Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One
Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson’s first book-length engagement with Marx’s magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx’s thought as if it were a musical score. The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are in themselves so many leaps into the unknown.
Marx’s fundamental concepts are not presented philosophically, or in social-scientific terms, but rather as a series of figures produced by the development of the text. Jameson grasps Marx’s work as a representational problem and an experiment in constructing the figure or model of the inexpressible phenomenon that is capital.
Hardback, 176 pages
ISBN: 9781844674541
June 2011
$24.95 / £14.99 / $31.00CAN
Reviews
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Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.
Blog
Competition now closed: win Fredric Jameson books to mark new Vorticists exhibition
To mark the new exhibition, Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, which opens at the Tate Britain today, Verso are giving away Fredric Jameson's classic book, Fables of Agression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, along with two of his other books.
While Fables of Agression primarily focuses on Wyndham Lewis' novels, Lewis was also the founder of the short-lived avant-garde Vorticist art and poetry movement. Among its other key members were the artists Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and it was also linked with modernist poets Ezra Pound, who gave the movement its name, and T. S Eliot).
The Tate exhibition focuses on the art of the Vorticist movement and the paintings of Lewis, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, showcased in the only two Vorticist exhibitions ever to have taken place. It also highlights the often overlooked female Vorticists, who included Helen Saunders and Dorothy Shakespear. From the exhibition blurb:
Vorticism was a radical art movement that shone briefly but brightly in the years before and during World War I. This exhibition celebrates the full electrifying force and vitality of this short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that was based in London but international in make-up and ambition ...
This exhibition aims to shine a new light on this revolutionary group of artists, presenting the style, radical aesthetics and thoughts of one of the most truly avant-garde art movements in British history.
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Fredric Jameson
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Brecht and Method
“Elegant dissection of Brecht’s method, from estrangements to allegory and beyond.”—Modern Drama
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Valences of the Dialectic
A comprehensive analysis of the philosophy of the dialectic.
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The Hegel Variations
The master philosopher and cultural theorist tackles the founder of modern dialectics.
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The Cultural Turn
An accessible introduction to the key writings on postmodernism by the influential Marxist critic.
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Ideologies of Theory
An expanded and updated collection of Jameson's essays.
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Fables of Aggression
Jameson’s controversial reading of one of the great twentieth-century writers.
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The Modernist Papers
A new perspective on Proust, Joyce, Kafka and others from a master of literary theory.
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Archaeologies of the Future
The relationship between utopia and science fiction, in the age of globalization.
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Late Marxism
A lively and lucid introduction to the work of Theodor Adorno.
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A Singular Modernity
A major new interpretation of the concepts of modernism and modernity.