The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought

by Fredric Jameson

Legendary lectures on the major figures of French theory from America’s leading Marxist criticFredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory introduces the major themes of French theory, including existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.In a series of accessible lectures, Jameson places this effervescent period of thought in the context of its most significant political conjunctures, including the Liberation of Paris, the Algerian War, the uprisings of May ‘68, and the creation of the EU.The contentious philosophical debates of the period come to life as much through anecdotes as through extended readings of work by their participants, including Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, groups like Tel Quel and Cahiers du Cinéma, and contemporary thinkers like Rancière and Badiou.Drawing on a wide range of references and thinkers, Jameson’s seminar provides an essential account of an intellectual moment whose significance is compared to that of ancient Athenian philosophy, both situating it historically and revitalizing its central concerns for the present.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Criticism, History, France

480 pages, Paperback

Published October 8, 2024

About the author

Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Reviews

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fredric Jameson passed away at 90 shortly before this book was to be published. The book is based on Zoom lectures that Jameson delivered in January through May 2021 while teaching a course at Duke remotely. In many ways the course was a survey and recap of the 20th century French intellectuals and their work that Jameson engaged with during his professional life. Something of a tour de force, Jameson takes the reader on a journey from Sartre to the end of the era. Along the way he takes the reader through the emergence of structuralism, a couple waves of feminism, poststructuralism and postmodernism in all of their varieties, and the eclipse of the scene in the age of multinational capitalism. Interestingly enough, the era starts with thinkers announcing the death of metaphysics and perhaps ends with Jameson helping the reader come to terms with its obsolescence in the 21st century. Like most writers, the thinkers of the era were a product of their times, and the times have changed with the end of the Cold War, the rise of globalization, the emergence of new challenges in Europe and America, and the bubbling up of new international conflicts. In this light it was fun to take a last romp with Jameson back through this heady moment in the mid to late 20th century.

[E.Y. Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d say Jameson is my Socrates, but this book taught me Socrates is, in a sense, just the empty voice of the big Other

A wonderful, capacious, occasionally rambly—it is transcribed lectures, after all—resource for anyone who’s curious about critical theory. Which, even as someone who used to dislike “theory bros,” I think everyone could stand to be.

[V.]

At the start of this book, Jameson says that there have been three great periods in Western philosophy: the school of Athens, founded by Parmenides and culminating in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; the German school founded by Kant which culminated in Hegel and Marx; and, finally, the Paris school founded by Jean-Paul Sartre which culminated in what Jameson calls the "big three": Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. Likely thing for Jameson to think, of course--he's an American, but that was his period and those were his contemporaries (Jameson is probably best known for writing "Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", a tome from 1991 which along with Lyotard is a lot of students' introduction to "postmodernism" as a concept). So, these lectures are the work of an old, old man putting his golden years at the apex of Western civilization. Many such cases.

And they are lectures, by the way; this book is just a very lightly edited collection of transcripts of lectures that Jameson delivered during a Zoom seminar at Duke in 2021 on post-war French thought. There's a funny moment where, discussing Lacan, Jameson advises his students that there's really no reason to read the Ecrits, ever, unless you're a Lacan specialist, because they're written in such an incredibly dense, almost incomprehensible style; for anyone but a specialist, he says, stick to the Seminars, which are edited lecture transcripts and are therefore more readable, less maddeningly dense. I don't know if he was already planning to have these lectures collected and published when he said that, but if so it's amusingly self-aware. Try to read anything else Jameson has written and you'll see what I mean.

The date, 2021, is also relevant here. Occasionally Jameson will make offhand reference to current events; near the beginning, for example, discussing Sartre's work on crowds, he obliquely brings up the January 6th Capitol riot as an example (in a typical communist misprision, he refers to it as a "militia" action, which I think is overstating the organization of the rioters substantially). Occasionally he has to defend his subjects from what are apparently woke critiques in students' papers--wasn't Sartre trying to speak for the oppressed, etc. (Jameson sez: Sartre was ugly as sin, he didn't have to be Black or a woman to know what it feels like to be stared at).

Overall, I found this to be a useful and entertaining high-level intellectual history of "French theory", a notoriously annoying and slippery topic. As Jameson says near the end of the book, the present is always cloaked in darkness, which only gradually recedes as we move into the recent past. French theory (which Jameson restricts mostly to the period 1940-1980 or so) is only just long enough ago that we're starting to be able to write histories of it. Jameson, an old old man who passed away before these lectures could be published, is another artifact of that transition.

I was reading this collection basically to take a break from A Thousand Plateaus, which I had been enjoying a great deal (apart from "The Geology of Morals"). I came away from Jameson basically vindicated in my view that Foucault and Deleuze are the most interesting of these guys, although not entirely for the reasons that Jameson is interested in. Jameson keeps emphasizing the decisive break from the past around 1980 brought about by the transition to "neoliberalism"--he seems to consider this a much more important turning point than 1989, which he mostly raises to emphasize its proximity to Maastricht (whether that's Western parochialism you tell me!). So Jameson is really put out by the evaporation of "revolutionary" potential and "de-Marxification", of which the basically anti- or non-Marxist social critiques of Foucault and Deleuze are characteristic. From my own, more limited and equally ideological perspective, the most striking thing about all of these guys is not how Marxist they aren't but how Marxist they still are--they'll articulate a comprehensive critique of state power and then, seemingly unable to step outside of the internal logic of "leftism", describe themselves as Maoists, picking another more exotic form of totalitarianism that offers the illusion from a distance of bloody chaos, rather than following their own ideas to what seems to me to be their logical conclusion in some form of libertarianism. I guess that's why they're old French guys and I'm a young American bozo.

Jameson is full of interesting anecdotes: Did you know that Louis-Ferdinand Celine was so despised after the war for his collaborationism that he surrounded his house with barbed wire and had a tunnel built into his favorite restaurant, so he could dine out without being shot in the street? Did you know that Deleuze and Foucault were fast friends until they were bitterly divided over the politics of Israel-Palestine?

I don't really care about the Revolution (except as a disease to stave off), or the fate of class analysis or any of the other concerns that Jameson, a Marxist, puts at the center of this analysis. And his account of these thinkers tends to be very very abstract, focused on the internal logic of the history of metaphysics and the development of philosophical language, even in these lectures where he has to make his method of explanation a lot more lively. So in both directions his concerns aren't really mine. But I still found this to be a very interesting guide to this slippery period, pointing up the important interrelationships and lines of influence among these thinkers and how they were relating to each other's ideas. And it's quite casual and readable, also a rarity in this topic area.

[William Moriarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I would like you to feel the excitement of this stuff, even when you don't necessarily understand it.” This is precisely what Jameson’s book did for me. Perry Anderson did not lie when he called this the most accessible of Jameson’s major writings, which is very surprising based on the subject matter. I still don’t think I really understand French Theory.

[Andy Zhang]

want to read this so badly

[Chris]

Where was this when I actually needed it in undergrad?

[Elizabeth Tuttle · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP to one of the best American Marxists we had.

Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought is a brilliant, accessible text that outlines the basic concepts guiding post-WWII (and post-critical theory) leftist cultural and political theory. 

A 500-page lecture series on theory might not sound accessible, but Jameson effectively scratches the surface of all major strains of French thought without requiring the reader to have much background. While some basic knowledge of Hegel, Marx, and Freud would be useful, not much else is needed. Unlike theory itself, Jameson's lectures are completely readable for beginners. 

Young leftists looking for a cursory overview will surely benefit from reading Years of Theory cover to cover. Others may find it useful to pull out sections on existentialism, psychoanalysis, or semiotics if those fields are of particular interest. Jameson is not laying out each thinker's program in great detail, but he provides their major concepts to give readers a starting point for how to approach these theorists. What I particularly love about the lectures is the way Jameson contextualizes theorists in terms of their biography, politics, and social relationships to other thinkers. Anyone who can begin a lecture on French feminism with Bataille or who finds it necessary to mention David Cronenberg in the larger discussion of Baudrillard is surely providing these connections in a comprehensive, holistic way. 

This is an absolutely fantastic text for beginners and should be required reading for all students of philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies. Whether you're interested in this text because you need someone to explain Deleuze to you or you'll fucking kill them, because you've been avoiding Lacanian psychoanalysis but see how it influences everything else you're reading, because you love unhinged schizophrenic theorists who strangle their wives, because you're a self-identified Marxist with no sense of intellectual history, or you're simply trying to keep up with leftist memes, this book is for you. 

This is not a 5-star rating because the book permanently changed my life, but because this is the text I desperately needed when I was 20. Thank you to NetGalley and Verso for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review. 

[Taylor Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The adjective used on the back cover is magisterial. I can think of no word more apropos for the text of what must have been magnificent seminars. Yes, the enthusiasm, the passion come through. And equally the tantalizing erudition. His is a remarkable knack for conveying complexity with grace, and for locating theoretical abstraction within the very material nexus from which it springs. I can think of exceedingly few works that manage navigating both the challenging and the exciting as deftly this one does. To deploy a cliché, let’s call it a real page-turner. What a blow to have lost Jameson, but what a gift to be able to trace the marks (how fumblingly the fingers doing the tracing) he’s left upon the surface of literature and theory.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting to see Jameson in the spoken register. I'd like to read the Adorno lectures but that editor butchered them with this dumb contrived theatrical format. This seminar doesn't do that - it flows like a moderately cleaned up lecture so it doesn't take as much effort to follow as Jameson's writing.

This enacts in a historical philosophical vein what Beauvoir's Mandarins maps out in the subjective fictional register (how people in Paris experienced this conjuncture). How did this era come about? What were the specific political -historical circumstances that gave rise to and delimited this parenthesis in Western thought?

This is as good an intro to answering that question as well as the thinkers briefly covered here (Sartre thru Badiou) as you're going to get anywhere. Good for beginners and enjoyable for adepts.

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? This book would've been such a saviour in my first year in college. Jameson is great at explaining philosphy and I really enjoyed reading this, despite the topic being inherently difficult. He was clearly good as a professor, and the tone of these lectures make him seem like someone who liked teaching these philosophers.

The throughline of these essays is the chronological description and explanation of how different philosophical currents appeared and developed, and he explains each of them in their historical and cultural context, which makes them easier to understand. As I said in the beginning, this book would've been FANTASTIC to have as a fresher.

[Jeroen Kuiper · Rating 4 out of 5]

An overview of post-war French philosophy. These are written down online lectures which makes for easy and clear style, although sometimes is a bit too colloquial and less structured. There is a lot of thinkers to cover so it doesn't go into deep too much, but mainly it makes you want to read the original works, and at the same time it give enlighting insights which can help with doing just that.

[Jomar Canales Conde · Rating 5 out of 5]

felt my brain growing a little bit as i read this

[Faryal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read something that would continue my love of Sartre further, and also help me keep in touch with my major of International Relations, this did both wonderfully. The thinkers introduced, from Sartre to Foucault, all were done with an ease that comes with an abundance of knowledge, and a mastery over their theories.

What an amazing collection of lectures! I am so grateful I came across them on NetGalley, and actually got this book as an ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley and Verso.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Years of Theory, Fredric Jameson’s lectures on French thought from Sartre to the present, is a tour de force, an astonishing display of erudition. These edited seminar lectures necessarily cover figures like Kant and Hegel as well as Plato and Aristotle. Philosophy, after all, is often conceived as a struggle with its past. But the intensity of French philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century is such that Jameson largely exhumes past thinkers so that the reader can watch them be thoroughly put to death yet again by Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lévi Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, and many others.

There is an agreeable “spoken” quality to this book; it probably reads more easily than it should. Jameson, then a professor at Duke, covers his subjects quickly, but they are a thorny bunch. Among the questions they raise are:
Is history possible…or necessary?
Does human experience from the perspective of individuals make any sense?
Do great paintings rearrange our brains, in effect looking at us as we look at them?
What is being?
Why is there anything?
What is nothingness?
Can anything exist if its opposite does not exist?
Do authors know the meaning of what they write?
If Proust, Joyce and others, ushered in modernism, what is post-modernism?
Is freedom the most terrifying human condition?
We sometimes say translations are betrayals. Could we also say that writing itself is a betrayal (not accurately representing the mental operations that precede moving a pen across paper?)
Has there even been a matriarchy?
Are symbols the conveyors of complete meanings?
What is meaning anyway?
Are kinship structures more important than class structures? (What are class structures, anyway?)
What can be said about photographs when they are images of something irrecoverably past, and therefore alien to the present?
What do Internet-based media mean in terms of human understanding, conflict, cooperation, and basic communication?
Where does the written word stand vis-a-vis the image? What are their roles? Is writing passé?

Good Lord, I could go on, as the French have gone on, as Jameson goes on.

Again, a tour de force.

[Alexander Pechacek · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy to read! Since having found Archaeologies of the Future in 2013 I’ve had a fondness for Jameson which led me to read the Logic of Late Capitalism, Valences of the Dialectic, and Antinomies of Realism. Often I read his works for what he points to… great writers and theorists that I just can’t miss out on. Here he is answering questions in his lectures. There’s so much here where I just think he’s on point with French theory and philosophy and describes it so well. As in raising questions and answering them curtly. Providing information as to why we should care about these big ideas that philosophers and theorists have come up with. This is easier to understand but it’s packed with meaning and well-intentioned thinking. From describing Sartre and Beauvoir to Heidegger, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty, his fondness for Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze. He does it swiftly and permanently changed my perceptions of these thinkers in relation to each other. I jumped at the opportunity to dig in to this text, which was less of a strain than his other books and to be honest much less confusing since it was a series of lectures. Thanks Verso for publishing another wonderful book filled with the humble teachings of the masterful Marxist Fredric Jameson!

[Lucille Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating romp through the philosophy of the postwar French philosophers, largely focusing on the structuralists and post-structuralists. Provides a good intellectual history of the time period, albeit a bit colored by Jameson's own political and philosophical orientation. For example, in his discussion of Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, his explanation of why many French intellectuals endorsed the Gulf War was islamophobia, which discounts other reasons why survivors of Nazi occupation might stand in solidarity with the nation of Kuwait being violently taken by the authoritarian leader of Iraq's wanton war of conquest for oil. This was a tour de force of philosophical reflection, yet as many of the philosophers profiled in this book might have noted, said reflections are themselves interpretations of Jameson's own views. Highly recommend reading this, though with a critical eye to much of it.

[Daniel Silliman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tricky thing about this book is it is not an introduction. It feels like it should be, but Jameson does not, for example, define Louis Althusser's main terms and explain his basic ideas. Instead, this is an intellectual history, given as a series of lectures, attempting to place thinkers in relationship to each other and larger context. It is an intellectual history, though, so Jameson really only goes briefly into social contexts, here and there.

If you've read a good bit of continental philosophy, though, and want a chance to engage again and think about, e.g., why French intellectuals were troubled by the unity and coherence of the self, this is perfect. I've found Jameson tough to engage elsewhere, but this was a book to swim around in.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful lectures in the history of ideas in France from 1943 to the present.

Generally, a relaxed series of talks about men at the commanding heights of the middle class left: Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes Derrida...

After several hundred pages, around the time of Foucault, the reader's eyes begin to glaze. But with Deleuze the end is in sight.

The early sections do convey the author's youthful excitement in discovering these thinkers.

[Seahorse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't ever read a book that covers and summarises a whole 50 year period in the humanities in a country. A really enriching guide to understanding French thought, the rise and effect of neoliberalism and the failures of '68, and its spread all over the world in the form of language politics, art and culture.

[Jacob Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Profoundly dull and florid. Jameson clearly knows his topic, and lectures well on it. But equally clearly, we would've disagreed on the theoretical and political salience of the thinkers he's surveying. This book is probably very intereating for a certain kind of grad student or academic, but that person wasn't me.

[Caleb Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

dopw book! flies by cuz its just lecture stlyings, whicjh comes at the expense of some argumentative clarity, but the conversational style is fun, and many great little detials in this. so many things to learn!

[jonty reading]

Transcribed lectures full of digressions and sweet anecdotes. I don’t think any of the sections are worthwhile without having read a decent bit of the thinker in question.
Enjoyed generally reading after his passing but would’ve loved for this to have been a work he’d actually written.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

RIP to a real one

[Ayoto Ataraxia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely incredible. It is a page-turner, stringing together the macro perspective at a pace that reads like a blockbuster.

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

RIP to a neo-Marxist king 🐐

[Keith Corbin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great overview of recent French theory. Far more readable than most Jameson.

[Tyler Redlitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Expansive, readable introduction to French Theory through Jameson’s thought. A great scaffold to expand on.

[savanna jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

so the French are iconic but so is Jameson