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영어

This essay attempts to extend and critically sublate Jameson’s historicist understanding of narrative texts by engaging the theoretical underpinning that runs through the expansive range of his investigative endeavors: namely, his central hypothesis that “History is the experience of Necessity.” The notion of historical inevitability or “History as Necessity” is limited, I argue, to the extent to which such a concept necessarily eclipses or covers over the historicizing or temporalizing dimension of critical and textual practices, including the inaugural and originary impulse of figurative presentations (Darstellung). As a consequence, historical necessitarianism forecloses the possibility of a differential dimension in time. A developing theme of this discussion is the idea that as a historicizing as well as historical operation, the double orientation of origin points to a qualitative “leap” (Sprung), which immediately opens onto the possibility of a future in time, and is to that extent preconceptual: that is, it operates as a principle of subversion with regard to any synchronic determination of the field of history in terms of necessity.