ABSTRACT
Fredric Jameson is the most challenging American Marxist hermeneutic thinker on the present scene. This chapter highlights Jameson’s impressive intellectual achievements, specific theoretical flaws, and particular political shortcomings by focusing on the philosophical concerns and ideological aims in his trilogy. He rightly considers poststructuralism an ally against bourgeois humanism yet ultimately an intellectual foe and political enemy. Jameson’s first lengthy treatment of the Marxist dialectical tradition focuses on the most intelligent thinker and adroit stylist of that tradition: Theodor Adorno. He is attracted to Walter Benjamin primarily because Benjamin’s conception of nostalgic utopianism as a revolutionary stimulus in the present delivers Jameson from the wretched pessimism of Adorno. In Jameson’s sophisticated version of Lukacsian Marxism, narrative is the means by which the totality is glimpsed, thereby preserving the possibility of dialectical thinking. His American Marxist Aufhebung of poststructuralism posits the major terrain— the primal scene— of contemporary criticism not as epistemology, but as ethics.
