Some collections lend themselves to opening up discussion in a particular field.
Some tend to close things down. Signatures Of The Visible, Fredric Jameson's collection of essays on film, tends to sit on the fence unable to decide if it is going to say something new about film or just call out Jameson's farewells. Notwithstanding any possible redundancies in the book, Jameson does have interesting things to say here. It may be, however, that he has said those things elsewhere and this book reflects a certain difficulty in articulating those insights in relation to a specific medium. Given the prominence of Jameson's writings and the wide circulation of the majority of these previously published pieces, it is with this final essay, 'The Existence of Italy', its 74 pages making it by far the most substantial essay in the book, that this review will concern itself before going on to make some more comments about the collection as a whole.