Late Marxism

Resumen del libro

In the name of an assault on totalization and identity, a number of contemporary theorists have been busily washing Marxism's dialectical and utopian projects down the plug-hole of postmodernism and post-politics. A case in point is recent interpretation of one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Theodor Adorno. In this powerful book, Fredric Jameson proposes a radically different reading of Adorno's work, especially of his major works on philosophy and aesthetics: Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.
Jameson argues persuasively that Adorno's contribution to the development of Marxism remains unique and indispensable. He shows how Adorno's work on aesthetics performs deconstructive operations yet is in sharp distinction to the now canonical deconstructive genre of writing. He explores the complexity of Adorno's very timely affirmation of philosophy of its possibility after the end of grand theory. Above all, he illuminates the subtlety and richness of Adorno's continuing emphasis on late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our culture. In its lucidity, Late Marxism echoes the writing of its subject, to whose critical, utopian intelligence Jameson remains faithful.

Jameson has a gift for bringing to bear an unusual parallel and for collocating scattered passages that illuminate one another. His major argument, that Adorno was always a Marxist, is not only corrective but dialectical; not only a quarrel with other interpreters who take him as a post-Marxist or Young Hegelian' or even a postmodernist and poststructuralist but a claim about what is most living and pertinent in his work. Michael Ferber, The Nation

Biografía del autor

Jameson, the William A. Lane Jr. is Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University.<br>Jameson received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1959 and taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California before going to Duke in 1985. He is the author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991, which won the MLA Lowell Award), Seeds of Time (1994), Brecht and Method (1998), The Cultural Turn (1998), and A Singular Modernity (2002). His recent works include Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and The Modernist Papers (2007). He received the 2008 Holberg Prize for his scholarship.