BOOKS
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phor of catachresis. White, however, makes much of the last work of
Foucault, his
History of Sexuality,
called
La volonti
de
savoir
in French,
showing that he is now no longer interested in defending his notions
of historical discontinuity , rupture, and mutation, on which he had
insisted in his previous works, and now has given a newly historical
account of concepts of sex, beginning with the Greek exaltation of
homosexuality . Still , the
History of Sexuality
is assumed to contribute
to the "death of man ," announced at the end of
The Order of Things.
Foucault's first and, to my mind , most impressive work is some kind
of parallel to German
Geistesgeschichte,
different from it in the em–
phasis on complete discontinuity and by the inclusion of topics little
known to most German historians of ideas: economics, law, penal
codes, and so on .
White's essay on Jameson's
Political Unconscious
perceives it as
an attempt to compose a Marxist version of Frye's
Anato"!>, of
Criticism.
I feel that Jameson has nothing very new to say, except to
embrace Marxism, interpreted in the terms of Sartre and Althusser,
as a promise for a very distant future.
The essay on Paul Ricoeur is largely an exposition of the first
two volumes of
Temps et ricit,
which White considers "the most
im–
portant synthesis of literary and historical theory produced in our
century ." White , surprisingly in view of his Marxist leanings, seems
to endorse Ricoeur's view of history-writing as serving "the moral
meaning of humanity's aspiration to redemption from history itself."
May I conclude with a quotation: "The problem may be not
how to get into history but how to get out of it. And in this respect,
modernism in the arts may be less a regression to a pseudo-mythic
condition of consciousness than an impulse to get beyond the myth–
history distinction, which has served as the theoretical basis for a
politics that has outlived its usefulness, and into a post-political age
insofar as politics is conceived in its nineteenth-century incarna–
tions ." It seems to me a pity that White does not include Marxism
among those political incarnations. Surprisingly, White welcomes
J arneson's formulation of a completely utopian Marxism based on
old-fashioned materialism. It contradicts the title of White's pro–
fessorship. He must be the only "Professor of the History of Con–
sciousness" in the whole world, and he, I'm afraid, in recent writings
seems more and more to abandon the basic philosophical assump–
tion of that very term.
RENE
WELLEK
