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 reveals the ways the sublime abyss that 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 ideas developed with 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, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism.

A theoretical work, a mediation on the nature of representation--the Vorstellung/Darstellung distinction--in relation to theoretical practices of Hegelianism, psychoanalysis (especially Lacan), and Marxism. Explores the works of Kant, Lacan, Hegel, Althusser, Marx, Jameson, and Zizek.

About the Author

George Hartley is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. He is author of Textual Politics and the Language Poets.

Reviews
"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



Book Information
ISBN 9780822331148
Author George Hartley
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 454g