Dialettiche della scomparsa. Jameson legge Max Weber

The essay examines Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of Max Weber, focusing on The Vanishing Mediator and reconstructing its theoretical significance within a dialectical critique of modernity. Palma shows that Jameson reads Weber not merely as a sociologist of rationalization, but as a thinker whose work is structured by a narrative and allegorical logic centered on the dialectic between action and meaning, charisma and bureaucracy, value and instrumental rationality. Drawing on Greimasian semiotics and on the category of the ‘vanishing mediator’, Weber is interpreted as a theorist of historical mediation, in which religion, charisma, and the prophetic figure function as transitional dispositifs enabling the passage from traditional society to rationalized capitalism. Particular attention is paid to the link between rationalization and the ‘religionization of the world’, understood as an ideological process that turns labor and value into objects of secular faith. The essay also highlights the psychological and symbolic dimension of this construction, relating Weber’s sociology to the modern crisis of meaning, to spleen, and to the tension between lost totality and fragmented experience. In its conclusion, the article shows how Jameson’s reading of Weber converges with Lukács’s mediation and with the theory of the ‘political unconscious’, interpreting rationalization as an allegorical figure of a repressed yet operative historical totality, and the disappearance of meaning as the narrative core of capitalist modernity