The great philosopher and critic Fredric Jameson died today, at the age of ninety. His writings, almost impossibly voluminous and still growing year by year, accomplish a magnificent balancing act between intellectual rigor on the one hand and aesthetic perception on the other; a strong political commitment undergirds the whole, yet his devotion to dialectical thought prevents him from ever approaching dogma. You read him not only for the grand formulations but also for the passing insights; he was, in realms of art, a skeptical enthusiast, and thus a brilliant critic. I took a seminar with him in 1987-88, on post-Marxist cultural theory; it was a turning point in my intellectual development, perhaps the turning point, and I am still rewriting the paper on Mann, Adorno, and Doktor Faustus that I produced under his aegis. A few years ago, I exchanged notes with him about Wagner, for whom he had an acute appreciation. He once wrote that the ending of the Ring "is paradigmatic of all great art in the way in which it foregrounds not this or that solution (bound in any case to be ideological), but rather the contradiction itself." The above is from Kasper Holten's Copenhagen Ring, which he especially admired. Ruhe, ruhe ...
