grappling with issues brought forth during the age of romanticism and revolution. Hartley shows how the modern problem of representation—the inability of a figure to do justice to its object—still haunts today's postmodern philosophy and politics. He reveals the ways the sublime abyss that opened up in Idealist epistemology and aesthetics resurfaces in recent theories of ideology and subjectivity.
Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-abyss-of-representation

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