I'm thrilled to be included in "The Ideology Issue" edited by Andrew Cole for the journal SAQ, along with essays by Hortense Spillers, Eleanor Kaufman, Anna Kornbluh and so many other thinkers I admire. The problem of ideology critique was a major part of my theoretical formation as a student, and I was always disappointed to see how the topic had slowly vanished in recent years. Or as Hal Foster asks in his contribution to the issue, "How did critique become a bad object when, only a few decades ago, it seemed to be the cutting edge of cultural practice?" So when Andrew Cole pitched the idea of a special issue on ideology and critique I was keen to reengage with a theoretical conjuncture that has only grown more and more relevant in these hallucinatory times.
For "The Ideology Issue" I took the opportunity to write about the work of Fredric Jameson under the title "Meditations on Last Philosophy." The piece revolves around a few propositions and themes that I try to unpack along the way:
Figuration is superior to equation;
Form reveals the social situation;
The law of genre.
The essay is something of a companion piece to a previous essay of mine from 2016 titled "History Is What Hurts: On Old Materialism,” also devoted to Jameson. If you're paywalled and want to read either essay simply email me.