The Concept of Totality: Visions of the Whole in the Work of Fredric Jameson

Abstract

The thesis presented here focuses on the concept of totality in the work of the contemporary cultural
critic Fredric Jameson (1934–). By totality, we mean how the human heart enables the human body,
but without the body, the heart has no part concerning the whole; they are mutually dependent. This
work shall argue that totality is the allegorical figuration framing Jameson’s political critiques of
modernity in The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism (1991). The postmodern world
today as an absent totality represents the contradiction in Jameson: We live in a complex world
despite its unrepresentability. Whilst studies of early Jameson have interpreted his works through
postmodernity and cognitive mapping, their unsubstantiation of Jameson’s later totality has resulted
in not being able to explicate Jameson’s view of the a-historicity of postmodernity. Part One shall
examine Jameson’s readings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, demonstrating that Hegel’s
critique of Kant concerning the boundary of knowledge includes its overcoming and that Hegelian
totality is not closed, permitting Jameson to represent the world as an open totality. Part Two shall
argue that Jameson’s reading of the works of Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition of Georg Lukács,
Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin reinforces totality in their writing styles, which allows
Jameson to glimpse totality through writing. Part Three shall argue that totality in Jameson’s
interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is at
work and that Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) elucidates a counterpoint to totality which
can be used to understand non-dialectical thinkers which Jameson examines such as Martin
Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Part Four shall argue that Jameson’s reading of
these thinkers is justified in critiquing their productive misreadings of totality as closed, informing
their political quietism, thereby re-politicising totality as an allegory.