Jameson avec or sans Žižek: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and the Impossible Social Bond

Abstract

In my recent book on Fredric Jameson, I averred that while Jameson and Žižek seem to be ideologically aligned, a misperception suggested or affirmed by their frequent citation of each other’s work, these citations were, I argued, a screen that obfuscates more profound differences (Burnham 2016: 10-11). But what are those differences? I propose here to lay some stress on what I take to be some important differences between those two projects, in terms of their attitudes towards the dialectic (that is to say, the impossibility of reconciling those antagonisms, but also the importance of that non-reconciliation). Grounding that dialectic via the vicissitudes of the Lacanian “non-relation,” I then turn to the question of historicism or historicity, articulated via contrasting readings of Jeff Wall’s 1994 photograph Untangling that allegorize via the pictorial not so much mark making (as Walter Benn Michaels would have it) but looking as labor – the labor of the clinic with or without the labor of the workshop.