Fredric Jameson 1934-2024

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2024-09-23 14:00:02

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.

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.