Right-wing literature secretly carries energies Marxism can reclaim
Evidence
If it is as Marxism has always claimed, namely that there can be no such thing as a right-wing philosophy, that a Fascist system is a contradiction in terms, not thought but the optical illusion of thought only; if indeed this accounts for the fact that Fascist revolutions have always been obliged to borrow their trappings from the left and to disguise themselves as national “socialisms”; then the official opinions and positions of such reactionary authors may be considered surface phenomena, rationalization and disguises for some more basic source of energy of which, on the analogy of the Freudian model of the unconscious, they are unaware. A Marxist hermeneutic would then have the task of restoring to that energy the political direction which rightfully belongs to it, of making it once more available to us. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 237
Categorization
- XREF: Direct lineage to the Frankfurt School’s treatment of fascism (Adorno on fascist oratory, Benjamin on fascism’s aestheticized politics) and to Lukács’s critique of bourgeois irrationalism; also resonates with the reader’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist interest in how official ideology disguises underlying drives. — connects to: Tracing how Marxism got absorbed into other philosophies requires delicate analysis of hidden connections.
- DEEPTHINKING: Top-tier: the claim that reactionary authors are ‘unaware’ instruments of an energy Marxism must ‘restore’ its direction to is a genuinely paradigm-shifting hermeneutic principle — that the political charge of a work is independent of its author’s conscious politics.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: the Freudian unconscious analogy for political energy — how does Jameson’s later theory of the political unconscious (in the 1981 book) refine this early formulation?