We are pleased to present a book forum on Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, featuring posts by Bill Brown, Jonathan Culler, Emily Apter, John Brenkman, and Bruno Perreau.
Read . . .
Bill Brown’s “Jameson’s Years of Theory”
Jonathan Culler’s “Jameson Stands Alone”
Emily Apter’s “Jameson and Us”
John Brenkman’s “Reflections on Fredric Jameson”
Bruno Perreau “In Theory: On Fredric Jameson’s Years with French Thought”
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Bruno Perreau
Translated by Susannah Dale
Fredric Jameson, literary critic, Marxist philosopher and Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, has published the transcripts of the graduate seminars he led in the spring of 2021 exploring the place of theory in France since the Second World War. The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in intellectual history. Written in a straightforward style, it offers a heterodox interpretation of the decades that established France’s intellectual reputation on American campuses, starting with the publication of Being and Nothingness (1943). Jameson organizes his work around a number of key figures: Sartre, of course, but also Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Saussure, Fanon, Barthes, Foucault, Clastres, Althusser, Wittig, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudry, Comolli, Rancière, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Balibar, Nancy, Debord and, more briefly, in an afterword, Meillassoux, Latour, Stiegler and Laruelle. Jameson draws on his personal experience (from his student days in Aix-en-Provence to his role as an ambassador of French culture in several American universities) to provide a fuller analysis of the power of ideas. He recounts how France “joined (the world of) theory” but also how it has, to his mind, partly emerged from it.
Jameson ascribes the centrality of theory in France to a number of factors: first, intellectual life was concentrated in Paris—a concentration unmatched in other Western countries; second, France lost its geopolitical and military clout after the Napoleonic defeats, which led the country to refocus its will to power on artistic and intellectual production; and finally, France’s position at the crossroads of Europe meant that it experienced simultaneous occupation, collaboration and resistance during the Second World War, thus heightening the need for critical thinking—or as Sartre famously put it: “Never were we freer than under the German occupation.”[1]
For Jameson, theory began to flourish in France when three perspectives came together: existential ontology, Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotics. When these perspectives ceased to interact, the theoretical intensity of the postwar period waned considerably: critical thought withdrew into various academic circles, where it was aestheticized to the point that it no longer had any essential relation to action.
Jameson’s thesis has much to recommend it, offering a historical breakdown that distances itself from the history of institutions, preferring to navigate between the development of concepts (binarism, the look, existence, utopia, and others), intellectual trajectories, and cultural movements (particularly cinema). Jameson’s approach is not linear: in each chapter, he brings together numerous references (often several centuries apart) and establishes some particularly enlightening connections: for example, within just a few pages, he navigates between Thomas Mann, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Norman Mailer, The Truman Show, The Invisible Man, Monique Wittig, and Guy Hocquenghem! This gripping exploration of intellectual life sometimes leads him to generalize (for example, when he contrasts French and American feminisms). But this is the inevitable trade-off for an analysis that is as brilliant as it is heterodox. As a critical rereading of intellectual life in France, The Years of Theory hits its mark.
By organizing his analysis around the best-known French authors in the United States (where they were referred to as French theorists), Jameson suggests, however, that the intensity of their theoretical work was merely a passing moment in contemporary history, linked to a particular intellectual configuration that has now come to an end. Yet other intellectual figures have forged networks just as dense and vigorous as those of “French Theory” and have consistently nourished social and institutional life in France since the Second World War: Daniel Guérin, Didier Éribon, René Schérer, Simone Debout, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Aurélien Barrau, Serge Moscovici, Yves Citton, Colette Guillaumin, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Nicole Lapierre, and Georges Didi-Huberman, among many others. However, they have never embodied theory in quite the same way: their approach has always been more collaborative, more decentralized and more situated.
As a follow-up to Jameson’s volume, I would like to make a plea for the acknowledgement of what may be referred to, for the sake of convenience, as New French Theory. Its starting point was 1983, forty years after Being and Nothingness was published. Why 1983? At the time, the Left was in power in France but had taken a neoliberal turn with its austerity policies. The first decentralization laws were passed. In the wake of decolonization, France was refocusing its universalist project on other areas and issues, such as technology and the body (the National Consultative Ethics Committee was founded in 1983). 1983 was also the year in which the Member States of the European Communities pledged their commitment to an “ever closer union” (Stuttgart Declaration of 19 June 1983), and in which Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party forged its first alliance with the Gaullist right in the Dreux municipal elections. The years to follow were marked by the creation of major private audiovisual channels—a phenomenon that would have a profound effect on theoretical practices. As shown by Pierre Bourdieu—the notable absentee from Jameson’s book—thought became caught up in an imperative of spectacle that favored a doxic rhetoric[2]. This had an impact on the entire editorial and journalistic chain. The mid-1980s also saw major sociological upheavals: deindustrialization led to the creation of committees of the unemployed; the AIDS epidemic raised questions about the authority of medical knowledge; new associations fighting racism and defending the rights of undocumented immigrants were pushing for a redefinition of land rights; environmentalists were calling for new forms of political responsibility (in the wake of the asbestos scandal, for example), and so on. Numerous intellectuals contributed to these initiatives where theory was coproduced, in the tradition of what Jean-Marie Domenach, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet inaugurated with the Prison Information Group back in 1971. Didier Éribon summed it up perfectly: “Foucault’s intellectual problem consisted in trying to detach historical and political analysis from Marxism”.[3]
These new links between theory and activism have been reinforced more recently by the globalization of exchanges and the rise of social media. Take feminist theory, for example: in the wake of #MeToo, and thanks to new printing technologies and online discussion forums, publishing houses are flourishing and contributing to the dynamic production of theory in France. There is also a wealth of critical journals that question the boundary between academic spaces and political commitment. Vacarme was one of the first, while the most renowned journals today are Multitudes; Cités; Raisons politiques; Analyse Opinion Critique; La Revue du Crieur; Frustration.
Resistance to academicism may also be seen in the combination of fiction and self-narrative as a form of political action, as in the work of Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis: aestheticization no longer means the defeat of theory but its reinvention. Ultimately, transatlantic relations have also been reconfigured: translations are less numerous than at the time of the authors analyzed by Jameson, but hybrid exchanges between art, politics and research are enabled by new institutions such as the Villa Albertine.
Some French-language authors, such as Thomas Piketty, Vinciane Despret, Norman Ajari, and Achille Mbembe, are of course well known in the United States. Others deserve greater recognition. Examples include Jérôme Gaillardais on terrestrial habitats, David Berliner on the avatars of the self, Benjamin Boudou on migration and hospitality, Philippe Huneman on profiling societies, Leonora Miano on cultural hybridity, Razmig Keucheyan on ecological planning and the artificiality of needs, Mathieu Quet on capitalist flows, Lila Braunschweig on the neutral, Camille Froideveaux-Metterie on the body and intimacy from a feminist perspective, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille on the relationship to objects, Magali Bessone on reparations, Astrid von Busekist on secularism and identity, and others.
Not only are these theoretical perspectives thriving in France and other French-speaking countries, but some of the authors to whom Jameson refers have also found a new relevance through them: Wittig on the question of inclusive language, Sartre on anti-Semitism, Fanon on police violence, Barthes on the question of emancipation, and so on. In my most recent book Spheres of Injustice, I argue for the need to create resonances between these works, based on a critical reflection on what links different minority experiences—what I call intrasectionality. One reason why minority theories are so important is that they reveal the deep conservatism of some highly acclaimed authors. A number of French theorists at the heart of Jameson’s book, for example, have vilified and sometimes even viciously attacked the LGBTQ+ and feminist movements. They have blamed reality when their theories have been challenged, as in the case of Jean Baudrillard and Alain Badiou.[4]
This, then, is one of the unintended merits of The Years of Theory: it serves as a reminder that all theoretical activity is historically and geographically situated and that it is our duty as academics, publishers, journalists, diplomats, and activists to help sustain, on North American soil, the critical vitality born in post-war France. In a world where the intertwining of time and space is complex and often contradictory, this task will only be achievable if we challenge the very epithet French: under what conditions can a language truly be a vector of theoretical invention?[5]. It is up to us to engage in this reflection by encouraging new transatlantic exchanges.
I wrote this short contribution at the end of August 2024, just three weeks before Fredric Jameson’s passing. The generosity that emanates from The Years of Theory is a reflection of his entire career: oriented towards others and marked by insatiable curiosity. May we follow in his footsteps and, to paraphrase French writer Pierre Michon, make his winter falter in our fictional summers.
[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Republic of Silence,” in The Aftermath of War, trans. Chris Turner (New York, 2008), p. 3.
[2] See Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (New York, 1999).
[3] Didier Éribon, D’une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française (Paris, 2007), p. 144.
[4] See Bruno Perreau, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford, Calif., 2016), pp. 237-38. See also Thomas Florian, Bonjour… Jean Baudrillard (Paris, 2004).
[5] See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, De langue à langue. L’hospitalité de la traduction, Paris, Albin Michel, 2022.
Bruno Perreau is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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John Brenkman
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 whom 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 coediting 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 post-structuralism 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 Thoms 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 superseded 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 nineteenth-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 aesthete 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.
John Brenkman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English, City University of New York Graduate Center, and Baruch College. He is the author of, most recently, Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect (2020). He lives in Livingston, Montana. More information at johnbrenkman.com
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Emily Apter
Fredric Jameson died in Killingworth, Connecticut, a town near one I was staying in when I learned the news. The physical proximity makes the feeling of loss especially poignant – I regret I hadn’t managed to visit him, the intention had been in my mind for months. I flash back to personal memories: meeting Jameson at my parents’ house in North Haven when Fred and my father were part of a seminar on structuralism (and likely the sole participants in that group, which included Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, who spoke and thought “in Marx”); sitting in on Fred’s Yale seminars (which set off explosions in my head); selecting Marxism and Form for my first oral presentation in graduate school; bringing Fred as a distinguished visiting faculty member to UCLA in the 1990s; writing an essay called “The Prison-House of Translation? Carceral Models and Translational Turns” in Diacritics (2019). In 2006 Sharon Marcus, myself, and Elaine Freedberg co-organized a joint NYU-Columbia conference called “The Way We Read Now”—a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Political Unconscious and an occasion to debate Jameson’s use of the Althusserian notion of symptomatic reading. Jameson gave the keynote, and a number of the conference papers were published in an issue of Representations that became a minor cause célèbre in literary history, with everyone arguing, for better or worse, about surface reading and the postcritical.
Fred was always direct and unpretentious, consistent in modeling equality of address.[1] He would talk theory with anyone who was willing to jump in. He didn’t apologize for his thunderous typing speed (on an old electric typewriter) or his prodigious canon mastery (Terry Eagleton alleged he’d read “every significant work of literature” [quoted in JJ, p. xvi]. In addition to his powers of recall and preternatural capacity for critical analytics, he had a knack like no other for translating continental theory into a discourse that Anglophone readers could (more or less) follow. Jameson was “our” Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Saussure, Troubetskoy, Auerbach, Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Goldmann, and Debord rolled into one. He was a paradigm thinker who loved disassembling and demystifying structures, especially ideological ones— “Always historicize!” might well have been matched with the slogan “Always demystify!” He could be relied on to identify what was precisely political about an aesthetic form. He underscored a form’s potential radicality at moments of conservative backlash, starting with the ’70s turn of the “nouveaux philosophes,” moving on to the post-Wall, post-Maestricht era of the “end of history” and “the retreat of the political,” and from thence to the contemporary queasy climate of self-centric affect theory, which he perhaps helped precipitate by insisting on the “waning of affect” as a symptom of postmodernism. Jameson’s struggle to resist capitalism as a force-field inside your head comes through clearly in The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, a text that now reads like something of a last will and testament.
What is this book’s genre? It is first and foremost a seminar, in the groove of those bequeathed by outsized postwar thinkers in France like Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. The last twenty years has seen a geyser of seminars coming to publication, many of them containing outtakes, records of intellectual paths not taken. Less filtered than books on similar topics, preserving traces of their settings, occasions and audiences, they are nonetheless well-edited documents. They remind us of how much teaching matters to thinking; they prompt us to remember that figures like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Kristeva, Rancière, Badiou, Stengers, Nancy, Latour and others were credentialized members of an academic labor force charged with exam preparation.
We don’t quite have the equivalent of the agrégation in the US, but we can read Jameson’s The Years of Theory in the same way, as a preparation for a qualifying exam that we may or may not ever take. Its genre is theory mode d’emploi. The text will be useful to teach with even though (or perhaps because) the explications are indisciplined; occasionally veering off into digressions that make the narrative resemble a shaggy dog story. What is striking about this book is its immediacy; it is a like a live recording of a mind at work. The stream of consciousness style flows into trenchant analyses of consciousness as such, in all its strangeness as a temporally décalé activity that ultimately remains impossible to grasp. Jameson’s writing about thought bites its own tail—it’s very meta, and it’s no accident he embraced the term “metacommentary” “to indicate a certain mode of cultural-intellectual production and intervention” (JJ, p. 183).[2] Topics like desire, the carceral imaginary, structuralism, cultural logic, subjectification, come off as auto-affective performatives of theory, and this perhaps is Jameson’s gimmick, his version of the self-reflexive MacGuffin that we also find in Freud, Marx, Lacan, and Žižek.
The gimmick aligns with what Jameson, in his chapter on Derrida and the “Linguistic Politics of the Third Way” in The Years of Theory refers to as failed synthesis, an aborted Aufhebung, a condition of dichotomizationthat yields oppositions ad infinitum with no hope of dialectical, systemic transformation. In questing for a “third way” Jameson will fix on Derrida’s “framework of the ‘supplement,’” cast as an accounting system (Derrida’s speculative origin of writing) for items of surplus accumulation (p. 269). The supplement is the vehicle by which Derrida’s much derogated “meaningless theoretical jargon” makes its stealth entry into mainstream analytic philosophy, overturning its norms. But more consequentially, politically speaking, the supplement works as a politics from within, producing a disjunct between conceptualization and experience. Jameson glosses this process of “deconstructing” as “a life in time,” whereby “we can’t have meaning in the vulgar sense of meaning: because we are always in this process” (p. 276). While he doesn’t exactly anoint “deconstructing” as the political answer to the question of a dialectics worthy of the name, he does recognize it as “an enormous insight” that might well define “what philosophy ought to be doing,” – so no mean feat (p. 277)!
5:00 a. m. on 9/25/24. Awake, reading obituary comments about Jameson. Mostly by male critics, including one by my friend Stathis Gourgouris, who notes, after posting a photograph of Fred encircled by rapt young men (dating from the 1980s?), the “only guys” gender-skew of the group. While it is no doubt true that Jameson’s fan base was heavily male (most often white, usually hyperliterate in the Marxist idiolect), there were notable exceptions: Kristin Ross early on, more recently Anna Kornbluh and Sianne Ngai, to mention just a few.
Ngai finds in Jameson’s essay “The Aesthetics of Singularity” (2015) inspiration for her own Theory of the Gimmick (2020). Referencing postmodern works “soaked in theory” like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005)and Xu Bing’s installation Book from the Sky (2016-2017), Jameson had analyzed the postmodern transformation of the idea in art from “universal concept to a historically isolated contrivance.” [3] This contrivance becomes the basis of gimmick theory: “The dictionary [Jameson wrote] tells us that the word ‘gimmick’ means ‘any small device used secretly by a magician in performing a trick.’ . . . It is a one-time device which must be thrown away once the trick—a singularity—has been performed” (TG, p. 65). This idea of the gimmick as disposable device is contradicted by the fact that gimmicks are “used over and over again” (TG, p. 66). But that is precisely the point. Ngai theorizes them as forms of compulsory repetition, like “an over-repeated joke that’s no longer funny,” or “a novelty with no consequences beyond its immediately vanishing moment. . . . The outdated device that refuses to die” (TG, p. 68) The gimmick, then, is revealed to be a strange one-time-but-forever hat trick that morphs into a political allegory of hellish presentism; the kind of endless, pointless expenditure and consumption that underwrites capitalism and epitomizes (as Ngai would have it), the late-capitalist aesthetic. A key characteristic of the gimmick is its self-defeat. As Ngai observes of the word’s effect on Jameson’s exposition: it “produces a hesitation in this essay, highlighting similar uncertainties inherent to the form. A likeness between the singularity and gimmick is suggested . . . then retracted. . . . The retraction is then itself retracted” (TG, p. 66). Perhaps this coy retractivity is Jameson’s indirect answer to the nihilating force of the dialectical language that he applies often to the analysis of literature, linguistic structuralism and the rhetoric of temporality, namely, sublation, subsumption and supersession.
Why France? Is Paris over as a city where polemics are “not only possible but inevitable?” As “a space in which all kinds of things can happen?” (p. 436). These questions are raised at the end of The Years of Theory in an “Envoi” subtitled “Theory after De-Marxification.” Like T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) or Edward W. Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2009),there is an elegiac plaint suffusing this bookend. Even the title, The Years of Theory, implies a past tense, a requiem for the years when people actually convened in person to theorize Verstehen, dialectical thinking, periodization, deconstruction, the gender of the Symbolic, the nature of unrepresentable totality, world systems, alternate narratives of modernity, third world allegory, cultural logics of late capitalism, the society of spectacle, feminism, and others.[4] Theory “then” kept the Left from bleeding out; it staved off the defeat of the Utopian idea.
So where are we now? With this retrospect on a life in theory, Jameson leaves us with the task of theorizing as a prescriptive calling grounded in an emancipatory political project. Cast as an open-ended teaching, the book guides us through a barren landscape in which thought has been de-Marxified (an expression that unfortunately connotes deprogramming, as if from a cult, or some kind of drug detox), towards a clearing that highlights theory’s ongoing vitality. We glimpse theory years that lie ahead.
In Paris, that historic site where postwar theory reigned, French Culture Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer organized a conference at the Sorbonne in January 2022 that took aim at “le cancel culture,” deconstruction, and “le wokisme.” But the attack was a reactionary sputter, soon forgotten. French theory soldiered on, with new work by thinkers of varying generations – Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Eric Alliez, Catherine Malabou, Eric Fassin, Peter Szendy, François Hartog, Pierre Charbonnier, Vinciane Despret, Grégoire Chamayou, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Hélène Cixous, Françoise Vergès, Achille Mbembe, and Paul Preciado– all widely read and translated.
A new English translation of Capital, Volume I by Paul Reitter (edited by Paul North) is renewing engagements, just as Jameson did, with Marx’s concept-lexicon, contributing to a thriving discussion of Marx in translation (Michael Heinrich, Ian Balfour, Robert Young, Keston Sutherland, Benjamin Conisbee Baer, Nergis Ertürk, Jason Smith are just a few who have weighed in in interesting ways). Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal (2024) conscripts Freud, Lacan, and Jameson in the service of a critique of conspiracy theory (“the Subject Supposed to Deceive (Us),” noting that, “As Fredric Jameson argued in his seminal study of conspiracy films of the 1970s and 1980s, conspiratorial thinking often functions as an important means of cognitive mapping in late capitalism—it could be seen as almost the only way left to think about the social as totality and about the collective (as opposed to the individual.” (emphasis in the text).[5] McKenzie Wark credits Jameson with readings of Situationism that spark her own efforts to identify a form of “collective, decentered cultural production, which, if it cannot fill the empty chair, can at least name it.”
The survey course that we can follow in The Years of Theory accords scandalously scant attention to Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s name appears in a line-up after those of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir under the chapter heading “After the Liberation.” Jameson was a Left internationalist but for the most part he left decolonizing Western epistemes to others and perhaps rightly so. Yes, there was Eurocentrism, but his preoccupation with Euro-theory did not stop him from being one of the most popular American thinkers the world over, especially in China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. We can well imagine Jameson writing a sequel to The Years of Theory that would track the story of theory’s global circulation and critical transformation. Here, it seems fitting to conclude with Jameson’s response to Xudong Zhang’s observation that many people in non-Western societies “are looking for an ideal form of representation or narrative, a mode of thinking as a way to organize your private and collective experiences, which might otherwise be utterly fragile and fragmented.”
Absolutely. I think that is the whole point of the narrative of postmodernity, and its relationship to late capitalism. Whatever is going on in the other parts of the world, in the Pacific Rim, for example, it seems to me that everyone in one way or another is caught in this force field of late capitalism (automation, structural unemployment, finance capital, globalization, and so on). That then, it seems to me, is the organizing dynamic. One does not necessarily solve this fragmented reality in existential terms. One does not map that our or represent it by turning it from fragments into something unified. One theorizes the fragmentary and symptomal interrelationship. [JJ, p. 187]
[1]Unpretentious, yes, but Fred did have an unselfconscious sense of his own importance. I remember when Anthony Vidler and I met him in Paris once, we picked him up where he was staying—at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes! – situated just steps from the Pantheon. Nor would he shy away from publishing a book of interviews in a series coedited by himself and Stanley Fish titled Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, ed. Ian Buchanan(Durham, N.C., 2007); hereafter abbreviated JJ.
[2] I cite Xudong Zhang’s gloss on “metacommentary” in his interview with Jameson.
[3] Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, Mass, 2020), p. 65; hereafter abbreviated TG.
[4] A querulous cavil: In The Years of Theory Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, and Luce Irigaray are lumped together under the rubric “Feminism as Transgression.” By contrast, Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze receive far more airtime, with dedicated, free-standing chapters.
[5] Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (Hoboken, N.J., 2024), pp. 97–98.
Emily Apter is the Julius Silver Professor of French Literature Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of, most recently, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (2018).
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Jonathan Culler
Given the thousands of pages that have been written about French theory, it seems surprising that Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory stands alone. There are many books about modern critical theory in general, about structuralism and/or post-structuralism, and about individual theorists, but to my knowledge nothing else that tries to capture the movement of theoretical work in France from the mid 1940s until the early twenty-first century. The closest competitor is doubtless François Dosse’s two volume Histoire du structuralisme (1991), but that is much more strictly chronological, more focused on publishing events and French institutions rather than the analysis of ideas, and heavily based on interviews with observers available to speak with him (most of the major figures had already died).
Jameson’s work is unique in its combination of colloquial tone, vast theoretical reach (potent excursions into the earlier history of philosophy to explain the stakes of French writings of these years), continuous situating of theoretical movements within the history of capitalism and the Cold War, and above all its pedagogical commitment “to demonstrate for those who never experienced it the intensity and originality” of these years of theory (p. 5). This makes it tremendously engaging. Frequent injunctions—“you should all read the famous essays”—accompanied by allowances that listeners will find some texts more interesting than others, make it a very welcoming book (p. 427).
While explicit in its identification of its historical and conceptual frameworks, and ready to note personal preferences, it is less a critique of various movements and theoretical claims than an engaged exploration of these competing discourses. “Anyone who has not lived through this period,” he writes,
will not be able to understand how one can provisionally adhere with a certain passion to all of them in turn, without abjuring the Marxism with which they were all “in dialogue” and without becoming a fanatical adherent of any one of these theoretical stances, now considered a doctrine or an -ism. But this is my personal claim, which animates these lectures and which, from another perspective, has tended to be denounced as eclecticism. [p. 4]
The Years of Theory offers analysis and high praise of Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Kristeva, and Deleuze but makes continual reference also to other thinkers interacting with them; gathered in close proximity in Paris and reading and responding to one another, they are “productively caught between capitalism and communism, and in search of a third way which does not exist” (p. 7).
Sartre, the subject of Jameson’s dissertation and first book, looms large, the central figure of four chapters. Sartre suddenly opens up “the possibility of writing philosophy in a wholly new way” (19), giving us theory rather than philosophy; and problems posed by Sartre’s work orient much of the subsequent analysis (p. 19). Lacan, whom Jameson now calls the central figure of theory in the 1960s, is surprisingly “read as a successor of Sartre”: Lacan “develops Sartreanism further with a very different sort of turn” (p. 23). Even structuralism’s break with phenomenology, its treatment of lived experience, such as meanings, as effects to be explained by reconstructing underlying systems responsible for them, is presented as a dialectical response to the limitations of Sartre’s conceptual framework: Sartre
is confined within this commitment to lived experience, to the individual, to existential experience. And so, while this is profound, it is also a fundamental limit on his problematic, on his thought. What is going to change that? Well, first of all, maybe we could name this problem. Maybe we could turn the problem into a solution by describing it. That is what will happen in structuralism. [p. 89]
But Lévi-Strauss declares in Tristes Tropiques (1955) that the movement of thought blossoming in existentialism seemed “the contrary of any valid reflection” because of its complacency about subjective experience. His three sources of inspiration, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and geology, had taught him, rather, that “to reach reality one has first to reject experience.”[2] This seems rather more than a “description” of Sartre’s problem.
Jameson distinguishes four periods of French theory. The first, dominated by Sartre and phenomenology, encompasses the Liberation, anti-colonialism, and the beginnings of the Cold War. The fourth, the period of “the end of theory,” is characterized by globalization, corporatization, postmodernism, aestheticization, and a return to the disciplines. Sandwiched between are two periods of the height of French theory, defined in unusual ways: the initial period of structuralism and the widespread influence of linguistics is related to Lévi-Strauss’s interest in societies without power, whereas the second, which brings the Algerian War and May ’68, is seen as a period of revolt and reflection on power. But Jameson admits that these are actually “two overlapping periods” (p. 17). Speaking of “so-called post-structuralisms,” he avoids the American tendency to distinguish a structuralist period from a post-structuralist one (p. 3). After all, the critique of the subject and an interest in resistance to systems is central to structuralism; and the culminating moment of French theory, 1966-67, sees the publication of Lacan’s Ecrits, Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, Derrida’s La Voix et le phénomène, De la Grammatologie, and L’Ecriture et la différence, and the second volume of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques, Du miel aux cendres—all of which are diverse and inventive explorations of structures. The American assimilation of all save Lévi-Strauss to post-structuralism would produce a caricature of structuralism, which Jameson avoids.
But his periodization is less important than the pedagogical effectiveness of his recommendations, informal comments, and extended explanations of key concepts and theoretical commitments. The pedagogical character of The Years of Theory entails a greater openness to the work of thinkers previously subject to Jameson’s critiques, such as Deleuze, who is here called “a thinking machine, one of the great thinking machines. Deleuze is one of the most marvelous thinkers of the twentieth century” (p. 368); but strikingly, this benevolence does not extend to Derrida. While Jameson offers useful, rather abstract accounts of Derrida’s general strategies, he allows himself comments easily twisted into barbs: “Does Derrida think? I tried to make the point the other day that there aren’t thoughts in Derrida” (p. 266). (I wonder whether Derrida’s claim that he had no interest in Sartre might have rankled.) Derrida’s writings “are performances, performances of reading and writing. They are to be experienced, but one must avoid—and I always come back to this notion of reification—reifying them into ideas” (p. 266). Defensible judgments are given an acrimonious twist. But more important than acerbic comments is Jameson’s failure to discuss essays, such as “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida’s influential critique of Lévi-Strauss, highly relevant to questions about structuralism and post-structuralism, and where Jameson, with his nose for complexity, could have shown that this is much more subtle than often assumed. In fact, Jameson is very sympathetic to the resistance to the reification of ideas that he finds in Derrida and to his conviction that you can’t escape it. In his concluding envoi he returns to Derridean formulations.
Jameson makes excessively modest claims for what he can accomplish in these lectures—this Cook’s tour, he suggests, can do little more than give the names of the principal players and explain the distinctive terms they use and slogans associated with them; in his envoi he winningly keeps mentioning people of interest whom he has left out. I do wish that the editor had listed the readings assigned for each session: those that are identified are often surprising or little-known, and readers would benefit from being able to follow up. But this minor failing scarcely mars the dazzling achievement of this book. The range of references Jameson brings together has always been amazing, but here it is accompanied both by an unusual pedagogical effort and a greater enthusiasm for ideas and positions that he would once have preferred to situate historically. Jameson’s critical oeuvre, the most impressive of any American critic of the postwar years, finds a fitting culmination in The Years of Theory.
[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York, 1976), p. 70.
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books on literary theory and criticism, including Structuralist Poetics, On Deconstruction, and, most recently, Theory of the Lyric (2015).
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Bill Brown
Fredric Jameson (1934-2024) held a seminar—remotely—in the Spring of 2021, the record of which now appears as The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present. Last spring we proposed that we feature the book of lectures as the focus of a “forum” on the Critical Inquiry blog, inviting a few scholars to respond to the book, followed by his own response to those responses, along with his further thoughts about the book, indeed about that thing called theory. He loved the idea. As it happened, of course, he didn’t live to read the responses, which we will begin posting on Monday, within an intellectual atmosphere that has suddenly changed without him.
The Years of Theory reads as a uniquely personal and idiosyncratic book by Jameson: there’s not one Jamesonian sentence in more than four hundred pages. The voice is casual and patiently pedagogical. Explaining Althusser’s notion of overdetermination, he uses the example of “a movie with George Clooney called The Perfect Storm,” where everything that could go wrong (multiple determinants) comes together (p. 233). It is a voice determined to render the opaque more transparent, to streamline basic concepts, and to chart their relation to each other (above all their relation to Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan). But for all its effort to organize French thought in the postwar era, it is delightfully digressive, waxing anecdotal, looping back to a point that he had meant to emphasize weeks before, recommending books to read (René Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel [1961], Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics [1972]) and films to watch, mostly the films of Goddard. Because the book preserves the lectures as they were, you gain a sense of their author’s concern for his (virtual) audience: “Okay, we’ll go on next time to Lacan. . . . I hope you survive the ice storm and all the things that are happening in the weather today.” But not at the expense of that overarching concern, “the project, futurity” (pp. 171, 82).
None of which means to slight the book’s formidable account of existentialism, structuralism, semiotics, and a cluster of post-structuralisms, perceived against the background of multiple ideological, social, and political milieux: the Communist Party, Algerian independence, May ’68, Maoism, Mitterrand, neoliberalism—above all the shifting fate of Marxism in and beyond France. It is a history that can’t be (and doesn’t mean to be) distinguished from an intellectual autobiography. There are predictable elements of that history: the persistence of Sartre (in Badiou, for instance). And there are unpredictable elements: his fascination with Baudrillard, the attachment to Lacan, his celebration of Kristeva’s invention of a new signifier, the abject, and his eagerness to bring out a “profound unity” in her work despite charges of eclecticism (p. 295). It will become impossible not to read the book for insights into Jameson’s other books (his own massive theoretical achievement) just as it’s impossible not to recognize, in his passing thoughts about schematization (in Kant, in Lacan, in Deleuze) what will crystalize into an essay published three years later. Given how seriously Jameson shaped more than one generation’s thinking (about literature, film, Marxism, postmodernism, utopia, allegory, the dialectic, and others) it is, and will continue to be, an invaluable resource for understanding how Paris shaped his own thinking.
Bill Brown is coeditor-in-chief of Critical Inquiry.
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In the Moment 