After 1945, France produced an extraordinary wave of social theorists whose influence is still felt today. In his final work, Fredric Jameson discussed the excitement of watching this wave rise and fall and the conditions that made it possible.
Fredric Jameson in São Paulo, Brazil, in January 2000. (Wikimedia Commons)
Fredric Jameson died last month at the age of ninety, after an extraordinarily prolific career as the leading Marxist cultural theorist of his age. The following text was Jameson’s introduction to The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, a newly published collection based on lectures that he delivered remotely in spring 2021, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic made in-person teaching impossible. The lectures address a vast range of postwar French social theorists, from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The Years of Theory is available now from Verso Books.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel distinguished three kinds of history: that of participants or contemporary witnesses; a history reconstructed around a theme, possibly but not necessarily arbitrary; and, finally, history viewed as the progression of the Idea, as the realization of the Absolute.
The history of French theory I propose here can be grasped from all three perspectives. If, for the Hegelian Absolute, one substitutes the evolution of capitalism, then it will gradually become clear how the emergence of French theory in the 1940s and its gradual exhaustion in the neoliberal period can be seen to be an expression of the uniquely national intellectual response to this more fundamental trajectory.
As for the construction of a history in terms of a theme, and one certainly at issue throughout this whole period, the lectures foreground the relationship of the production of theory to Marxism and the varying solutions of mainly linguistic alternatives to an incomplete Marxist reading of the then current situations. This version could also be expressed as the construction of so many idealisms in the face of a philosophically unsatisfactory materialism, or indeed as the reverse.
Thirdly, and this is what I want first to underscore, the book can be grasped in its autobiographical dimensions, as the account of a witness and sometime participant. There are therefore at least three stories to be told here. The first is that of the productivity of a Marxist framework or problematic. Then the texts themselves demand periodization and reconstruction in an authorial as well as a more general thematic context.
Finally there is my own (very mediated) participation in a period that runs from the liberation of Paris in 1944 to the 1980s or ’90s, or in other words to the de-Marxification of French intellectual life, the subsumption of France into the European Union, and the gradual primacy of a neoliberal or privatization-cum-austerity economic agenda.
Dialogues With Marxism
I first discovered my own profound acknowledgment of the spirit of Sartrean existentialism in contact with the novelist Georges Auclair, at Haverford College, and René Girard, then at Bryn Mawr. I indulge myself by remembering my intellectual excitement at unpacking that first shipment from France of the big fresh uncut volumes of Saint Genet and L’Etre et le néant in the living room of my family home in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, in the early 1950s.
It was the reading of Sartre’s novel L’Age de raison which first struck me like a thunderbolt.
But it was the reading of Sartre’s novel L’Age de raison which first struck me like a thunderbolt and revealed the truth of an existentialism to which, since then, I have always tried to be faithful. I mention these personal matters because they document the ways in which an individual, and indeed a foreigner, participates phenomenologically, if I may say so, in what is in fact a collective social phenomenon. Indeed, my teachers, both at Haverford and at Yale and mostly French, confirmed the way in which a philosophy or a “theory” takes on a quasi-material and certainly historical existence by way of collective acknowledgment.
It was during this period, as frequent stays in Paris confirmed, that the hegemony of Marxism and existentialism during the Resistance and the liberation began to be complicated by the excitements of linguistics and semiotics and also the emergence of new forms of politics on the left and the emergence of Trotskyist and Maoist adherents alongside the party-communist ones to which I had only a limited access.
It was during this transition that I began to understand that the new semiotic activities, as well as the various “philosophies of the concept” being elaborated alongside more familiar idealisms and materialisms, were all in dialogue (a word I don’t much like but prefer to the bland Rortyan term of “conversation”) with Marxism. But it was also at this time that, at University of California, San Diego, my own intellectual participation in what by now we may call the evolution of French theory (from structuralism to semiotics, from Sartrean existentialism to the various so-called post-structuralisms) took on a more openly collective form.
One learns as much from one’s students, and, in particular, from their commitments to the material, as from one’s own affinities, and so my own work during this period constituted a kind of untheorized collaboration with many interlocutors — students as well as visitors, colleagues as well as comrades, teachers as well as learners, at La Jolla and (after interludes at Yale and at Santa Cruz) at Duke, where, during the plague years, remotely, there took form these lectures to which those interlocutors, in one way or another, contributed.
I cannot name them all — they know who they are — but I must make an exception for the name of my regretted friend, comrade, and collaborator Stanley Aronowitz, with whom together we founded both the Marxist Literary Group and the journal Social Text, and to whose memory this seminar is dedicated.
Political and Theoretical Avant-Gardes
Meanwhile, from an “objective” standpoint now, I will offer a periodization which is perhaps more idiosyncratic than some intellectual histories of the period, in which the Tel Quel group (and various analogous movements and journals in film studies) have generally been called upon to play a central role in the French ’60s and ’70s. This is, rather, for me a period in which the political as well as the theoretical avant-gardes begin to break down and to constitute themselves into a variety of named ideological groups, some of them truly vast and systemic indeed: I will mention the Althusserians, the Lacanians, the Foucauldians, the Deleuzians, the Derrideans, alongside a variety of feminist movements and various subcultures.
One learns as much from one’s students, and, in particular, from their commitments to the material, as from one’s own affinities.
The towering edifice of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work precedes all this, no doubt; while that of Roland Barthes faithfully accompanies these developments and adapts in wonderfully creative sinuosity to their general rhythms. Anyone who has not lived through this period will not be able to understand how one can provisionally adhere with a certain passion to all of them in turn, without abjuring the Marxism with which they were all “in dialogue” and without becoming a fanatical adherent of any one of these theoretical stances, now considered a doctrine or an -ism. But this is my personal claim, which animates these lectures and which, from another perspective, has tended to be denounced as eclecticism.
What do I mean by developing within a Marxist problematic — or perhaps I should say a Western-Marxist problematic (the latter being distinguished by an emphasis on ideology, political subjectivity, and ultimately commodification, as opposed to the centrality of questions of party organization and class struggle in the older Leninist paradigm)? I think it means an overlap of three more circles of interest and inquiry: that of existential ontology, that of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and that, finally, of semiotics and structural linguistics.
When these three overlap within the more general framework of questions and problems proper to so-called Western Marxism, at that point “theory” has thrown off its more purely philosophical and systemic exterior and reaches its moment of greatest intensity. When the three zones (and their Marxian framework) begin to disengage from each other and recover a more traditional autonomy of an essentially academic nature, then that impetus is weakened or lost altogether (and much the same thing can be said for a Marxism that relapses into the technical questions of value, class definition, and the like.)
Academic philosophy begins to reconstruct itself, and questions of psychology, ethics, and aesthetics reassert their primacy as separate fields. This seminar does not propose some unified “field theory” in response to the current situation; but the intent is to demonstrate for those who never experienced it the intensity and originality of the problems of those older “years of theory.”
A Geopolitical Interpretation
Hegel would not have wanted me to theorize the end of this very rich and exciting period with the contingent deaths of its “master thinkers.” Nor is it necessary to do so. For the exhaustion of their work coincided with the withdrawal of the world spirit (so to speak) from France at the moment of failure of the François Mitterrand experiment in social democracy and the absorption of France into a Europe in which, as Régis Debray has observed, it turned from being a nation-state into a member-state, and in which the autonomy aspired to by Gaullism proved in nascent globalization to be unrealizable.
Nor does one have to posit the end of the Soviet Union as a central cause of France’s loss of cultural hegemony, although among the various “overdetermined” preconditions for that outcome it must certainly take its place. I have mentioned de-Marxification as an intellectual process, which spelled the end of Sartrean fellow traveling. The end of the concrete presence of an active and influential Communist Party is a separate matter, one cunningly engineered by Mitterrand but clearly completed by the definitive breakdown of the Soviet experiment.
The unique centrality of Paris makes for a situation for intellectuals in which the doom of provinciality is irredeemable even for strong regionalisms.
I have already mentioned the role played by the coming to hegemony of neoliberalism in the various tournants to be subsumed under the term postmodern. What follows culturally and intellectually is the return of academic specializations, the withdrawal of the possibility of political action (and of the sympathies with it), and a general “aestheticization” of theory and politics which Walter Benjamin already denounced in the 1930s. The return of certain neofascisms all over the world tends to encourage the belief in a kind of cyclical movement of politics or the zeitgeist, which I think it would be better to avoid.
Still, something more should be said in conclusion about the preeminence of France and more particularly of Paris which is the premise of this “history.” Why should there have accrued any special privilege to French theory in this postwar period, and what can possibly justify the implicit characterization of Sartre and his successors as “world-historical” figures in theory?
This is the moment to underscore and defend a level of properly geopolitical interpretation, of which the US reader is less likely to be aware than the European one. To be sure, the unique centrality of Paris — which has no equivalent in the other Western European countries, let alone the United States — makes for a situation for intellectuals in which the doom of provinciality is irredeemable even for strong regionalisms. Sartre’s La nausée is first a powerful and uniquely philosophical expression of the ennui of the provincial town; but its historical background is that of the return of the global adventurer of the 1920s.
Antoine Roquentin is a caricature of André Malraux returning home from an Indochina in which he hoped to make his fortune in stolen artworks: this retreat signals the transition to a political 1930s in which fascism and Soviet communism reoccupy the field of play and condemn the new Sartrean intellectual to historical research (M. de Rollebon and conspiracy) and thereby to that paralysis of praxis or action from which the awareness of ennui or Being springs. (In this respect, the occupation — the “Republic of Silence” — is to be seen as yet another form of forced provincialization in which the choices of freedom can be analyzed in their absence.)
The Experience of Defeat
As a kind of metaphysics, then, a geopolitical analysis presupposes a view of the human animal as a species condemned to seek “meaningful” activity beyond social reproduction as its justification for being. I will argue that this fate holds at the level of the nation-state as well. The defeat of France by England in the Napoleonic period — the loss of world hegemony to the British Empire — is, for its citizens, consciously or not, a sentence to an essentially superstructural competition, to the exercise of action through language and the elaboration of culture (and the production of intellectuals and artists as well).
Ennui begins here, with the epigones, Alfred de Musset’s “enfants du siècle,” and begins to bear those “fleurs du mal” which will culminate in the existential and phenomenological philosophies of the immediate postwar period. It is a situation which is redoubled on the empirical level, with a renewal that will leave France stranded between the superpowers and its intellectuals productively caught between capitalism and communism, and in search of a third way which does not exist.
The very geographical situation of France during the war is allegorical of its unique divisions: a reactionary yet self-governing zone and a Nazi occupation. France’s intellectuals thus knew both defeat and victory. They had not, as in Italy or Spain (let alone Nazi Germany), been thoroughly purged and subjected to that hiatus of modernist production suffered also by the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, they were far from having been reduced to the Americanizations of the United Kingdom or postwar West Germany. Only France, indeed, experienced both the Popular Front and the fascism of Vichy, both a Nazi occupation and a left-wing resistance, along with a Gaullist nationalism that gave it, for a time, a certain autonomy from both the United States and the USSR. This limited free space will determine the unique possibilities of thought and cultural production open to the intellectuals read and studied in these lectures.