THE YEARS OF THEORY

A cauldron of ideas.

In the spring of 2021, during the Covid-19 lockdown, literary scholar Jameson delivered his Duke University course remotely. The transcription of those 24 classes, edited by Welch, comprises an intellectually rigorous overview of post–World War II French thought, “informed,” Jameson notes, “by an autobiographical impulse” and reflecting his abiding philosophical interests in Marxism, aesthetics, utopia, and political theory. His sweeping cultural and philosophical history explores a period of “tremendous intellectual energy” that expressed itself, beyond philosophy and metaphysics, “in anthropology, in literary studies, in statecraft, in psychoanalytic forms,” becoming “not philosophy but theory.” Jameson considers existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and Marxism in the context of tumultuous historical events, including the Nazi occupation of France, the Cold War, De Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, France’s emergence as “a modern technocratic capitalist state,” and the uprisings of 1968. Arguing that the history of philosophy “is not a history of ideas” but “a history of problems,” Jameson examines the problems that occupied thinkers such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze, Latour, and Lévi-Strauss. Among those myriad problems are these: “Where did my unique consciousness come from?” Can language "really express reality”? “How can you have a society without power?” Portraying a “period of great rivalry,” Jameson provides biographical context for many individuals in his well-populated study: Lacan was a physician who traveled in surrealist circles and whose patients included Sartre, who came to him suffering from hallucinations. Bataille was a librarian with an interest in “anything heretical or underground.” The abrasive Derrida “would drive people crazy.” Tracing webs of influence, and rebellion, among them, Jameson conveys the intellectual vitality of a vastly changing world.

Challenging lectures that reward attentive reading.