Fredric Jameson died last month at the age of ninety, after an extraordinarily prolific career as the leading Marxist cultural theorist of his age. The following text was Jameson’s introduction to The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, a newly published collection based on lectures that he delivered remotely in spring 2021, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic made in-person teaching impossible. The lectures address a vast range of postwar French social theorists, from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The Years of Theory is available now from Verso Books.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel distinguished three kinds of history: that of participants or contemporary witnesses; a history reconstructed around a theme, possibly but not necessarily arbitrary; and, finally, history viewed as the progression of the Idea, as the realization of the Absolute.
The history of French theory I propose here can be grasped from all three perspectives. If, for the Hegelian Absolute, one substitutes the evolution of capitalism, then it will gradually become clear how the emergence of French theory in the 1940s and its gradual exhaustion in the neoliberal period can be seen to be an expression of the uniquely national intellectual response to this more fundamental trajectory.
As for the construction of a history in terms of a theme, and one certainly at issue throughout this whole period, the lectures foreground the relationship of the production of theory to Marxism and the varying solutions of mainly linguistic alternatives to an incomplete Marxist reading of the then current situations. This version could also be expressed as the construction of so many…
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Auteur: Fredric Jameson
