Death and historical fact are referents that resist all textualization

Evidence

In the immediate instance that concerns us here, I have argued for the presence and existence of what seems to me a palpable referent — namely, death and historical fact, which are ultimately not textualizable and tear through the tissues of textual elaboration, of combination and free play (“the Real,” Lacan tells us, “is what resists symbolization absolutely”). I want to add at once that this is no particularly triumphant philosophical victory for some putative realism or other over the various textualizing worldviews. For the assertion of a buried referent — as in the present example — is a two-way street whose antithetical directions might emblematically be named “repression” and Aufhebung, or “sublation”: the picture has no way of telling us whether we are looking at a rising or a setting sun. Does our discovery document the persistence and stubborn, all-informing gravitational charge of reference, or, on the contrary, does it show the tendential historical process whereby reference is systematically processed, dismantled, textualized, and volatilized, leaving little more than some indigestible remnant? — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Quotes Lacan’s definition of the Real as ‘what resists symbolization absolutely’ and frames death/historical fact as the un-textualizable referent — essential for the reader’s parody/pastiche and falsifiability analysis.
• XREF: Ties to the reader’s whole project — if death is the untextualizable referent, pastiche’s waning of affect (which flattens death into style) is falsifiable against this residue. — connects to: Concepts with real histories resist definition; only the historyless are definable. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 992
• SEED: An essay angle: whether the Holocaust/COVID/death remains a test case that breaks pastiche’s flattening — the ‘indigestible remnant’ as empirical check on the cultural dominant thesis.