The death of Fredric Jameson on September 22, 2024, was a shocking blow to those who knew him personally — students, colleagues, friends, comrades — and the many more who read his vast variegated body of work. Some have suggested that his death marks the end of an epoch: the confluence of the social forces — decolonialism, Marxism, popular culture — that combined with European philosophy to produce Jameson is not easily replicable. Others have noted, dialectically or ironically, that this is itself a profoundly anti-Jamesonian view, for it expresses a vision in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Jameson.
But, of course, Jameson always insisted that the most “negative” or ideological elements of the present occasion contain within them some “positive” or utopian prospect. We need only have the energy, skill, and willingness to perceive it. This insistence on…