ABSTRACT
Jameson is first and foremost a Marxist thinker, and the bulk of his work has directly or indirectly engaged with the traditions of Marxist thinking in the twentieth century. Some of his books have functioned as both primers in and critiques of the major Marxist philosophers: Marxism and Form (1971) was, for many American readers, the first serious work of scholarship to introduce them to the important Marxist critics Theodor Adorno (1903-69), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). The Political Unconscious (1980) includes lengthy discussions of the Marxism of Louis Althusser (1918-90), amongst others. The more complex Late Marxism (1990) remains one of the most sophisticated and challenging analysis of Theodor Adorno’s writing we have. The best way to read both of these books is to have some sense of the terms of the Marxist debate, and that is what this chapter sets out to provide.
