Benjamin Kunkel in Sidecar:
The great Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who died on Sunday at 90, cast a cold eye on death. Death in our society derives its glamour and pathos from representing the extinction of an allegedly unique, not just solitary but singular individual, once upon a time ideal-typically a ‘genius’ or ‘hero’ and today more often a celebrity. And Jameson would have none of this. What I mean will take a moment to explain.
Generally speaking, this determinedly utopian thinker adhered to the ban on graven images of utopia enunciated by Adorno, and refrained in his analysis of various classical and sci-fi utopias from speculation of his own about the lineaments of an ideal society. But his reticence was not absolute, and, in a handful of places within his massive body of writing, Jameson presents the deprecation of personal mortality as a feature of Utopia (his majuscule). One striking instance lies in his essay, in The Seeds of Time (1994), on Andrei Platonov and the Soviet novelist’s utopian picaresque Chevengur. The thought of Utopia, Jameson says, ‘obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.’
More here.
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