LITERARY THEORY AND PARADIGM: THE CIRCULATION OF THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS

Since Fredric Jameson proposed thinking about the political unconscious of literary narratives in 1981, the concept has frequently circulated in areas outside literary theory (architecture, cinema, political philosophy, etc.). When the political unconscious circulates, it is not so much a literal concept that is transposed but a mode of visibility or a paradigm that establishes analogies between different spheres, including said difference as a possibility of circulation. Based on Thomas S. Kuhn's notion of paradigm and the discussion proposed by Giorgio Agamben, this paper scrutinizes what kind of paradigm is at stake in several of these uses and circulations, with the aim of discerning how literary theory spills over its boundaries and it is activated in other discourses and disciplines.