Research Jameson’s Pleasure

The thesis consists of three parts: introduction,main part and conclusion.The introduction part explains the research background of Jameson’s theory of pleasure,summarizes the current research status at home and abroad,and demonstrates the feasibility of the thesis.The main part divides into three chapters.The first chapter combs out the historical form and realistic situation of the pleasure theory.For a long time,western aestheticians have different views on pleasure.Plato,Kant and Hegel pursued the rational pleasure;Nietzsche,Lacan and Barthes emphasized the sensuous side of pleasure;while Lukacs,Adorno and Fisk paied attention to the ideological nature of pleasure.Today’s society is full of pleasure everywhere.With the arrival of postmodernism,the problem of pleasure is facing a new context.The second chapter elaborates the connotation and characteristics of Jameson’s thought of pleasure.The pleasure Jameson talks about refers to a kind of intense sensory experience when people facing various cultural products in the post-modern society.This kind of pleasure can be seen everywhere in the consumer society,but it is hard to trace,and it is related to desire,ideology,utopia and so on.The pleasure he understands is the recognition of the life of the body and emphasizes the ontological pleasure of the meaning of life.The most important feature of Jameson’s thought of pleasure is to discuss pleasure as a political problem and associate it with the sublime.In the consumer society,people only focus on sensory pleasure,no longer experience the deep beauty.In order to restore people’s feeling and not let the sense of sublime be swallowed up by the mass culture,he tried to find a power in the aesthetics of sublime and tried to achieve the integration of aesthetics and politics.The third chapter examines the meaning and limitations of Jameson’s thought of pleasure.His theory enriches the western Marxist theory and develops the mass culture pleasure theory.But his discussion of pleasure scattered in different articles,which makes his theory unsystematic and superficial.What he pursues is only a theoretical discussion,lacking of practice.Jameson neither supports nor condemns the problem of pleasure,trying to give full play to the proper political value of pleasure by tracing back the history and politics of pleasure theory.