Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (review)

REVIEWS cal obsession of one character undermines traditional dialogue and mimesis. This theatrical representation of the fracturing of the individual subject and the resultant demise of dialogical theater is one of the key features of PirandelUan modernism. Behind it Ues a nostalgia for a lost integrity, or a Utopian desire for the healing of the fractured subject and possibUity of dialogue. PirandeUo's successors, however, have accepted these losses as a given. In "Sartre et la métamorphose du cercle PirandelUan," Krysinski convincingly argues that the "chronotope" (Bahktin's term) or the fusion of time with space that concludes Henry IVhas become in Huis Clos the only scene, infernal and infinite. With Genet, the nostalgia for individual identity and Uberty and the tragic juxtaposition of the monological circle with an external reality have completely disappeared as the mask has become reaUty and the theatrical circle closed. Postmodernity, Krysinski argues in the last chapters, is defined in part by the loss of aU norms as reference and the acceptance of Ufe as perpetual spectacle. The PirandelUanparadigme inquiet serves as a generator in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. Although there exists what might be considered a super-abundance of PirandeUo criticism, the bulk of it deals either with the PirandelUan corpus in the context of ItaUan Uterature, or with the plays in the context of modern European and American theater. Krysinski's contribution—an important one—is to have situated PirandeUo's narrative, dramatic, and theoretical texts in a broadly comparativist perspective from which their impact on modernity and postmodernity can be more fuUy understood. Mary Ann Frese Witt North Carolina State University FREDRIC JAMESON. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence ofthe Dialectic. London: Verso Books, 1990. ? + 270 pp. Amid the theory boom of the last twenty years, T. W. Adorno is stiU the least accessible ofContinental thinkers. Although translation ofhis work proceeds apace (including, most recently, the remarkable Notes to Literature (1974)), and his affinity with current preoccupations is regularly noted, the obstacles to assimUation should not be underestimated. The most obvious reasons for his neglect—a formidable philosophical style, the mandarin cast ofhis aesthetics, or the unconsolable melancholythat marks his thinking "after Auschwitz"—are perhaps less significant than is commonly supposed: such truisms of Adorno-reception serve mostly to fend off a more deeply disconcerting negativity. Above all, it is the principled resistance that Adorno's writing offers to methodological codification that continues to perplex. Where Derrida and Foucault have sUpped quickly into the handbooks, Adorno remains stubbornlysui generis, a standing reproach to the business of culture as usual. Alert to the pitfalls ofoverhasty accommodation, Fredric Jameson's Late Marxism steers a wary course between the timely and the untimely aspects of Adorno's thought. Loose, often casual in tone, the book sets out to combine exegesis with polemic, to track the intricate turns of Adorno's dialectic while affirming its essential continuity with classical Marxism. Appearing as a companion piece to Jameson's magnum opus on postmodernism, it wiU inevitably 150 THE COMPARATIST be read as an extended preface or coda to that work, a heroic effort to rescue a viable Marxism from the glacial wUderness of postmodern theory. Readers looking for an introduction to Adorno's thought are still better served by the first chapter of Marxism and Form (1971), but those familiar with its key premises can welcome Jameson's provocative elaboration of major themes. The bulk of Late Marxism consists of extended readings of Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) and the posthumous Aesthetic Theory (1970), the most daunting and systematic statements of Adorno's phUosophical position. The first section, "Baleful Enchantments of the Concept," expUcates Adorno's critique of"identity-thinking" and his efforts to deploy phUosophical argumentation against itself. WhUe acknowledging similarities with the poststructuralist critique of Western metaphysics, Jameson emphasizes the Marxian derivation of this motif. For Adorno, he argues, identity-thinking is finaUy not a conceptual problem but a historical one: the ultimate agent of identity is capitalism itself (or rather: das Tauschverhältnis, the structure of economic exchange). By resisting the reifications ofconceptual thought, phUosophy can bear witness to an oppressive reality but not escape it. Here the category of totaUty...