Notwithstanding his venerable age of 90, the death of Fredric Jameson in September 2024 came as a great surprise, for right until the end he had been so active and engaged in teaching, speaking, and writing, as evidenced in part by his two books published by Verso in 2024 alone: Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization and The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present. In celebration of his birthday in April, Jameson participated in an online conference I helped to organized with Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, and Fabio Durão titled Jameson at 90: A Celebration of Theory (connected with a forthcoming collection, The Future of Totality). I also helped organize a blog series for Verso that included 26 brief articles, each by a different critic writing on one of Jameson’s books in chronological order of their publication. These events, among others, underscore the degree to which Jameson’s work over a long career remains valuable in its own right, while continuing to inspire others and demonstrating the significance of Marxist literary studies and critical theory today.

It is difficult, in our times, not to see Jameson as a sort of intellectual hero, one who heroically fought intellectual battles against great odds, challenging the powerful and righteous in their smug dismissal of Marxism, of dialectics, and of the social relevance of aesthetic or poetic forms. In the early days of his career, Marxist literary criticism and theory were hardly known at all in the U.S., and where it was known it was largely dismissed out of hand. Even after Marxism finally did gain greater acceptance within U.S. academic and critical circles, in part through his own prodigious efforts, Jameson frequently found himself at odds with fellow leftists, particularly in his engagements with postmodernism and poststructuralist theory, which many Marxists disavowed or rejected tout court. After 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, many former Marxist or left-leaning critics abandoned Marxism entirely. However, not only did Jameson persist in his efforts, but he ably showed how the post-1989 geopolitical realignments and globalization of capital made Marxism far more relevant than ever. Indeed, thanks in part to Jameson’s work since the 1990s, Marxist theory has become ever more prominent in critical discourse and politics in recent years, when it has also proven all the more desirable and necessary.

Jameson’s entire 65-year career was devoted to Marxist critical theory and practice, particularly with respect to the relationship between social and cultural forms within the system of contemporary capitalism. Notably, Jameson was among the first to engage with the work of what would become known as Western Marxism, a distinction he did not himself fully avow, as he frequently also tied the insights of such thinkers to writers from Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Latin America, and other parts of the world. Yet in his early work on Jean-Paul Sartre, his discussions of Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School, his sweeping analyses of French structuralism and Russian formalism, and especially his indefatigable engagements with “Theory” as it made its way to center stage of academic and artistic debates in the 1970s and 1980s, Jameson stood at the forefront of the critical reception and theorization of these diverse Marxist or Marx-adjacent discourses. In such books as Sartre: The Origin of a Style (1961), Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), and The Ideologies of Theory (1988; revised and expanded edition in 2008), Jameson established himself as a supremely gifted and generous reader, at once introducing a new audience to the works (often previously untranslated) of key thinkers while also situating them in a broader social, cultural, political, and literary history, demonstrating their strengths and limitations, and thus incorporating them into a vaster, more flexible and inclusive Marxism. Of course, Jameson himself would say this is simply Marxism, not some “Jamesonian” version of it. As much as his interests ranged across any number of topics, Jameson maintained his commitment to the Marxist perspective, ultimately grounding all his analyses in the historical materialism of Marx and Engels.

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) may likely be seen as Jameson’s magnum opus, so influential has it become for scholars across numerous disciplines and fields. In that book, Jameson establishes an approach to reading cultural artifacts in their social, historical, and political context, but he moves beyond facile historicisms to show how matters of genre and form, right down to the formation of individual sentences, are bound up in broader ideological structures and practices. In retrospect, The Political Unconscious may also be viewed as a sort of methodological introduction to Jameson’s massive six-volume project titled The Poetics of Social Forms, the last volume of which—in what is perhaps a dialectical unity of opposites, it will be Volume One, in fact—is still forthcoming. That project sketches something like a universal history of literary and cultural forms in relations to the modes of production in the societies in which they were produced, going from the ancient epic of Homer through medieval allegorical romance, the development of realism, thence to modernism, postmodernism, and what lies beyond the limits to our own imaginations today, that is, utopia, which Jameson magisterially explores in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), among other works.

For many, Jameson will be best remembered for his controversial foray into the debates surrounding postmodernism and postmodernity. At the time, nearly all Marxists were opposed to these ideas or the aesthetic practices associated with them, but Jameson’s powerfully dialectical approach effectively “captured” postmodernism for Marxism, as Perry Anderson has put it. After Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the first chapter of which appeared in slightly different form in the New Left Review in 1984, any discussion of postmodernism would have to address, at least tacitly, Jameson’s own insistence upon the relationship between this “cultural dominant” and the present stage of multinational capitalism in an era of globalization. That is, to think about postmodernity was to consider the Marxist critique of the present system, something Jameson made abundantly clear in a number of brilliant works in the years to come, such as The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992), The Seeds of Time (1994), A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002), and Valences of the Dialectic (2009).

Jameson is also likely to be remembered for his unwavering commitment to the proposition that aesthetics and politics are inextricably connected, something about which so many even on the left have remained diffident. Here Jameson’s Brechtianism, if we can think of it in such terms, is on full display. Jameson devoted a book-length study, Brecht and Method (1998), to the playwright, theorist, activist, and militant writer, and Jameson returned to Brecht throughout his career, often in dialogue with Brecht’s own interlocutors and critics. Jameson’s “Reflections of the Brecht-Lukács Debate,” included in a volume titled Aesthetics and Politics (1977), effectively recast the realism-versus-modernism antagonism from the 1930s and situated its problematics for our own times as well. Jameson’s writings on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, including the full-length books Late Marxism; Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990) and The Benjamin Files (2020), contributed to the discussion of political art in Brecht and others in illuminating ways, effectively showing the interconnectedness of aesthetics, poetics, politics, and economics even as it registered the apparent semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere amid the maelstroms of capitalist modernity and postmodernity.

 As I noted in my Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014), Jameson’s critical theory and practice remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, even as he also continually grappled with the new, the avant-garde, and the seeming cutting edge in art, music, theatre, architecture, film, philosophy, or what have you. “Nothing cultural is alien to him,” as Colin MacCabe famously put it, channeling Terence. Jameson’s consistency through all these cultural explorations is not a sign of stubbornness or dogmatism, as some have suggested, but rather a function of his commitment to Marxist theory, which would hold that whatever forms exist do so as part of a socio-historical system, one undergoing constant modification and development, with emergent and residual elements coexisting alongside the dominant structures, and with potentially utopian as well as ideological features. As Jameson has put it,

“A Marxist politics is a Utopian project or program for transforming the world, and replacing a capitalist mode of production with a radically different one. But it is also a conception of historical dynamics in which it is posited that the whole new world is also objectively in emergence all around us, without our necessarily at once perceiving it; so that alongside our conscious praxis and our strategies for producing change, we may also take a more receptive and interpretive stance in which, with the proper instruments and registering apparatus, we may detect the allegorical stirrings of a different state of things, the imperceptible and even immemorial ripenings of the seeds of time, the subliminal and subcutaneous eruptions of whole new forms of life and social relations.”[1]

Jameson’s persistent attunement to these fitful vibrations of the utopian butterfly within our system’s ideological chrysalis is a mark of his profoundly dialectical approach to critical theory.

Needless to say, perhaps, Jameson did all this in times and places that were remarkably hostile to Marxism. He was formed during the period of McCarthyism, after all, and the development of Marxist literary theory and practice took place in the mostly inhospitable environment of American academe. Nevertheless, in 1968, Jameson founded the Marxist Literary Group, which included a number of his graduate students from the University of California–San Diego, where erstwhile Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse was a colleague. Jameson continued this work with innumerable students everywhere he taught, including Yale University, UC–Santa Cruz, and Duke University, where he arrived in 1985 to form the Program in Literature, founded the Center for Critical Theory, and helped to reimagine what the study of literature and culture would entail for generations of scholars. Jameson never ceased to champion Marxist theory and critical practice in a manner that was fundamentally pedagogical, introducing students and colleagues to new ways of seeing, thinking, and ultimately reimagining the world as we think we know it. It is perhaps appropriate that his final book (although more posthumous work is on the way, no doubt), The Years of Theory, is based on his lectures from a recent graduate course, for Jameson was always and will continue to be a teacher.

Perhaps it is there that his legacy will be most productively imagined, in fact. Jameson was never one for autobiography, and as noted, he was not interested in founding a “Jamesonian” method, theory, or practice outside of Marxism itself. Jameson has received well-deserved accolades in his career, including the Holberg Prize and the Modern Language Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, but he would be the first to abjure any form of lionizing memorials, monument making, or hero worship. Jameson’s books and essays, lectures and interviews, and even just the memories held onto by his many friends, students, colleagues, and readers around the world, are not to be placed in gilded frames or hallowed halls. Rather, they provide the materials for further critical exploration, for future cultural analyses, and for theories as yet unimaginable that would address situations currently impossible to predict.

The loss of such a seemingly heroic critic, theorist, and teacher as Fredric Jameson understandably saddens, but Jameson’s example can also inspire us to forge ahead in our own various forms of artistic, political, and critical theory and practice. In Brecht’s Life of Galileo, the exasperated student Andrea shouts, Unglücklich das Land, das keine Helden hat! (“Unhappy is the land that has no heroes!”), but in a softer voice, Galileo himself answers: “Nein. Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat (“No, unhappy is the land that needs heroes”). Our land, our time, does not need heroes, but it definitely calls for artists, critics, and theorists who can build upon and make use of the sort of teaching, writing, and thinking that Jameson has made available to us. The best way to remember Jameson, ultimately, is to get to work on our own projects.

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[1] Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. Verso, 2009, p. 416.