In April I was thrilled that he was celebrating his ninetieth birthday. When contacted by Critical Inquiry in June I was amazed to learn that he had a new book on French theory coming out. And then on the day I sat down to sketch out these reflections on The Years of Theory came the news that Fredric Jameson had died. Delight, marvel, and sorrow arrived in such rapid succession that they remain tangled and fused in my heart.

I got to know Fred my second year of teaching. When I arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1974 the chair asked me who I thought he should invite for the comparative literature department’s “polyseminar” the following year. I said I thought the two most interesting literary critics at that moment were Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson. David Hayman invited them for 1975–76, and each came for two separate weeks and taught five evening seminars on each visit. For me, my colleagues, and our students those twenty evenings were electric. I’d been hired to “teach theory,” and Jameson and de Man jolted the field into existence for my department and students. I soon joined Jameson and Stanley Aronowitz in envisioning, planning, and launching Social Text. Even though I left the journal after co-editing just the first six or seven issues, the value of that experience and my admiration and affection for Fred have lasted a lifetime.

The lectures transcribed in The Years of Theory are cast as a retrospective on an eighty-year span of French thought, beginning with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). Retrospection creates a vibrant tension and ambiguity in the lectures. The periodizing framing of existentialism followed by structuralism followed by poststructuralism followed by an “aestheticizing” trend—each of which has complex interactions with psychoanalysis and Marxism—gives the impression that each phase supersedes the previous. And Jameson does evoke Thomas Kuhn’s notion that paradigms are abandoned when they exhaust themselves, providing no new fresh solutions to the problems they inaugurally posed. And yet he qualifies the model when he counters any impression that “the past is just worthless” by alluding to a precept of more recent science studies, where explaining “why a discovery comes to count as true” must be accompanied by explaining “why what is now false once counted as true” (p. 79). Even as he seeks to apply this approach in the seminar, he keeps exceeding the dictum itself. For over and over he pinpoints, and often celebrates, moments in the theorists he is discussing which remain vital and productive well after another paradigm has intruded. In a kind of countermovement to his own narrative he validates ideas, procedures, and problematics that return in new contexts or revive neglected problems.

Nowhere is the nonsynchronous, syncopated countermovement more palpable than in the references to Sartre throughout the lectures. Jameson begins with Sartre and offers an extraordinarily lucid and engaging account of the pour soi of consciousness and en soi of concrete, empirical entities. Unlike entities, consciousness is empty; the self is a nothingness ever seeking to become an entity in itself (en soi). Jameson shows the silent persistence of Sartrean existentialism in Lacan’s mirror stage and the psychoanalytic notion that identity is but a bundle of identifications. He shows the traces of Sartrean phenomenology in Kristeva’s innovative exploration of the abject. He points out that Deleuze sees Sartre as the benchmark of the vocation of philosophy. And the vital emptiness of the self even returns in Jameson’s clarification of problems in Althusser, the anti-Sartrean Marxist whose notions of ideology and mode of production often anchor Jameson’s own version of Marxism.

The autobiographical aspect of the lectures goes deeper than the fact that the years of French theory overlap Jameson’s education and career, even as that provides illuminating context and great anecdotes and gossip. More fundamentally, the existentialist sense of situation and freedom, of the individual’s predicament and responsibility, with all its overtones of tragedy and liberation, pervades Jameson’s own sensibility. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his plays and novels stubbornly resist being supeseded by his Critique of Dialectical Reason. The polarity of seriality and the fused group, which Jameson often evokes and refined in his own polarity of reificiation and utopia, does not ultimately absorb or efface that situated, empty self from whose projects, desires, actions, and words emerge a singular individual. As he himself might say, Fredric Jameson is but the signifier of those projects, desires, actions, and words. Such is the singular individual honored and remembered today.

In the many tributes to Jameson, it is striking how his readers and students often center his impact on some specific instance in the vast scope of his literary and artistic analyses. Is it 19th-century realism? Or postmodern architecture? Or global cinema? Or science fiction? Or avant-gardism? Or Raymond Chandler? Or Wyndham Lewis?! The scope and heterogeneity dazzles all who have followed his work. At the same time he is always identified as a Marxist. And yet there is no tightly held Marxist doctrine that governs his myriad interpretations. As with the great Marxist critics preceding him—Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno—there is more than a bit of the esthete in Jameson. Marxism provides frame and concepts to rein in unwieldy receptivity and give it social and political pertinence. In fact, Jameson’s aesthetic sensibility and sensitivity are even more capacious than his predecessors’. And his Marxism is less rigid. His trust in the broad strokes of Marx’s thought—and it is more belief than doctrine—and his evocation of his own recurrent but loosely defined keywords—History, revolution, utopia, the dialectic, the collective—allow him to relish others’ intellectual commitments and theoretical projects. Throughout these 2021 lectures that capacious receptivity to ideas as well as literature and art is fully manifest. One hopes that those who took the seminar and those who now read The Years of Theory will be as inspired as those of us at the polyseminar half a century ago. ∞

October 2024