Fredric Jameson: The King Is Dead (original) (raw)

The King is dead, long live the King!" This ancient French phrase, dating to at least the Fifteenth Century, is the kind that might have set Fredric Jameson on one of his extended, languorous, alternately dense and playful, intellectually demanding examinations. Marxism's preeminent cultural critic for more than fifty years, Jameson was the foremost proponent of dialectical thought, in which two seemingly contradictory phenomena were shown to be united by some underlying logic. In this mode, the shells of appearance could be recast as a unity of essence. Originating in Georg Hegel, evident in the young Marx, it is perhaps Hungarian philosopher and critic, Georg Lukács, who stands as Jameson's most evident forebear. The influence here is not simply intellectual but stylistic. Inherent is a belief that the form of communication is constitutive of its content: the way you write something is essential to what is being written. In this way, Jameson could deploy seemingly irreducibly antithetical and antinomic systems of thought-structuralism and post-structuralism, Freudian psychoanalysis and Sartrean existentialism, Greimasian squares and DeManian discoursesand clash them together in one and the same piece. Arguably, this technique dances along a dangerous cliff: the risk of dissolving real antinomies, producing an eclecticism rather than integration into any coherent "totality." Is this just a sophisticated way of justifying the use of any old system or approach? If this was the risk, the reward was analyses of striking, often unparalleled, originality.