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  • Specters of the Dialectic
  • Christian Haines (bio)
Valences of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson; Verso, 2009

Fredric Jameson poses a provocative thesis in Valences of the Dialectic, namely, that the dialectic, rather than being a vestigial intellectual organ, has been secretly operating behind the scenes of contemporary theory. Jameson argues that those thinkers who would disavow the dialectic (such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault) are some of its most interesting practitioners. Such a gesture has been a feature of Jameson’s thought since at least The Political Unconscious, with its translation of other theoretical codes into the language of Marxist dialectics. And, indeed, many of the essays in this volume have appeared elsewhere, and others may seem quite familiar fare. But something new happens in this particular constellation of texts: in naming the dialectic the hidden hand of contemporary theory, Jameson shifts the very project of the dialectic. For the haunting of the dialectic, its uncanny inhabitation of contemporary theory, is also its own haunting, its possession, and its reinvention.

The central displacement that the dialectic undergoes in Valences is its translation from a temporal mode to a spatial mode. Jameson’s interest in spatiality has always been the obverse side of his investigation of postmodernity, for as he has argued, the emergence of late capitalism has involved the eclipse of history (“the waning of our historical sense”) by the omnipresence of spatiality in the closure of an “eternal present.”1 Jameson’s response to this situation has up until now been the dialectical one of conceiving of the historicity of our situation as defined precisely by the singular impossibility of imagining it as history. Valences of the Dialectic should be seen as a break with this [End Page 241] response and the emergence of a new period in Jameson’s work, one characterized less by the diagnosis of history’s repression than the registering of its return. It is perhaps too soon to pronounce the death of postmodernism—and certainly late capitalism is alive, if not well—but beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and accelerating with the birth of a new socialist bloc in South America, the rise of capitalist China, and the 2008 financial crisis (to name only a few symptoms), the glacial closure of the present has begun to thaw, a fact signaling not a solution for thought but rather the introduction of new problems. We might call this new period of Jameson’s thought “post-postmodern,” until a better term emerges, so as to mark this new sense of historical eventfulness.2

Valences attempts to provide us with the conceptual organs to grasp this new situation. Brechtian thinker that he is, Jameson begins by estranging our typical perceptions of theoretical thought, mapping the intellectual scene as so many returns of the repressed dialectic. As the title of one section suggests—“Hegel Without Aufhebung”— Jameson argues the existence of a dialectic whose emphasis is not reconciliation but contradiction and whose modus operandi is not homogenous mediation but the productive clash of incommensurable codes. Jameson’s analysis of the disavowal of the dialectic reaches its most condensed and spectacular form in the third chapter, “Hegel’s Contemporary Critics,” in which he takes up the explicitly counter- or nondialectical thought of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault to show how the very critique of the dialectic becomes part and parcel of the dialectic: “What we took to be a devastating analysis was not Derrida’s deconstruction of Hegel, but rather Hegel’s own deconstruction. . . . Are we to conclude that the dialectic is already deconstruction, avant la lettre?” (105). Jameson does not exactly answer in the positive—deconstruction is neither the dialectic nor vice versa—but he does leave us with the idea that deconstruction is dialectical. Similarly, Jameson understands Deleuze’s condemnation of dialectical negativity to already be inscribed in the Hegelian dialectic’s oscillation between Identity and Difference in the face of contradiction. And of Foucault: “But what if the categories of the Logic were already just this neutral thought of the outside for which Foucault calls?” (122–23). It is not that the dialectic has always already exhausted thought but that, on the...

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