What stories can we tell of the vanishing mediator? Is it an irreducible kernel of transition between two different configurations of the social structure, or is it only imagined retrospectively, as the transient possibility of another world? Fredric Jameson shows, paradigmatically, that the Protestant ethic functions as "the vanishing mediator" in Max Weber's historical narrative between medieval society and modern capitalism, the "catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms." Slavoj Žižek adopts the term for his conception of subjectivity, where the subject exists as the transcendental excess of its symbolic universe—as an irremediable gap and a site of transformation. This seminar interrogates the vanishing mediator as a narrative figure and as a paradigm for the dialectic. It asks if the term is still viable as a non-appropriative model of of agency; if a singular mediator as the "bearer of change and social transformation" (Jameson) can still be found amidst the overlapping contradictions of capitalist modernity; and whether we might altogether look for our vanishing mediators on a different scale and in mundane places—among shifting affects, for instance, or fleeting thoughts.

Some topics might include:

• Jameson, Žižek, Badiou, or Balibar's use of the term;
• Representations of subjectivity, e.g. the ontology of literary characters;
• Representations of social change, e.g. through changes in narrative form;
• Raymond Williams's account of the residual, the dominant, and the emergent;
• Psychoanalytic theories of "working through," "transference," or "transitional objects";
• Phenomenology or existentialism, e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre's "externalization of the internal";
• Possibilities of non-dualistic thought.

We especially welcome contributions that mediate among intellectual traditions and work between theory and representation, politics and aesthetics.