Fredric Jameson 1934-2024
The Editors
Fredric Jameson died yesterday at the age of 90. He had taught since 1985 at Duke University. His many books include The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Antinomies of Realism (reviewing which, Michael Wood observed that ‘Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does’). As Perry Anderson has written, ‘the capture of the postmodern by Jameson has set the terms of subsequent debate’:
Jameson’s account of postmodernism … develops for the first time a theory of the ‘cultural logic’ of capital that simultaneously offers a portrait of the transformations of this social form as a whole … Here, in the passage from the sectoral to the general, the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.
Anderson also praised Jameson’s style:
The spacious rhythms of a complex, yet supple syntax – well-nigh Jamesian in its forms of address – enact the absorption of so many variegated sources in the theory itself; while the sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity, exhilarating figural leaps with a high-wire éclat all of their own, stand as emblems of the bold diagonal moves … We are dealing with a great writer.
Jameson wrote 17 pieces for the London Review between 1994 and 2022, on the novels of Günter Grass (‘can there be literature after reunification?’), Kenzaburo Oe (‘Nobel Prize-winners seem to fall into two categories: those whom the prize honours, and those who honour the prize’), Margaret Atwood (‘who will recount the pleasures of dystopia?’), Henrik Pontoppidan (‘you can be happy without luck, you can be lucky without necessarily knowing happiness’), Gabriel García Márquez (‘it isn’t only objects that are subject to commodification, it is anything capable of being named’), Karl Ove Knausgaard (‘I want to situate this passage, a scoop out of a seemingly endless and relatively homogeneous stream of detail, somewhere in the history of writing’), Joseph Conrad (‘what Conrad does with plot betrays the fundamental contradiction in modernism between plot and sentence’), Olga Tokarczuk (‘We are in what, by analogy to the fog of war, may be called the fog of history: only gradually do world-historical events and the institutions they leave behind them begin slowly to emerge, in shadowy outline’) and Ben Pastor (‘it might chasten us to remember that as a result of our increased historicity today all novels are historical’); on Walter Benjamin (‘Benjamin’s letters are instructive also in the way in which they show how political commitments are something a bourgeoisie makes for itself, for its own good and its psychic well-being’), the postwar French intellectual left (‘it is still to be hoped that the concept of the political intellectual will live on, even in the unpropitious circumstances of late-capitalist corporate life’), Tel Quel (‘like the cycles of the great Mafiosi or the history of the Comintern, the chanson de geste of the various avant gardes has a relatively immutable pattern’) and Slavoj Žižek (‘I am myself attacked in passing as some kind of gullible practitioner of commodification theory’); on ‘the invisible’ and ‘Japan-ness’ in architecture; on creative writing programmes and time travel (‘Back to the Future is not only a prime illustration of a new narrative genre, it is also a commercial event and a narrative commodity constructed at a uniquely regressive moment in American history’).
Some of those pieces are among the essays collected in Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalisation, published earlier this year. The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present is due next month. Terry Eagleton will write about it, and Jameson, in the next issue of the LRB. He will be much missed.
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