The World Still Needs French Theory

The Years of Theory, by the recently deceased and legendary literary critic Fredric Jameson, offers a corrective by describing the ways theory—that is, French philosophy freed from its systemic ambitions—has also always been a solution. The book offers an understanding of French theory’s political background often marginalized in American contexts.

In 25 chapters—really a transcription of extemporaneous lectures given for an online 2021 graduate seminar at Duke University during the COVID-19 pandemic—Jameson perceptively and lucidly discusses theory from the immediate postwar period to today. With one foot in the present and the other in the past, Jameson illustrates the unique political possibilities French philosophers opened over the course of five decades.

Since its invention in the 1970s in American universities, the term “French theory”—used to describe a body of thought that many now call post-modernism or post-structuralism (or if you’re older, existentialism)—has always been, especially for the French, suspect. The French theorists, nevertheless, were united by a belief that the world was not separate from the subject encountering it, but rather that both were the result of linguistic practices that co-create each other.

Central to Jameson’s argument is that France’s era of theory occurred within a specific historical moment and geopolitical structure. He writes in his introduction that “the emergence of French theory in the 1940s and its gradual exhaustion in the neoliberal period can be seen to be an expression of the uniquely national intellectual response” to the capitalist system’s expansion. For Jameson, postwar French thinkers tried to solve philosophical problems raised by national events.

Jameson divides his story into four sections that trace the rise of theory in parallel with events in France. First, there is the postwar period of the “liberation,” an era in which thinkers, like Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness, responded to the potential for personal agency and personal identity. For Sartre, the absence of a border between subject (consciousness) and object (external world) thrusts unavoidable responsibilities on the individual for their own choices and the world.

Then comes the late 1950s, when the Algerian War loomed in France. This coincided with an intellectual shift toward communication and language called “structuralism,” as represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ethnological studies, which had a momentous impact on academic disciplines not simply in France but in other countries. With its emphasis on impersonal forces beyond human intention, the structuralist mode of thought resonated with leftist intellectuals politically frustrated during the Algerian War.

The uprisings of May 1968 in France and the experience of defeat of rebellion that followed helped make fashionable theories of individualism and revolt seem useless. Accordingly, in the 1960s, thinkers moved away from a focus on an individual’s consciousness and further toward “the notion of trans-individual forces” as exemplified by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “the central figure of theory in the ’60s”; Gilles Deleuze and his notion of the “concept”; Michel Foucault and his idea of power; and Jacques Derrida and his deconstruction of philosophy of the subject and the linguistics of structuralism.

Lastly, came the period of globalization, which began in the 1980s, when transnational corporations dominated public life and the “modernist aesthetic” that encouraged thinkers to invent ever new forms of solutions to ever new problems “falls away.” Theory thus returned to separately siloed disciplines with blinkered aims, leading to “the end of theory.” Jameson concludes with theory’s need for resuscitation after the end of Marxism and France’s joining the European Union.

In all, Jameson portrays theory as a series of French thinkers’ answers to political problems that arose during France’s attempt to forge a way between the United States and the USSR, and then France’s integration into the global capitalist system. Just as theory was relevant in that time, Jameson implies that it can, with some effort, become relevant again.

Fredric Jameson teaching a class at Duke University in 1988. Duke University

American proponents ecstatically recontextualized theory for different purposes: It provided analytic tools to dismantle oppressive hierarchies and power relations in texts, in social relations—anywhere really. Indeed, French theory in America transformed cohorts of humanists’ reading habits, helping spawn third-wave feminism, for instance. The professional-managerial class in America learned French theory at university and then spread these ideas in their workplaces and social lives, deepening their cultural influence.

Still, for many, theories from France were, ironically, the epitome of intellectual masturbation, or simply faddish, though dangerously so. In 1983, American philosopher John Searle memorably denounced Derrida’s “obscurantism” in the New York Review of Books. More recently, French theory has been blamed for helping to usher in our post-truth era.

Jameson, however, continually stresses in The Years of Theory that theory always had a distinctly legible and material politics. The intellectual tradition was linked to the pursuit of an “autonomous France” in the period between World War II and the dominance of neoliberalism. This was an era during which “the national fact” was “a collective part of your individual personality.”

Once that era ended, theory lost its political bearings, unable to solve social issues, such as envisioning collective life. “[T]o the degree that thinkers are connected to national history,” Jameson tells students in Lecture 23, “political writing will not be the same after…the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the European Union.” After these “momentous events” rendered France a member rather than a nation-state, “community itself is somehow impossible.”

To demonstrate, Jameson engages Jean-Luc Nancy, “obviously a man of the Left,” but whose La Communauté désœuvrée (1986) is “anti-Left.” Nancy argues that the “finitude of the individual” ensures it will never be “subsumed by the community.” For Jameson, this is an abdication of politics. “[H]ow,” Jameson asks, “can we imagine the community as being when it’s founded on not-being?”

In his penultimate lecture, Jameson describes how Jean Baudrillard’s theory that “reality” is “a simulacrum” is inevitably entangled with neoliberalism. This is because our “lack of being is not in us anymore, because, in a sense, there isn’t any us—just a lot of consumers, serial consumers at that.” In the post-Maastricht Treaty postmodern era, theorists implied that we exist only as individuals, sharing little in common beyond our current activities, as when queuing for the bus.

With “France” no longer a background against which to orient their philosophical solutions, theorists in France during the 1990s and the 2000s shed their political imagination further. In his last lecture, Jameson traces how the disparate philosophical, psychological, and semiotic approaches that theory once fused have been again disaggregated and placed in more traditional disciplinary silos since neoliberalism’s supremacy. The solvent of neoliberalism melted “France,” and, by re-philosophizing theory, theory’s political ambitions as well.

At the same time, the subjection of the university to market-based imperatives has undermined research time, research funds, indeed the very academic jobs where many intellectuals, like Jameson, cultivated theory. In his last lecture, he notes that, today, the spaces for intellectuals to create theoretical inventions are “filled up.”

This raises the question: Is theory soundly dead after neoliberalism has become hegemonic? “I think,” Jameson states at his course’s end, “it is not possible for me to lay down a future program.” It’s understandable that he doesn’t provide an outlook on the future problems for theory to solve. His seminar is mostly a historical overview; he even opened it with a warning that his approach “is going to be so frustrating and unsatisfying” because he is “trying to do everything.” The best he hoped to do is give students “the slogans” and historically relate them to other watchwords.

Here, the seminar’s implicit theme—the problem of theory and collective social life—again reappears. For if the conditions in France that helped cultivate philosophical theories that intervene into present social issues are gone, then can theory be political in our neoliberal condition? Jameson offers a sliver of hope: “[M]aybe we all have this feeling [of being a part of something larger] on the scale of globalization, though we don’t yet know what that larger thing is.” For Jameson, theory’s ability to imagine a collective future—one different from us simply being serial consumers in the market—remains possible; it is up to us, though, not to foster a dangerous nostalgia for, say, Gaullist France, nor to want to “make America great again,” but to identify and solve shared problems. Jameson, in fact, encourages students to “go back and see what the interesting problems are”—above all, “ethics, art, the brain.”

The U.S. scholar Anna Kornbluh, for instance, has drawn on traditions of theory to persuasively argue how the prevalent contemporary aesthetic modes of immediacy and direct expression respond to a capitalist imperative for “presence.” Today, there are also scholars and activists, as Kornbluh has noted, mining theory to mobilize groups to achieve concrete political goals, such as unionizing workers at Amazon. And there are now extra-academic institutions like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and para-academic journals and magazines that cultivate theory by studying free choice together with the institutions and forces that overshadow individual action.

Theory is often cast as either capitulating to capitalism or having become a bogeyman of internationalized culture wars in our supposed post-national states, but the years of theory, in Jameson’s sense, might yet be extended. “[Herbert] Marcuse,” he lectured on February 25, 2021, “used to say that the one problem with getting rid of the Oedipus complex is that you don’t have that powerful authoritarian father to revolt against anymore.” Jameson suggests that theory still has an authoritarian figure against which to rebel: globalization. And theory’s decline in France has offered the world conceptual instruments with which to philosophize the political problems of collective social life.