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As I’ve said before, I will always think of Fred foremost as a teacher, not just because I first encountered him in the classroom as a student, but because all his work is so richly pedagogical: introducing readers to new writers, theories, and ideas; making unforeseen and seemingly unforeseeable connections; patiently building up and reinforcing archives of thought; inspiring new projects, and encouraging others to strike out on their own. Fred did all these things and more, in person and in print, and all while being so kind, generous, and supportive. He will be sorely missed, but we who love him will also eagerly try to continue this work in the future.
In 2019 fall, I arrived at Duke as a visiting scholar. On the very registering day, Miss Maria took me on a tour in Friedl Building. I saw Professor Jameson’s office and felt his aura in the first time. In fact, before this I have read many of his books’ Chinese translation. After several days, I wrote to Professor Jameson to get his permission to audit his lectures on literature topics. He replied me soon and kindly said: “of course, you would be very welcome.” Then, I was there. There were many people from the world in his classes. He speaked softly and clearly when he delivered his points in the big classroom. Jameson and his thoughts will be permanently discussed and passed on in the future. R.I.P.
Fred Jameson was chair of Literature and responsible for my move to Duke back in the fall of 1996. I am so grateful for the time that I spent as his colleague. He was a giant; the intellectual world is smaller with his passing.
I went to Duke in 2016 as a visiting scholar. I was finishing my Ph.D. on Theodor W. Adorno, which was obviously completely transformed after meeting Jameson. His courses were incredible. He was the most intelligent and generous professor I have ever encountered. He read Portuguese, read my whole dissertation, and was there every time I needed his help. Not every academic is an intellectual. Jameson was both. In addition to being an extraordinary Marxist, Jameson was a diligent, humble, and dedicated professor. He was respectful and serious, proof that a brilliant author can make time to be a good professor and advisor—nothing about him gave the impression of a superstar. He was the most orthodox and heterodox Marxist I’ve ever encountered. He was an Adornian Althusserian and Brechtian, a Sartrean Lukácsian, and perhaps for that reason, a Benjaminian. Jameson seemed to have an anthropological spirit when it came to both Marxism and literature. Everything interested him and sparked his curiosity. Everything could be put to use but without relativism. The greatest lesson from his work is this: read all the authors of Marxism, read all literature—with the inevitable preferences we always have—with an open heart and mind, without taking sides before genuinely understanding them. Beyond that, and I think this is the hallmark of his work, Jameson insisted on saying and showing that the fear of making mistakes should not paralyze thought. He experimented with concepts, analyses, and interpretations. He knew that to say something new required the courage to go beyond what had already been established in the critical fortune of a work. And that takes more courage than we often think. I believe that overcoming this psychological and social barrier is what made his work so vibrant. From him, I learned that more important than merely repeating everything from Adorno and Critical Theory, the real effort was to reflect on how that theory sheds light on the present. That, he said, was the real thrill of it all. It wasn’t an exercise in conformity, but rather freedom—radical freedom when engaging with texts (within the limits that their material allows, of course)—and a willingness to take certain authors where even they might not have wanted to go. Even at 83, Jameson set aside weekly office hours to meet with students after class. These hours were for talking, asking for reading suggestions or getting guidance on research. Often, he would sit by himself next to the portrait of Marx in his office, waiting for students. Even when no one showed up, he stayed there. That image of him has stayed with me. This year at Duke changed my life, and I am glad to have known him. I hope he rests in peace while remaining alive in our memories and hearts.
When I came to Duke in 1987, the Literature Program and English Department were in the ascendency. The then provost, the late Philip Griffiths (incidentally a mathematician), decided that Duke, with its relatively small endowment compared to the Ivy League, Stanford, et al, could rise to prominence more easily and rapidly by boosting the humanities rather than STEM—recruiting STEM faculty incurred relatively large start-up costs (providing a lab, lab staff, bigger salaries to match competitors, etc), whereas a start-up in the humanities typically involved providing a computer and a research and travel budget that was relatively small. The “stars” were also given secretarial help.
I was recruited by the Religion department, in part because my work was informed in a rudimentary way by theory, and the provost wanted to hire faculty in other departments who could create “synergies” (a buzzword among university administrators) with Lit and English. Fred was one of the people whom I met during my campus visit in 1986.
The Lit Program was on east campus, and all my meetings were on west, so Fred came over to the office of the then undergrad dean, the late Richard White. White left his office to the two of us for our meeting, Fred was wearing his usual plaid shirt and khakis, the trademark pocket-watch fastened by a chain to his belt.
I had just written a book on the theological problem of evil, in which I briefly discussed Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil. The only other work by Ricoeur I’d read was his text on the “masters of suspicion” Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Fred launched into a discussion of the entirety of Ricoeur’s work on hermeneutics, in which I struggled to keep up.
I had read Fred’s Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious and wanted to discuss these with him but he was engrossed with Ricoeur, and it was soon time for me to go to my next meeting.
The position in Religion I was hired for was a “target of opportunity” hiring, so there were no other contenders for the job.
The Religion PhD Program was shared by the department and the divinity school, and at that time the two sub-units coexisted uneasily. As theologian I was acceptable to most of the divinity school, while some in the department didn’t think a theologian should be in a religious studies department. With some exceptions, theory was regarded by some with hostility, and by others with stark incomprehension, in both sub-units.
I was losing interest in theology, and my classes had, increasingly, a theory syllabus. Through the device of cross-listing Lit students could take my classes, and they preponderated in some classes. In the early 90s I had a campus visit for a philosophical theology position at Harvard Divinity School (I did not get the job, somewhat to my relief). Harvard was higher-up the university totem pole than Duke, and I was able to parley my Harvard campus for a nice salary increase. But what else?
This is where Fred came in. By now all my classes has Lit students in them, and I was on several of their dissertation committees. Fred suggested we should put a suggestion to the administration. I would transfer from Religion to Lit, while the administration would allow Religion to conduct a search for my former position. Hans Hillerbrand, then chair of Religion, knew I was unhappy in Religion, and with the knowledge that Religion could fill my position, signed off on the transfer. The administration had two conditions: (1) that the Lit faculty vote to have me join the Program; and (2) that I go through the tenure process again, this time as a Lit scholar. Fred shepherded me through both, and in due course I became his colleague.
My time in Lit was the happiest in my 4 decades as an academic in the UK and US.
Deeply, deeply saddened. Even now, I still struggle to come to terms with this heartbreaking loss.
I first encountered Professor Jameson before his lecture while I was visiting Irvine, and one of my biggest regrets is not following him to Duke. Although I was never formally his student, he provided me with generous mentorship after our meeting, and later sponsored me as a Visiting Scholar at Duke. He showed great interest in my writings, encouraged me often to send him my work, and provided invaluable feedback. His exceptional intellectual prowess and kindness will never be forgotten.
We have lost what I will call one of our great “directeurs de conscience” (a reference to Proust’s reflection on the passing of nineteenth-century giants…). Fredric Jameson was 90 years old and still active as a scholar and professor. I first encountered Jameson’s writings in a course with the late Diane Leonard, who was my advisor at UNC Chapel Hill. Already a precocious student of the humanities, this marked a decisive point in my decision to engage deeply with philosophy, theory and criticism in the academic world. I figured out that I could enroll the following semester in his graduate seminar at Duke, which was to be given on the subject of global modernism. When I heard Fred reciting Rimbaud on the first day, I understood viscerally that his commitment to ideological critique served to strengthen rather than undermine the artistic power of literature, a notion that would sink in for me more deeply when I read his 1982 The Political Unconscious shortly thereafter. As Alex Ross has written on this occasion, one reads Jameson “not only for the grand formulations but also for the passing insights.” The same was true of his seminar lectures. During that first course I took with him, I was undergoing a terrible existential crisis involving the possibility of having an HIV infection. One day Fred went on a tangent lamenting the character of our “test culture”: “They want you to get a test for everything: an ADD test, an AIDS test…” The way he made this remark really opened a new horizon for me in terms of epistemic disobedience and social imagination…
I took two more courses with Fred, on Nietzsche and Wagner and on Arthurian Romances. During the latter I was going through some extreme states. For example, I showed up to a film screening for the class accompanied by a vagrant I had recently ganged up with. Fred greeted him respectfully and gracefully. He cared deeply about people’s personal lives and struggles. I was somewhat intimidated to show up for his office hours, but he was generous with the discussion and the trading of books and anecdotes. Particularly significant for me was our conversation about Grotowski, which for me represented a passion for physical theater that had seemed somehow at odds with my intellectual side. Fred was reluctant to give me any definitive advice about grad school or navigating a career, but he always provided recommendation letters and held me to standards of Derrida and the like. He gave insightful feedback on both my academic and creative writing. When I wrote to him years later (after two failed attempts at doctoral programs) about my persistent interest in scholarly pursuits, he invited me to lunch. At the time I was frustrated by my involvement with a Maoist group, having been branded as a bourgeois academic and postmodernist, and he gently suggested that I could always lead by example…We last spoke on Skype about a year and a half ago; I told him about the new work I had gestating, and we had a mysterious exchange about the influence of Artaud on Godard…
Fred himself set an example for engagement and compassion that I will never forget in my reading, writing, teaching and living…