Project of Libertarianism in the Conceptual Interpretation of Postmodernity: Microcosm vs Macrocosm and the “Inbetween Man”

The ambivalence of meanings in the postmodern theories accentuates the hermeneutic interpretation of concepts: the new “cosmic meanings” have changed the world picture in quite a revolutionary way. Though the views on postmodernism are contradictory, of principle importance is the idea that there are some valid “inventions”, which have given meaning to this term; in politics, it is the rise of neoliberalism and libertarianism. Thus, the paper aims to research the interrelation of the “inner” logic of the “free indi- vidual”, his/her micro-and macrocosm in libertarianism with the external political transformations and ideological discourses of postmodernity. The research results show that science and arts allow focusing on the interpretation of the consequences of those phenomena, which are going on at the level of the “political unconscious”. The theorists insist on rethinking the categories of libertarianism: the included concepts are challenging to combine in the principle of the domination of liberty. The focus on libertarianism stipulates the novelty of the research as the postmodern feature, which provides validity to the term “late postmod- ernism”. The new cosmology of the third millennium gives the possibility to use the term “cosmological postmodernism”.

The Last Picture Show: Reconsidering Nostalgia, Desire and the Real

Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece The Last Picture Show (1971) remains a highly influential example of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it has largely escaped the sustained critical attention enjoyed by many of its contemporaries. This article seeks to revisit the status of the film and its critical reputation. Amongst the critics who have appraised this unique film, opinion is split. On the one hand, it remains an influential example of the “post-western” impulse in the American New Wave. On the other hand, it has been critically maligned as a “nostalgia film.” This article revisits these perspectives and argues that a holistic understanding of the inner dynamics of the film must necessarily take both perspectives into account. It examines how these dynamics are organized around a central formal tension between the cinematic codes of the western and those of social realism. Finally, it argues that the pejorative critical categorization of The Last Picture Show as a “nostalgia film” does not adequately grasp its rich, complex and contradictory affects. Instead, it proposes that the sense of loss, nostalgia and disappointment that Bogdanovich articulates can be read as an expression of that confrontation between “Desire” and the “Real” that the Marxian critic Fredric Jameson theorized was central to the “political unconscious.”

Difference Relates: Allegory, Ideology, and the Anthropocene

Fredric Jameson’s recent book, Allegory and Ideology, argues that allegory has become a ‘social symptom’, an attempt during moments of historical crisis to represent reality even as that reality, rife with contradictory levels, eludes representation. Mobilising the fourfold medieval system of allegory he first introduced in The Political Unconscious, Jameson traces a formal history of attempts to come to terms with the ‘multiplicities’ and incommensurable levels that emerge within modernity and postmodernity. This article identifies the complexities of Jameson’s understanding of allegory and draws on the brief moments when Jameson references the Anthropocene to argue for an allegorical reading of our contemporary environmental crisis that would allow us to see the problem the Anthropocene names as truly contradictory: at one and the same time, the world we inhabit appears to us as a world of our own making and as a world that has become truly alien to us.

Difference Relates: Allegory, Ideology, and the Anthropocene

Fredric Jameson’s recent book, Allegory and Ideology, argues that allegory has become a ‘social symptom’, an attempt during moments of historical crisis to represent reality even as that reality, rife with contradictory levels, eludes representation. Mobilising the fourfold medieval system of allegory he first introduced in The Political Unconscious, Jameson traces a formal history of attempts to come to terms with the ‘multiplicities’ and incommensurable levels that emerge within modernity and postmodernity. This article identifies the complexities of Jameson’s understanding of allegory and draws on the brief moments when Jameson references the Anthropocene to argue for an allegorical reading of our contemporary environmental crisis that would allow us to see the problem the Anthropocene names as truly contradictory: at one and the same time, the world we inhabit appears to us as a world of our own making and as a world that has become truly alien to us.

The Brothers Rico

The paradigmatic ’50s exposé is The Phenix City Story (1955). Phil Karlson’s film, set in Phenix City, Alabama, “The Wickedest City in America,” possesses voice-over narration and location photography like other ’50s exposés, but it also emits a vérité vibe that’s unmatched in the ’50s crime canon. What separates Karlson’s film from every other “city confidential,” not to mention syndicate picture, is its deep racial-political subtext, which, in the martyred figure of Alabama attorney general nominee Albert Patterson, evokes the pacifist, civil rights movement spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr. Accordingly, if the anti-Communist films of the 1950s can be said to constitute what R. Barton Palmer calls a “national confidential,” The Phenix City Story not only exposes the raced political unconscious of the syndicate picture but also foregrounds its status as both a local and national confidential.