The great Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who died on Sunday at 90, cast a cold eye on death. Death in our society derives its glamour and pathos from representing the extinction of an allegedly unique, not just solitary but singular individual, once upon a time ideal-typically a ‘genius’ or ‘hero’ and today more often a celebrity. And Jameson would have none of this. What I mean will take a moment to explain.

Generally speaking, this determinedly utopian thinker adhered to the ban on graven images of utopia enunciated by Adorno, and refrained in his analysis of various classical and sci-fi utopias from speculation of his own about the lineaments of an ideal society. But his reticence was not absolute, and, in a handful of places within his massive body of writing, Jameson presents the deprecation of personal mortality as a feature of Utopia (his majuscule). One striking instance lies in his essay, in The Seeds of Time (1994), on Andrei Platonov and the Soviet novelist’s utopian picaresque Chevengur. The thought of Utopia, Jameson says, ‘obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.’

So it was that a sort of anticipatory collectivism sponsored Jameson’s belittling of the fact of ‘individual death’, along with the bourgeois and individualist – at its summit or nadir, no doubt Heideggerian – tremulousness that tends to accompany that fact. Of course this theme or notion was not some paradoxical preoccupation of Jameson’s; in the constellation of his concerns, such thoughts on mortality were only a small, far star. Dozens of other matters bulk more importantly in Jameson’s famously capacious and omnivorous cultural criticism, the best short introduction to which is probably Leo Robson’s recent discussion of Jameson’s work as our strongest available ‘vindication of the claims for Marxism as the supra-method, the cultural master-code’; and it can be left to others to rehearse the late polymath’s contributions to the criticism of fiction, film, architecture, French theory, and much else besides.

But the question of learning how to die did recur from time to time in Jameson’s philosophy (as he would not have called it). There it is again in Late Marxism (1990), his study of Adorno, where ‘the ultimate terms of any vision of history in the light of nature are…those of the ceaseless stream of generations themselves, the perpetual transformation of the river of organisms into which one never steps twice, the dizzying perspective of Kafka’s Josephine the Mouse-Singer, and the omnipresence of ephemerality and death’; or in his evocation, from Valences of the Dialectic (2009), of ‘the objective time of the universe, the great wheel of the stars, the perfect circular movement, whose very existence tends to reduce individual temporal experience to mere projection’. The motif suggests Jameson’s ability to regard his own temporal existence – which began in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934 – sub specie Ūtopiānus, as a bursting bubble in the stream of time.

The upshot of these occasional lyric forays was to devalue one’s own individual, bourgeois being vertically, as it were, up and down the ladder of generations. More central to Jameson’s work was a sort of horizontal devaluation of one’s own precious ego, across the vast demographic plain revealed by postwar decolonization (beginning around the time of Jameson’s adolescence and early adulthood). He was fond of quoting Sartre’s observation, in the preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: ‘Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others merely had use of it.’ The citation appears, among other texts, in ‘Periodizing the 6os’, an essay that makes clear that for Jameson the decade had fundamentally to do with the colonial wars – in Indochina and Algeria, respectively – which his native country, the US, and what might be called his adopted cultural homeland, France, were waging. Exploding anticolonial struggles substituted the protagonism of the wretched of the earth for one’s own metropolitan self-importance, a sensation of being cut down to size that Jameson plainly found invigorating: ‘We have described the 60s as the moment in which the enlargement of capitalism on a global scale produced an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces: the ethnic forces of black and ‘minority,’ or third world, movements everywhere, regionalisms, the development of new and militant bearers of ‘surplus consciousness’ in the student and women’s movements’, et cetera.

Of a piece with this diminution of one’s individual ego from the standpoint of both utopia and revolution was Jameson’s equally characteristic dismissal of the unique personal subjectivity meant to be so definitive of aesthetic modernity in general, and the modern novel in particular. In A Singular Modernity (2002), Jameson propounds a straightforward maxim: ‘The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated’. Needless to say, consciousness and subjectivity exist inside oneself and perish when one dies. By contrast, a situation (in Jameson’s typically Sartrean term) takes place outside oneself, in history, and goes on after one’s departure from the scene.

The ego that is learning to die in Jameson is a bourgeois and modernist excrescence, hysterical with self-regard at the confrontation with its historical mortality, delivered as the latter is at the point of an anti-colonial bayonet. This coolness in the face of personal extinction is one of the more bracing tonalities in Jameson’s work. Only it’s here that we who are mourning Jameson encounter a kind of antinomy or contradiction. (I suppose we’ll find out which later on.) It’s one thing for Jameson to have apparently looked upon himself as a mere passing occasion for the temporary theoretical capture of a historical situation in which he and billions of others found themselves; it would be another for us to adopt the same casual attitude to so manifestly singular a thinker, whose like we doubt we’ll encounter again.

On X, formerly Twitter, one of my most rigorously Marxist friends resorted, on learning of Jameson’s death, to the distinctly unmarxist concept of ‘genius’ in describing Jameson as one of few of these that he’d known. Genius, it seems to me, functions in aesthetic theory something like charisma in political theory, as a way of accounting for that which can’t be accounted for in an individual. For the same reason, the idea is embarrassing: mystifying, individualistic, bourgeois. The Sartrean approach to accounting for Jameson’s exceptional range and unique style would be to locate in him the intersection of post-colonial and postmodern history, on the one hand, and personal biography on the other, discovering ‘the point of insertion’, as Sartre wrote, ‘for man and his class – that is, the particular family – as mediation between the universal class and the individual’. But this was not Jameson’s way. In other respects a resolute Sartrean from the beginning, he never followed Sartre in the effort to renovate biographical and psychoanalytic literary criticism as a form of Marxist historiography. An atypical blind spot in Jameson’s method is that it can’t explain how such a singularity as himself came to be. His many students, formal and informal, are not, however, bound to observe such modesty and tact. Especially without him around to correct us, we’re entitled to resume, if only for a moment, the old, discredited vocabulary of genius, uniqueness, individuality, the nonpareil. It’s the very rare contemporary person, after all, who can regard his life and death from the point-of-view of future collectivity.

Read On: Fredric Jameson, ‘The Politics of Utopia’, NLR 25.