From this vaster perspective, then, it would seem that only indifference suspends a lived relationship to the past that can be registered in intensities of any conceivable quality: for even boredom, in its strong Baudelairean form, is a way of sensing and living the specificity of certain moments of the cultural past. If this is the case with boredom, however, as a resistance of the organism to culturally alien and asphyxiating forms, perhaps we may want to take into consideration the possibility that indifference is itself ultimately also a mode of relationship, something like a defense mechanism, a repression, a neurotic denial, a preventive shutting off of affect, which itself finally reconfirms the vital threat of its object. In that case, the “nightmare of history” becomes inescapable: we are everywhere in relation to it, even in its apparent absences, and the therapeutic Nietzschean “forgetfulness” of history is fully as reactive to the fact of history as is Michelet’s “resurrection.” How are we to understand this “absent cause” (Althusser), to which we cannot not react with the whole range of our affective intensities, and which at the same time would seem to be so charged with dread as to make the occasional prospect of its occultation—its repression or its amnesia—come before us like a momentary relief? It does not seem to me that the immemorial record of violence and the most brutal as well as the most intangible forms of domination are sufficient to motivate this mental flight, these ingenious subterfuges. Violence is a sheerly ideological category, as the popularity of this “concept” in American social criticism today testifies; and as for domination, social Darwinism and neo-fascism make it plain that under certain circumstances this phenomenon can also be contemplated with complacency or even a somber exhilaration. For Marixism, indeed, the categories of power are not the ultimate ones, and the trajectory of contemporary social theory (from Weber to Foucault) suggests that the appeal to it is often strategic, and involves a systematic displacement of the Marxian problematic. No, the ultimate form of the “nightmare of history” is rather the fact of labor itself, and the intolerable spectacle of the backbreaking millenial toil of millions of people from the earliest moments of human history. The more existential versions of this dizzying and properly unthinkable, unimaginable spectacle—as in horror at the endless succession of “dying generations,” at the ceaseless wheel of life, or at the irrevocable passage of Time itself—are themselves only disguises for this ultimately scandalous fact of mindless alienated work and of the irremediable loss and waste of human energies, a scandal to which no metaphysical categories can give a meaning.
- Marxism and Historicism, Fredric Jameson, 1979; New Literary History
Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 41-73 (33 pages)