It didn’t seem possible that someone so full of life and thought and humor could die, but Fredric Jameson has passed. Those of us who were fortunate enough to sit in his classrooms, to go to his home for dinners and parties, to be part of his generously-shared intellectual milieu: we know that however much we lament his death, his corporeal mortality has nothing to do with the ways in which the possibilities of thought he opened continue to live on in each of us. The flood of tributes on Facebook alone is enough to impress upon me that I live in a universe suffused by Fred’s capacious capacity to link worlds together, to connect us in a shared world of thinking that is rigorous without being rigid, structured without being constrained. I haven’t seen Fred in a number of years and cannot count myself one of his inner circle. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write some scattered thoughts as I process the fact of his death and that the incredible steady stream of his provocations will all too soon run dry. 

Let me indulge first in a couple personal memories. Back at Duke, when I was a grad student often seriously outside my depth, I and two then-classmates, now close friends, did an independent study with Fred; these days I am regularly asked to do such things, to which I usually acquiesce, so I know how much effort it takes clear time and mental space to teach such an overload. Neferti, Jon, and I proposed to read systematically on theories of imperialism, for which we constructed a wildly ambitious syllabus filled with classic and obscure readings along with a number of films. As Neferti reminded me the other day, Fred patiently presided over our weekly sessions, sipping Sleepy Time tea while we vigorously debated imperialism, on occasion interjecting a comment or question that jolted us awake.

During those years, a number of international students had arrived in Durham, North Carolina to study with Fred, most were soon appalled at the paucity of food options in the area. Although my family was in New York at the time, often I stayed in Durham for Thanksgiving to save on expensive travel. Fred would have us stragglers over to his house for a huge meal, much of which we, the guests, ended up cooking while we drank large amounts of wine from his prodigious cellar and watched bad-quality pirated VHS copies of important movies, on which Fred would provide a running commentary. There was always a chaotic swirl of activity, but eventually we’d all sit down to a meal as untraditional as it was eclectically delicious. Fred would rise from the table at around 8:30 or 9:00 pm, say good night on his way to bed, and instruct those of us left which bottles of wine we could drink, reminding us to close the front door on our way out. His laughter, his generous sharing of his intellect and his life, his infectious energy, his insatiable curiosity… that’s what I remember most vividly.

Fred’s thinking had many lives, not least a life in China. As a consequence, WeChat too has been filled with tributes to his work and mourning at his death. Many of these pieces attest to how important his thinking is to a whole generation of Chinese literary scholars and critics. This is as true of those in diaspora as of those who have primarily worked only in China. His numerous visits to universities in China, from the famous first one in 1985 at Beida through to more recent times; the thorough translation of many of his signature works; and his early choice of a few Chinese male students to go to Duke to study with him in the late 1980s and early 1990s, helped foster and cement his – and his Chinese students’ – reputation for “theory” (lilun 理论) and cosmopolitanism. All of this structured and shaped what became “Jameson” as a scholar-brand in China.  Yet, his genuine interest in China and specifically in the Chinese revolution and its socialist politics always sat strangely athwart a 1980s/1990s intellectual field rapidly repudiating the radicalisms of a previous era, hoping instead to shed the stigma of socialism so as to converge with the very capitalist world and wildly consumerist cultures that were the targets of Jameson’s withering gaze and critique. 

What has struck me about the WeChat testimonials I have read – and I cannot say I have read a huge number – is how many somehow elide the politics of Jameson’s Marxism to focus on the more purely methodological aspects of his oeuvre. While labeling him a “great Marxist philosopher,” these commentators nevertheless appear to divide him in two: a philosophical thinker with a political significance deemed less relevant and that can be left to the side; and a “critical” thinker whose abstract methodology remains of interest. That is, the philosophical appears subordinated to the apolitical appropriation of Jameson as exponent of method, centrally of historical materialism, mediation, and totality. Each of these methods – curiously shorn of their particular historical stakes –takes on a fundamental role in operationalizing Jameson without subscribing to his Marxist orientation. Of course, this impulse to run from politics is not just a Chinese scholarly proclivity; it has informed more generally the scholarship and commentary of many of those who want to claim some Jamesonian genealogy without the perceived taint of his Marxist leanings.

I am not here to proclaim what is the correct way to think Jameson. Nevertheless, I would maintain that, just as Carl Schmitt cannot be raised without centrally referencing his fascism, Jameson too cannot be taken up seriously without his Marxism. Indeed, ideology critique is one of the most important aspects of Jameson’s theory as scholarly practice. And here, I’m arbitrarily reminded of a perhaps relatively minor piece he wrote in 2001 for the journal, Radical Philosophy, “Nothing but a Commodity,” on a new translation of Lukacs’ A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic. I’m reminded in two ways. First, personal: whilst preparing for my written qualifying exams, everyone who took a field exam with Fred was instructed by their seniors that, when writing about Lukacs, one needed to note how his theory of the proletariat as the subject of history was both Eurocentrically limiting and historically constraining. In my exam paper, I dutifully critiqued Lukacs in that vein. But, second, I’m reminded in a political-theoretical way as well: to my mind, Jameson’s attempt in this longish essay to banish the dogmas of Leninist vanguardism while retaining a sense of politics and the historical as full of dialectical possibility is enabling. His provocation that politics is the “requirement for political appreciation and intelligence” (RP 110, Nov/Dec 2001: 38) rather than rigid organizational formula seems important to remember these days, as we incite against a genocidal regime intent on wiping out the Palestinian people and simultaneously against our university administrations busy criminalizing those of us who dare to speak a critique of the current Zionist ideology and the Israeli state’s violent will to power. I don’t have anything particularly incisive to say about Fred. Others who have studied his thought, rather than studied with his thought as I have, are far more qualified to say important things. So, I’ll just end with the wise words of Fred’s friend and generational colleague, Harry Harootunian, who wrote thus to me about Fred’s passing: “he was the inspiration and force of our times.” May that spirit live on as a political principle and a politics worth articulating and defending.  

Rebecca Karl is Professor of History at New York University