Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third "Critique" in Adorno and Jameson
slogan-the one absolute and we may even say 'transhistorical' imperative of all dialectical thought-will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well."' A great deal of critical theory, since Jameson issued his mandate, has assumed an identity between the aesthetic (particularly in its Kantian and modernist versions) and the process of ideological deformation of the material, the real, the sociopolitical; ultimately, of the historical. For many critics working during the last two decades from the Marxian or Marxian-derived premises of the "critique of aesthetic ideology," it has been axiomatic that Kantian aesthetics and the art contemporaneous with it establish an essentialist or transcendental ideology of literary-cultural value whose Other, from romanticism through modernism, will be the material, the social, and the historical; whose Other, to formulate it more precisely, will be the critical attempt to engage the material, social, and historical from a political, interventionist