THE
ABYSS OF REPRESENTATION
Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime
|
Post-Contemporary
Interventions 360
pages (May 2003)
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 |
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 traces the ways the sublime abyss
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 the objects
of study in 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, The Abyss of Representation
reveals, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the
challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism
"The Abyss of Representation is an ambitious and highly illuminating book."-Ernesto Laclau
"The Abyss of Representation is an
outstanding contribution to a theory of literature and aesthetic philosophy.
It is a strong elaboration of the failure inherent in representation and
that failure's relevance to a cultural and political theory."-Michael
Bernard-Donals, coauthor of Between
Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation
George Hartley is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. He is author of Textual Politics and the Language Poets