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On the Theory and History of Ideological Production. Juan Carlos Rodríguez and His Contemporaries

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Published Aug 2023

Malcolm K. Read

Author: Malcolm K. Read
On the Theory and History of Ideological Production promotes the existence of an ‘ideological unconscious’, understood primarily as a product of social relations, not of the Ideological State Apparatus. Attention focuses upon the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as theorised by the Spanish Marxist and former student of Althusser, Juan Carlos Rodríguez. Theorization of the ‘ideological unconscious’ presupposes a change of terrain from the individual/society opposition to a problematic based on the ‘social formation’. The present text assesses Rodríguez’s work alongside that of his contemporaries, Fredric Jameson, Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton, Roy Bhaskar, Slavoj Žižek, and others.

Biographical Note

Malcolm K. Read, Ph.D. University of Wales, is Emeritus Professor of Hispanic Languages at the State University of New York. He has published monographs, translations, and many articles, including The Matrix Effect (2010) and Journeys through the Ideological Unconscious (2022).

Readership

Of immediate interest for students of Marxism, specifically of the ‘structural’ variety; also of relevance for sociologists, political scientists, social philosophers, and literary theoreticians in general.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 In the Shadow of Althusser
1 Negotiating the ‘Break’
2 The Ideological Unconscious
3 Althusser: the Unconsciousness of Ideology
4 Feudal Substantialism
5 Althusser: Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology
6 The Libidinal Unconscious
7 Antonio Gramsci and the Case for Historicism
8 The Eye/I That Sees the Thing
9 Nicos Poulantzas: the Matrix Effect

2 On the Radical Historicity of Literature: Roy Bhaskar
1 Who Walked a Crooked Mile
2 A Hegelian Turn
3 Visions in Exile
4 History without a Subject
5 On the Radical Historicity of ‘Love’
6 Ideology as ‘Productivity’
7 The Historical Origins of the Free Subject
8 The Closet Althusserian
9 Methodology versus Epistemology
10 Critical Realism and Althusserianism
11 Conclusion

3 Ideologies of the Transition: Noam Chomsky
1 Chomsky and Huarte
2 Ideologies of the Absolutist State
3 Rodríguez and the Examination
4 The Literal Gaze
5 The Letter of the Law
6 The Subsequent History of Animism
7 Conclusion

4 Explorations of the Political/Ideological Unconscious: Fredric Jameson
1 From Marx to Althusser
2 Science and Ideology
3 Althusser Reconfigured: from Kant to Hegel
4 Theorising the Ideological Unconscious
5 The Political Unconscious
6 From Substantialist to Animist Tears
7 Postmodernism and the End of Ideology
8 The Melodrama of Tears: Jorge Isaacs’s ‘María’
9 Conclusion

5 On Continuities and Discontinuities: Terry Eagleton
1 Servants of the Lord
2 The Legacy of Catholicism
3 Radical Historicity: the Case of the Theatre
4 The Individual and Society
5 Transitional Ideologies
6 Power versus Exploitation
7 The ‘Break’ That Never Was
8 Conclusion

6 Discourse and Ideology: Michel Foucault
1 Making the ‘Break’
2 Theorising the Ideological Unconscious
3 Theorising the Discursive Unconscious
4 Mirrors and Souls
5 A Borgesian Interlude: the Chinese Encyclopaedia
6 Empowering Discursive Unconsciousness
7 Staging the State Apparatus
8 The Revenge of History

7 Educating the Educators: The Critical Realists
1 Althusserian Unconsciousness Re-Visited
2 Extracting the Concept
3 Causal Dynamics
4 Reclaiming Reality
5 Love, Money, and Marriage
6 Deprocessualising History
7 On Radical Historicity
8 British Marxism at Its Limits
9 Conclusion

8 Paradoxes and Exploitation: Slavoj Žižek
1 Towards a Philosophical Anthropology
2 The Dog That Didn’t Bark
3 Fetishism and Commodity Fetishism
4 ‘Structural Causality’ and ‘Homologies’
5 The ‘Look’ versus the ‘Gaze’
6 The Paradoxes of Democracy
7 The Private Eye: Traversing the Fantasy
8 Conclusion

9 The Rise of Podemos: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
1 Ernesto Laclau: Goodbye to All That
2 The State/Stage under Absolutism
3 Chantal Mouffe: Reductionism Inverted
4 The Eighteenth-Century Drama: from Public to Private
5 From the Social to the Discursive Formation
6 García Lorca: the Objectivity of the Text
7 Podemos: Life in the Media
8 Borges Revisited

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index