Historical Materialism is deeply grieved by the passing of the Marxist intellectual giant, philosopher and cultural critic Fredric Jameson at the age of 90. Jameson’s work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of culture, politics and aesthetics, leaving behind an enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars.
From his early encounter with Sartre’s work to his lifelong engagement with Hegel and Marx, Lukács and Adorno, Benjamin and Althusser, Jameson devoted much of his intellectual energies to explore the deep ties between ideology and aesthetics, culture and economy, language and history in literature, architecture and film.
His famous dictum, ‘always historicise!’ was part and parcel of his militant commitment to a materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts. His enormous body of work, including Marxism and Form (1971), The Prison-House of Language (1972), The Political Unconscious (1981), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Signatures of the Visible (1992) and The Antinomies of Realism (2013) restructured our Marxist vocabulary and set a new direction in cultural theory.
To honour his memory, we reproduce his article ‘On Levels and Categories’ that appeared in the issue 29.1 of Historical Materialism, as a response to texts of the symposium on his Allegory and Ideology that was included in the same issue of the journal.
Moreover, the following articles by Fredric Jameson or on Fredric Jameson have been temporarily unpaywalled:
Radical Fantasy
Author: Fredric Jameson
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/10/4/article-p273_13.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=6
Early Lukács, Aesthetics of Politics?
Author: Fredric Jameson
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/23/1/article-p3_1.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=8
On Levels and Categories
Author: Fredric R. Jameson
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p221_12.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=7
Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory
Author: Gail Day
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/20/1/article-p31_2.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=1
Introduction to the Italian translation of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form
Author: Franco Fortini
Translator: Toscano Alberto
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p235_13.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=2
On Perry Anderson’s The Origins Of Postmodernity, Clint Burnham’s The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics Of Marxist Theory, Steven Helmling’s The Success And Failure Of Fredric Jameson: Writing, The Sublime, And The Dialectic Of Critique, Sean Homer’s Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism, Adam Roberts’s Fredric Jameson and Christopher Wise’s The Marxian Hermeneutics Of Fredric Jameson
Author: Ian Buchanan
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/10/3/article-p223_7.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=4
Fredric Jameson’s A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
Author: Maria Elisa Cevasco
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/13/4/article-p345_15.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=5
Who Is ‘The Prince’?: Hegel and Marx in Jameson and Bhaskar
Author: Alan Norrie
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/20/2/article-p75_3.xml?rskey=x9Ohin&result=13
Archaeologies of the Future: Jameson’s Utopia or Orwell’s Dystopia?
Author: Andrew Milner
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/17/4/article-p101_4.xml?rskey=x9Ohin&result=14
Elsewhere and Otherwise
Introduction to a Symposium on Fredric Jameson’s ‘Allegory and Ideology’
Author: Alberto Toscano
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p113_3.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=9
The Future Perfect, Otherwise: Narrative, Abstraction and History in the Work of Fredric Jameson
Author: Leigh Claire La Berge
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p211_11.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=3
Jameson with Lacan
Author: Clint Burnham
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p187_9.xml?rskey=Kk7E6Z&result=10
The Jamesonian Impersonal; or, Person as Allegory
Author: Daniel Hartley
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p174_8.xml?rskey=x9Ohin&result=11
Difference Relates: Allegory, Ideology, and the Anthropocene
Author: Carolyn Lesjak
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p123_4.xml?rskey=x9Ohin&result=19
‘The Masses Make History’: On Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology
Author: Benjamin Noys
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p134_5.xml?rskey=x9Ohin&result=20
The Faust Variations
Author: Alberto Toscano
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p162_7.xml?rskey=x9Ohin&result=21
Jameson on Allegory: Notes from the Periphery
Author: Maria Elisa Cevasco
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p151_6.xml?rskey=x9Ohin&result=24
