The American Lukács? Fredric Jameson and Dialectical Thought

Abstract

In March 1992 Fredric Jameson was interviewed for a book on the legacy of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács after the fall of Communism. For those interested in the early development of Jameson’s ideas the interview offers some fascinating, if brief, recollections of a young American student in the 1950s, encountering the work of Lukács for the first time. In his conversation with the interviewer, Eva Corredor, Jameson recalls studying in Berlin in 1956, in the period before the Berlin Wall was erected. He remembers the excitement of going across to the East to fetch back ‘those big blue volumes of Lukács’ literary and philosophical essays, without having any idea of the kind of debates that were to rage around them in the German Democratic Republic in those days, and without, of course, the benefit of History and Class Consciousness, which remained unpublished in English and even more legendary until much later’ (Corredor, 1997, pp. 75–6).

reality can only be understood and penetrated as a totality, and only a subject which is itself a totality is capable of this penetration.

(Lukács)

it is ultimately always of the social totality itself that it is a question in representation, and never more so than in the present age of a multinational global corporate network. (Jameson)¹