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History is what hurts.
—The Political Unconscious (1981)
One summer afternoon, 10 years ago, I received an email that I initially thought was a prank from a friend. The sender’s name was “FR Jameson,” whom I had been reading for decades and whose books I had always kept close to hand, but whom I had never, until that moment, met. My initial instinct was to immediately close my laptop, a little nervously, and then think: Which of my sadistic friends is playing this prank on me? Slowly, I opened it up again and, seeing that it was from Duke University, realized that it was indeed Fredric Jameson: The message was very short, all in lowercase letters, with no greeting or farewell. It simply said that a mutual friend, Moira Fradinger, had sent him a manuscript of mine on his 2009 book, Valences of the Dialectic, and that he would like to talk to me. The message included his cell phone number, so that I could call him and arrange to meet him in Connecticut, where he always spent his summers. For the second time, I closed the computer, but this time called my partner, Jennifer, immediately; we were leaving for a vacation in Montauk in a week. But we tinkered with the dates a bit and I managed to arrange a visit. I got to New Haven by train and then took another local train. There, at the agreed station, Fred was waiting for me.
All this while, I had not the slightest idea of how the meeting would be, or what it would consist of. We greeted each other amicably, I got into his car, we stopped at a deli, where he bought sandwiches for both of us, and then we arrived at his house. To my surprise—for it reminded me of my childhood—it was a rustic place, populated by all kinds of farm animals, predominantly chickens and goats. With a mischievous grin, Fred immediately told me that the goats traveled with him and Susan, his life partner—whom I had just met at that very moment—from North Carolina to Connecticut and back every summer. He briefly gestured toward a TV, which jutted out like the tip of an iceberg emerging from an ocean of books and papers, and murmured that one of his children had just installed Netflix on it, which he was very excited about. As Fred searched for a glass to pour me water, I noticed the hole in his socks, underlining his supreme indifference to the professorial protocols that define many of the mega-stars of the American academy.
Meanwhile, I was only thinking about how the person I still consider the most acute diagnostician and critic of postmodernism lived in a rural, rustic environment, completely detached from everything one associates with the postmodern condition. “Would this be one of the determinants, perhaps even a precondition, of his penetrating account of postmodernism?” I thought, in a combination of stupefaction, tenderness, fascination, and bewilderment.
Two years ago today—on September 22, 2024—Jameson passed away. Every day since has shown our loss, especially politically: Over the decades, Jameson showed great intellectual independence and courage in going against the grain of anti-Marxism, the inevitable corollary of the fall of the Eastern bloc and the end of the Cold War. He also showed lucidity, courage, and a high degree of political literacy in the face of September 11, 2001, first in the London Review of Books and then in one of his most important but unfortunately least read essays: “The Dialectics of Disaster” (2002). Going against the grain of many positions, including chimeras, such as critical support for the War on Terror, as if American imperial hegemony were à la carte, Jameson soberly resisted that logic, contrasted the political moralism at play, and proceeded to map and explain the collective and hyperbolic fantasies that the justifications and reactions to the attacks aroused. Here lies another aspect of great importance for my own formation: The rejection of the moralization of politics, a recurring theme in his writings, especially during the last two decades of his life.
Over the decades, Jameson showed great intellectual independence and courage in going against the grain of anti-Marxism, the inevitable corollary of the fall of the Eastern bloc and the end of the Cold War.
But it will take time to gain the necessary perspective to make accurate judgments of a work as wide ranging as it is prolific. For me, the best way to summarize Jameson’s work is to understand the modernist impulse at work in his writings, not as the ideology dissected in A Singular Modernity (2002) but in the ways in which it unfolds the Mallarméan vocation at work in Jameson’s intellectual temperament: “ethics and politics are superficial ‘sciences,’” he has remarked, and that is “why Mallarmé was correct to oppose them to political economy and aesthetics, each of which is profoundly marked by the drama of content and the experience of limits, of the impossibility of forms and the constraints of historical development.”1 In his reckoning, only the aesthetic and the political economy provide the vectors to map the totality. Therein lay our greatest disagreement and subject of greatest dispute: the disdainful way in which Jameson referred to political theory and to politics itself understood in its most classical sense; a space of action with its own inner logic and principles; a legitimate level of totality that I have always insisted enjoys a certain autonomy from the economy and demands to be theorized as such.
Without doubt, this is a conviction that also accompanies Jameson’s modernist gestures at the level of the sentence itself. An abiding modernism pervades his œuvre: from the emphasis on “the break” in his reflections on Utopia, and the aporetic stance about it and situatedness, to his proclivity for theory, the sometimes nondialectical agony over reification, and the voracious subsumption of every system of thought in his indefatigable quest to represent the unrepresentable Absolute, even as he decries the most philosophical (dialectic and speculative) of its representations, that of Hegel. I have always seen this as a modernist recasting of the Marxist legacy—innovation, rupture, and autonomization—all for the sake of a revolutionary future beyond what is.
What followed defied and surpassed any ideas or expectations I had had prior to our meeting. We sat down, sandwiches in hand, Fred put the printed copy of my text on the table, placed his left hand on the papers, and simply said to me: “Well, people usually do one of two things with my work: they either trash me, or write love letters. Neither one is helpful. But this made me think. Let’s talk about the problems I’ve been dealing with.” For a few seconds I felt very nervous, but that dissipated as soon as I realized that Fred had no intention of defending himself from my criticisms, or correcting me on my remarks about his work, or anything like that. On the contrary, the next two hours consisted of an intellectual and political dialogue about the problems he was trying to confront, the preliminary solutions he had given (in Fred’s work, every theoretical formulation combines forcefulness with a high sense of provisionality, even doubt, which is always one of the peculiarities of his unique style) of a caliber and seriousness that turned out to be one of the most intense, fruitful, and memorable intellectual experiences I have ever had.
With generosity and without a hint of defensiveness, much less condescension, this great teacher and thinker discussed with me the fundamental problems of dialectical thought. Fred had made a list of issues to discuss, which he had momentarily misplaced but soon found. It consisted of the following: the difficulty of representing dialectical thought, as well as the problem of re-presenting its categories; his constant concern with the reification of ways of thinking and how that concern animated what I criticized most—his practice of transcoding—which for him was one of his main contributions; the dilemmas of how to represent capitalism; the centrality of Lukács in his thought; the problem of mediation in figures like Adorno and Sartre; how I emphasized the strong sense of bindingness and obligation that Adorno’s negative dialectics represents and what were the German terms in question (Darstellung, Verbindlichkeit, and so on), and his reservations about my approach.
After two hours, Susan came over and indicated that she and I had to leave soon, so as not to miss my train home. As we said goodbye, Fred expressed his gratitude for my visit and offered his support for my modest efforts on how to take up and transform the dialectical legacy in the present. A promise that was always unwavering, regardless of the critical tone that occasionally characterized some of my reflections on his writings. This great act of intellectual generosity, so rare in the academy today, has stayed with me; an intellectual graciousness and generosity that I try to emulate along with everything else I have learned from him and his work. Openness and generosity are integral to his legacy.
Jameson, as I have written elsewhere, was a master of great literary style and had a talent for provocation. That combination is, for me, what best encapsulates the intellectual ethos that defined his work. Irritation and admiration, often simultaneously, characterize the experience of many readers—that is certainly the case with my experience of reading his texts—but one always persists, with a sense that something compelling, even momentous, is at stake, a sense of adventure in each book and essay. And, in the end, there is always the satisfaction of having learned a great deal in the process. His provocations always invited me to clarify and sharpen my own thinking. Some readers of his work have confessed to only having read Jameson’s theoretical texts, or those with an explicitly political bent, and not his literary criticism. This I have always considered a mistake. For, more often than not, some of Jameson’s most acute theoretical observations are to be found in his literary criticism.
What in the immediate aftermath of his passing can be said about a work whose scope and erudition are the product of an education, a formation, that is now impossible to obtain and defies any attempt to summarize it?
Perhaps this. What for me immediately stands out is the combination of originality, curiosity, style, and political courage, together with the unapologetic intellectual and political commitments, that his works represented for five decades. Reanimating historical experience, our sense of historicity and thus breaking with presentism; thinking again about the Absolute, with which Jameson sometimes flirted by linking it with utopia, that great idea always hovering over his reflections. These Herculean tasks were undertaken with a rare combination of ambition, poise, and modesty.
Educated in the French tradition with a doctoral thesis on Sartre’s novels—which served as the basis for his first book—the rest of his work consisted of a curiosity and constant commitment to intellectual systems and traditions, predominantly French and German, whose initial fruit were two studies that today deserve to be read and reread: Marxism and Form (1971), a book that introduced Western Marxism to the Anglo-Saxon world with a stroke of the pen, just as The Prison-House of Language (1972) made structuralism and formalism known. These were texts that in the ’70s already foreshadowed theoretical references and discussions that would only gain ascendancy in the following decades. Already in the conclusion of Marxism and Form, Jameson’s own interpretive approach was announced and manifested, later refined and expanded in the texts that made him famous: The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism (1990).
Yet the latter, more often invoked than read in many post-Marxist circles in the 1990s, offered a comprehensive theorization of postmodernity that linked this phenomenon to a particular stage of the capitalist mode of production: a mediation and dialectical relation, not a reduction, to a differentiated totality whose different levels always remain irreducible to any of its determinations, including the economic one. This emphasis on the mediations of different levels of the social totality constitutes, in my view, one of the most valuable elements of his work, which continued to be elaborated in later texts, especially in his vindication of allegory as a fundamental strategy for critique in Allegory and Ideology (2019).
In Brecht and Method (1998), a favorite of mine, Brecht is interpreted as a modernist whose unique “combination of the celebration of Novum and the delight in learning” constitutes one of his most important contributions. In his work, then, a modernist reformulation of the Marxist legacy was always at stake: innovation, rupture, and autonomization, all in the name of a revolutionary future beyond what exists, beyond what is. Jameson always stressed, mainly in his literary texts, the importance of “grasping the absolute” in modernism, and the centrality of innovations, of “making it new,” that motto of Ezra Pound’s that he often repeated. With the literary cadence characteristic of his writing, in Valences of the Dialectic (2009) he reflected on “an older modernism” for which “the unrepresentable was still an object to be conquered and subdued, articulated and modeled, expressed and revealed or disclosed, by the invention of wholly new languages, the development of hitherto nonexistent theoretical and representational equipment, the ruthless abandonment of the old traditions and their habits and terminologies, and the confidence in the capacity for innovation and the Novum at least asymptomatically to approach the Absolute.”
A more apt characterization of Jameson’s own oeuvre is hard to envisage. This tireless quest for the Absolute is the masterly signature of Jameson’s titanic quest to decode the seeds of time, a quest relentlessly pursued with the indefatigable zeal of a modernist priest. Or, as he wrote in his dazzling essay on Mallarmé in The Modernist Papers (2007), the poet “must hold passionately to a conviction that the New is possible and that the Novum is imminent, already prepared by the crisis of modernity and ‘le Vers’ itself.” Mutatis mutandis, that is Jameson’s utopian desire, the impulse in his dissection of forms, of the sentences themselves, which he has brilliantly reworked into a dialectical concept. In this modernist account of the dialectic, Mallarmé meets Shakespeare (flanked by Lukács and Sartre): by means of the former’s brio, the hope of cracking the elusive code of “the seeds of time” for a post-capitalist future is poetically undertaken.
In Divagations (1897), Mallarmé penned the set of passages that have long been Jameson’s companions. Jameson used a fragment from one of them as an epigraphs to Marxism and Form—“Since there are only two ways open to mental research, where our need bifurcates—aesthetics, on the one hand, political economy on the other: it is of the latter, principally, that alchemy was the glorious, hasty, and unclear precursor.” Another vignette from Divagations, which also caught Jameson’s attention elsewhere, is apposite here.2 In it, Mallarmé’s fascination with alchemy is at work, as is his modernist ambition for the ungraspable yet always present totality:
I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of the alchemist, ready to satisfy all vanity and all satisfaction, the way they used to burn their furniture and the beams from their ceiling, to stoke the fires of the Great Work. What would it be? It’s hard to say: a book, quite simply, in several volumes, a book that would be a real book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of chance inspirations, however wonderful. … I would even go further and say, the book, convinced as I am that in the final analysis there is only one, unwittingly attempted by anyone who writes, even Geniuses.
There, now, is the admission of my vice, laid bare, dear friend, which I have many times rejected, my spirit bruised and tried; but I am possessed by it and I will succeed, perhaps—not in drafting the whole of it (one would have to be I don’t know who for that!) but in showing a fully executed fragment, making its glorious authenticity glow from the corner, and indicating the rest, for which a lifetime would not suffice. To prove, by means of these finished pieces that this book exists, that I knew what it was I couldn’t accomplish.
These fragments could easily be a motto for Jameson’s enigmatic, unfinished project, The Poetics of Social Forms, a literary allegory for the transcoding at work in Jameson’s capacious intellect in which alternative bodies of work, even alternative articulations of the dialectical legacy, are subsumed in his Theoretical edifice.
Jameson’s recasting of the dialectic is a formidable heir to Mallarmé. Here an Olympian intelligence carries on the task to prove not only that the totality exists but that it ought to be cognitively mapped and critically apprehended, by means of a dialectical account of narrative properly refashioned for this task, in order to grasp history and catch a glimpse of a future beyond capitalism, one in which history would appear once again, thus transcending “that weakening of the sense of history and of the imagination of historical difference which characterizes postmodernity.”3 Only then, after immanently transcending what is, and history would at last be changed to itself. Whether such a transformation is at hand today is not at all clear. Evident, however, is that no other thinker, Hegelian Marxist or otherwise, has lived up to this modernist vocation with the originality, intellectual élan, aesthetic intelligence, and political trenchancy of Fredric Jameson. Fred exemplified the openness and generosity of a true intellectual; his work, for its part, embodied an intellectual vocation, originality, political courage, and style that will remain an inspiration, an endless source of intellectual stimulation. 
This article was commissioned by Bécquer Seguín.
