Abstract: In this paper, Kordela focuses on Jameson’s criteria of a properly postmodern dialectics, as exemplified in his Valences of the Dialectic (2009), the first instalment of his trilogy on dialectics, in concrete examples from Adorno and Lukács, and juxtaposes them to both Spinoza’s tripartite conception of truth and Gilles Deleuze’s criteria of what constitutes structuralism. While this examination reveals that Jameson’s examples consistently fail to meet his own criteria, Kordela then turns to Representing Capital (2011), the last volume of the trilogy, to argue that it is in his close encounter with Marx’s representation of the system of capital that Jameson succeeds in formulating a logic that fulfills his own criteria of postmodern dialectics.
A. Kiarina Kordela, Professor of German Studies and founding Director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College, has published in fields that range from intellectual history, philosophy, critical and political theory to literary, film, and cultural analysis. She is the author of Epistemontology in Spinoza, Freud, Marx, Lacan (Routledge, 2018), Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, 2013), and Surplus (SUNY Press, 2007), and the co-editor of two volumes onSpinoza’s Authority (Bloomsbury, 2018) and one on Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011).
On Thursday, October 30, Kiarina Kordela holds a workshop on her essay “Capital, or, Information: Affective Labor, Historical Materialism, and the Convergence of Forces and Relations of Production.” (12:30-2:30, Maxwell Hall, Room 122)
