Goodbye to the Greatest Marxist Critic of Our Time

In the spring of 2021, Fredric Jameson, the greatest American Marxist critic who ever lived, found himself at home, observing Covid protocols in Killingworth, Connecticut, where (legend has it) he spent his free time reading books, growing vegetables, and tending to a little herd of goats. He also taught a seminar, via Zoom, for graduate students at Duke University. Now the course has been transcribed and lightly edited for publication as The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present (Verso).

The book offers a masterful introduction to its topic, beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and then moving on to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, among others. And it allows readers to sit in, like virtual auditors, while Jameson guides us through their ideas. After Jameson’s death in September at the age of 90, the volume carries forward his work as a teacher.

Jameson made his reputation on rigorously dialectical monographs like The Political Unconscious and the monumental Postmodernism. By comparison to these landmark works, The Years of Theory makes for relatively easy reading. The tone is patient, not polemical. Readers will recognize the attitude of a classroom instructor — sometimes excited, sometimes exhausted — who is doing his best, week after week, to inspire a sense of curiosity in his students. “We’re dealing with some difficult stuff here, and I recognize that.” There are moments of whimsy and nostalgia, too, when Jameson seems to sense that his material is obsolescing as he speaks. The course will “have to deal,” he says, “with the question of whether theory exists anymore.”

Jameson’s story opens in a Paris café. One day Sartre and Beauvoir were having a few drinks with their friend Raymond Aron, who had just come back from Berlin, bringing the news of an innovative movement called phenomenology. “What it means,” he explained, is “you can philosophize about that glass of beer.” Sartre and Beauvoir became fascinated. They began to experiment with new kinds of speculative and critical writing, moving away from the traditional philosophical systems that they had studied at the École Normale Supérieure. Thus their work “set off this immense period of liberation from philosophy, a liberation toward theory.”

In a seminar on 20th-century France, liberation is a freighted word. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness appeared in 1943; the Allies and resistance forces drove the Nazis out of Paris in 1944. Decades later, when Sartre and his collaborators founded a daily newspaper, they called it Libération. Always historicizing, Jameson draws a strong connection between geopolitical events and the history of ideas. To understand French theory, he suggests, you have to grasp what was unusual about postwar France itself.

Awkwardly situated between two rising superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, French intellectuals found themselves searching for a third way. They were interested in Marxism, but they had serious misgivings about Stalin, and they chafed under the rigid discipline of the French Communist Party. They were bourgeois intellectuals and bohemians, not working-class militants. Their patron saint was Jean Genet, a queer vagabond and petty thief who wrote gorgeously sleazy novels about hustlers, prisoners, and other lost souls.

If communism was too rigid for theory’s restless temperament, however, American-style consumer culture was not much more appealing. Theory was dissatisfied with the liberal ideals, the personal freedoms of expression and lifestyle, that the United States embraced. Over time, by a strange twist of fate, French theory would come to be associated with identity politics in our culture war. But Jameson does not really deal with that part of the story. Focusing on the original French context, he wants to show how theory turned away, consistently, from any notion of a fixed identity. The self was its main object of critique.

In Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology, for instance, Jameson finds a strong account of how we are shaped by the environments in which we live. Our habitat is physical, of course, a matter of geography and climate. But it is also cultural. It includes our kinship systems, our mythologies; most crucially, for theory, it includes our language. And so theory analyzes language as a system that determines — and perhaps creates — the very subjects who believe that they are using it to express themselves. You may think that you are speaking a language, but from the point of view of theory, “it speaks you.”

This insight leads Jameson to Lacan, a rogue psychoanalyst proposing that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Within ourselves, where we go looking for the deepest truths of our identities, we find instead “the discourse of the other,” a repertoire of signs and images that we learned from someone else. “Maybe language is inhuman,” Jameson says. And maybe this is the reality of the human condition — not that we are animals endowed with the special power of speech, but that we are “animals on whom this painful experience of speaking has been imposed.”

Somehow, preaching this depressing gospel, Lacan’s public seminars became a hot ticket in the 1950s and ’60s. “People would go to these things out of curiosity,” Jameson recalls with a touch of wonder. “These were grand public events.” Rowdy groups of Maoist students crowded in, chain-smoking, alongside respectable professionals and the fashionable Parisian rich. There was glamour in the scene.

This all feels alien today, not only because Lacan’s style was so esoteric, so unapologetically specialized — the furthest imaginable thing from our TED Talks or public-facing cultural criticism — but also because of his anti-humanist message. Lacan was hostile to any notion of personal empowerment, and he made a point of attacking American-style ego psychology. What is the opposite of a motivational speaker? He was that kind of guru.

The material that Jameson teaches in The Years of Theory is, he admits, sometimes “not fun to read.” Nonetheless, he wants to insist that existentialism, despite its killjoy reputation, has always been “an affirmative and energizing philosophy.” You can almost hear his voice rising, hoping to convince the grid of faces on his Zoom screen.

You might also detect some concern, if not dismay, as Jameson comes up against what Paul de Man called “the resistance to theory.” The trouble is not simply that the material is dated, or even that the prose can be bewildering. Theory makes people defensive for another reason, as well — because it messes with our deepest, most familiar ways of thinking about identity, language, and power. This relentless turning away from common sense, this flight from an ideologically ingrained worldview, is what Jameson means when he talks about theory as a liberation. But it does not offer us the kind of freedom that we already know how to want, or even to imagine, before we go through theory’s looking glass.

Some of the richest passages in The Years of Theory deal with the concept of le regard, often translated into English as “the gaze.” Jameson prefers a homelier term, “the look.” Fanon described the terror that he felt when he was looked at through white eyes, which viewed him as a strange, exotic specimen of Blackness. Feminists developed the concept of the male gaze, fixing women in its sights as objects of desire. In Foucault’s analysis of modern prison systems, surveillance is a means of discipline and punishment; the panopticon turns le regard on everybody, all the time. According to this theoretical tradition, Jameson muses, even the daylight that falls around us is not to be defined in scientific terms, as energy or matter. Instead, theory deals with the phenomenology of being gazed at, suspiciously, and light becomes “the element of my vulnerability as being in the world.”

Jameson arrives at his most salient account of le regard, and of identity, by way of Louis Althusser, who, along with Sartre, plays a starring role in The Years of Theory. It makes sense that Jameson gives pride of place to Althusser. He was a mentor and friend to many of the other major theorists, and — like Jameson himself but unlike most of them — he kept the faith with revolutionary communism.

For Althusser, the gaze had a political effect. It helped to reproduce the capitalist system by summoning the human subjects who would serve it. Whenever authority turns its eyes on us and calls our names, Althusser argued, it inducts us into ideology. A police officer flags you down, or campus security asks for your identification. As soon as you respond, you’ve been “interpellated.” Ideology is not just a set of political opinions. It is the unconscious way that we see ourselves and our relation to the social world, and it is all the more powerful because we are unaware of how it works on us.

“I think that’s what interpellation really is,” Jameson says: “your visibility.” What you think of as your identity, the core of your true self, is an effect of your exposure to surveillance; it follows from a procedure of identification, as you are assigned (and as you accept) your place in an official taxonomy. And so, by Althusser’s account, our identities are created, rather than acknowledged or repressed, by le regard.

At this point, Jameson has prepared his students to see why theory’s rejection of personal identity might feel more like a liberation than a loss. If ideology is the internalization of our answerability to power, and if identity is an effect of this submission, then theory shows us a way out of the frame, away from the picture of ourselves that ideology imposes on us. If the self is a trap, in other words, then when we lose ourselves, we get away.

Again and again, theory analyzes structures of confinement and seeks lines of flight. “Each of Foucault’s preoccupations,” for example — punishment, psychiatry, sexuality — “is going to return to the imprisonment of the self.” At the same time, Foucault will insist that power never functions without generating some resistance. There will always be more delinquents, lunatics, and perverts than the cells can hold.

Derrida turned against Foucault, and their rivalry generated some of theory’s fiercest controversies, but the two shared a suspicion about subjectivity. Jameson sees this in the way that deconstruction refused to treat the human voice as the paradigmatic medium of expression. Derrida preferred to deal with writing. Unlike speech, “the text” drifted free of its creator and became available to endless interpretation and readerly play. These theorists did not want to express a personal identity; they wanted to unhook their thinking and their writing from the self. As far as they were concerned, the death of the author would be good news.

For a time, these new styles of thought contributed to political action in the streets. French theory found a kind of practice in its era’s vibrant social movements — anti-colonial (Sartre, Fanon), feminist (Beauvoir, Kristeva), anarchistic (Foucault, Deleuze). Many of the major thinkers supported the mass uprisings of May 1968. But the spirit of liberation was harshly repressed, and in the end French theorists, like the political left more broadly, adapted to a series of defeats and disappointments. “Is there a death of theory, along with the death of the author, the end of art, and all the rest of it?” Jameson asks.

The political situation is no longer what it was in 1944 or 1968, when France was balancing precariously between Soviet communism and American capitalism. Jameson argues that France’s entry into the European Union effectively halted its impossible quest for a third way; the country aligned itself, decisively, with neoliberalism and free markets. In the meantime, Althusser, in the midst of a mental breakdown, had strangled his wife in 1980, and then spent the remainder of his life under psychiatric supervision. Foucault had died of AIDS-related complications in 1984. Most of the other theorists took shelter in research universities, where their attack on conventional academic disciplines was absorbed, with some alterations, into new research and teaching programs. Along the way, they came to represent a recognizable social type: the radical thinker within the elite school. They kept the candle of radical thought burning through reactionary times, but they also became easy targets for populist attacks.

Today, the strongest insurgencies against the liberal order arise not from communists or the campus left but from the ethnonationalist right. Jameson suggests, half seriously, that Donald J. Trump follows in the footsteps of the 1970s Maoists, calling on his followers to “bombard the headquarters” and smash the system. The traditional institutions that theory wanted to subvert, including the academy and the middle-class household, are crumbling under the pressures of austerity instead.

Meanwhile, new technologies have come along with an updated ideology, changing how we see ourselves. These days, we are networked and viral — linked in to the hive mind, not locked up in the monad of the self. When Jameson says that Gilles Deleuze was “one of the great thinking machines,” he is trying to describe a kind of philosophical activity detached from personal identity, but today the phrasing smacks of artificial intelligence.

And so The Years of Theory is not just a seminar but also something of an elegy. In the introduction, Jameson reflects on his own personal history with the movement that became the topic of his seminar. He finds himself in a peculiar, somewhat-lonely situation, having outlived most of his old collaborators and antagonists. He wonders whether younger readers will be able to understand what these brilliant thinkers meant to him, before they faded. Will we see how he was able to “adhere with a certain passion to all of them in turn,” he wonders, “without becoming a fanatical adherent of any one of these theoretical stances,” and without ever abandoning his Marxist commitments?

Jameson is recalling his own career, but he is also inviting us into his way of reading. He is talking about surrendering part of ourselves to the power of someone else’s thought and work. Studying these theorists, he suggests, we might inhabit their strange point of view, provisionally, to see what kinds of pleasure and insight it provides. Reading in this way does not require a permanent conversion, religious or political. But while it lasts it is an act devotion, opening onto mystery. “I would like you to feel the excitement of this stuff, even when you don’t necessarily understand it,” Jameson says to his students, and to anyone else who might be listening. “This is a marvelous experience.”