The hieroglyph: Literature, criticism and the ideological unconscious (Juan Carlos Rodriguez).

摘要

The work of contemporary Spanish philosopher Juan Carlos Rodriguez emerged out of the influential philosophy of Louis Althusser, which took hold in the 1960's in Paris. This study concludes that Rodriguez's work neither resolves to jettison an older Historical Materialism, nor to accept uncritically a newer one. Rather, Rodriguez argues throughout for the constitution of an authentic materialist tradition, one that is neither mechanistic nor empiricist, but one that is genuinely historical. Such an endeavor commands a firm emphasis on the sphere of ideology. Principally, Rodriguez states that the genuine understanding of ideology rests on lineaments that can be found in Karl Marx's Capital. Rodriguez dubs this structure the 'ideological unconscious.'; This significant finding becomes the rationale for specific interventions into classical and current materialist approaches to literature. His work addresses old questions such as the relationship of literature to ideology and the questions of value and of a revolution in literary practice. In taking on these concerns, Rodriguez avoids the gamut of available approaches, such as Hegelianism, Structuralism, Formalism and Deconstruction. In turn, he infuses these literary problems with an authentically materialist viewpoint. These topics form the parameters of the present study; each chapter represents an investigation into the issues, which involved a thorough acquaintance with the vast and growing corpus of Rodriguez's writings. Research beyond Rodriguez's work was equally fundamental and covered the literature of the Historical Materialist tradition; classical and contemporary philosophy and literary works within Hispanism; and other national literatures, which were also the object of Rodriguez's analyses.; This study engages the history of the unconscious and Rodriguez's distinctive adaptation of this key concept. Once the meaning of 'ideological unconscious' is established, the analysis proceeds to his conceptualization of literature and from there to the subsidiary questions of literary value and the possibility of an alternative practice of literature. In sum, I address the questions of object, value, practice and the unconscious, as problem-concepts that intersect in Rodriguez's theory of ideological production . My study concludes that the constitution of a genuine Historical Materialism entails the resolution of the existing problems of materialism a propos literature.