«Moments of failure». F. Jameson lettore della Logica hegeliana. Note critiche su reificazione, metafisica e dialettica

This essay offers a critical appraisal of Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of Hegel’s Science of Logic, taking as its guiding problem the systematic “placement” of reification and its hermeneutic import. Against the tradition that locates Verdinglichung primarily within the philosophy of spirit – from Marx and Lukács to a broader constellation of twentieth-century reprises – the author reconstructs Jameson’s move to seek its driving mechanism instead in pure logic, identifying it with the fixating activity of the Verstand as opposed to the Vernunft. This shift is examined both for its theoretical productivity – inasmuch as it forces one to interrogate the allegedly “objective” status of logical categories – and for its aporias, especially where Jameson reads the Doctrine of the Concept as the reemergence of a metaphysics (and, ultimately, of an ideological “leap”). Through a close engagement with Hegelian texts, the essay argues that Hegelian logic is indeed “metaphysical,” but in a profoundly renewed sense, precisely because it dissolves the separation between forms of thought and the truth of the object, thereby also removing the consubstantial relation between thought and “thing” from the schema of a merely subjective and narcissistic act. Finally, by reworking Jameson’s thesis of “moments of failure,” the author shows that neither the distinction between the speculative and the dialectical nor that between understanding and reason warrants a reifying demonization of the Verstand : rather, it functions as a necessary moment of rationality and as a safeguard for the persistence of the finite within the system.