Transfigurations of contemporaneity Cover Image

Transfiguracije suvremenosti
Transfigurations of contemporaneity

Author(s): Snježan Hasnaš
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences
Published by: Hrvatsko Filozofsko Društvo
Keywords: contemporaneity; Fredric Jameson; culture; modernity; postmodernity; Marxism; narrative; historicity

Summary/Abstract: This paper is generally conceived as an analysis of some fragmentary parts concerning the thought of American philosopher Fredric Jameson. The opus of this author includes tens of titles but only three of them will be elaborated here in some fragments (more precisely, I will elaborate on one of the chapter from each book respectively). The books in question are the following: The Signatures of the Visible (especially first chapter in the book titled “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (text from the sixth chapter titled “Space: Utopianism After the End of Utopia”) and at the end there is A Singular Modernity (first chapter titled “The Four Maxims of Modernity”). My intention in this paper is to propound texts from those chapters as moments of one imagined digression about scope and depth of question which is asked about identity of contemporaneity, or rather, its contemporary transfigurations expressed through Jameson’s theses. In further elaborations this issues spreads beyond firmly set definitions and continuous examination of the method of research, and finds its foundation in reflecting concepts and notions of narrative and historicity. It is obvious that introducing concepts and notion of the narrative in relation to history evokes classical approaches to this problem, but the point here is precisely its contemporary transfigurations which are couched in these chapters. The intention of this paper is therefore also, beside obvious analytical moments in mentioned texts, to point out critical role of such analysis, on the one hand. But, on the other hand, the intention that lies in it is to indicate research point of which is further critical and analytical questioning and ascertaining theoretical starting points that do not hold on only to speculative postulates related to mentioned problems, and which do not tend only to one new meta-discursiveness, but tend to question up possible research paths that unavoidably show up in mentioned transfigurations, concerning both theory and unavoidable practices that mark them as well.

  • Issue Year: 30/2010
  • Issue No: 01-02
  • Page Range: 79-95
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Croatian