It is not as simple as it might appear to write about the passing of a renowned philosopher after a nearly two-week interval. First, detachment from an event (and of course Jameson's absence is just as much an event as his presence in the intellectual realm) lessens its initial shock, making it difficult to think about. Second, following the influx of memorials and texts it might appear that no further contributions can be made to this gravestone, and this perspective may not be entirely inaccurate. Writing about someone like Frederic Jameson, after all, calls for a close reading of his works and a critical analysis of the legacy left by such a unique character. Therefore, it may be the most advantageous course of action at this time to remain mute and immerse oneself in the philosophy of this renowned American philosopher.

Conversely, the sole viable method of writing about an event or the eventful disappearance of an event may be to distance oneself from it. Events now have no more significance than their anticipated meaning and perhaps the only way to be faithful to Jameson's legacy is to turn back from the anticipated meaning of his death.

My attempt here is not to provide a detailed reading of Jameson and his world of thought, but to shortly emphasize a part of his legacy that I think is particularly important in the current situation, namely, the concept of the future and utopia. Today's world is replete with analyses of utopia and the future, ranging from the imminent threat of environmental catastrophe to the not-so-distant future of an all-out war that will condemn all individuals to a permanent state of torment.  

A significant portion of Jameson's oeuvre is a philosophical inquiry into human aspirations for an alternative future, offering readers a diverse array of concepts that interrogate conventional understandings of time, space, and society. His argument is predicated on the notion that the desire for utopia is profoundly ingrained in human consciousness and that utopia is not merely an abstract concept, but rather an indispensable human aspiration. Here, utopia is not just an idea about the possible future. Still, it provides a comprehensive examination of the present as well as the past and its impact on the formation of the coming community, and this makes Jameson's inquiry different from the multitude of texts written about the hereafter.

In pursuit of a feasible utopia, he illustrates a dystopian representation of the present in numerous of his works, which he specifically links to a disconnection from history. In other words, he conducted a philosophical inquiry into our aspirations for an alternative future, acknowledging that the majority of our understanding of the present and the future relies on the absence of any perspective beyond the status quo. 

According to Jameson, our predicament is rooted in a historical deafness as a mode of dystopian present we are all living in while dreaming about the coming apocalypse. Jameson urged readers to view utopia as a serious means for the exploration of intricate social dynamics, rather than solely as entertainment in the form of science fiction. Here, we are dealing with an exploration in the heart of a constant situation, an exploration that emerges from the heart of interpretation that deals with details and tracks down the singularities that are coming in the contemporary world and shaping the world to come.

Jameson's intellectual odyssey was based on the disappearance of alternatives to capitalism, that is, not denial but the complete and thorough oblivion of the world beyond what is presented to us as the only possibility. According to Jameson, utopian philosophy serves as a means of reviving hope for the future. He argued that whereas modernism often portrays a fragmented understanding of reality, utopian ideas have the power to unite people around shared goals and aspirations. The struggle between the hopelessness of modernism and the promise of utopianism is essential to understanding how cultural narratives evolve: 

The Utopian idea… keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is. (1) 

This is the point at which the radicality of the architecture of the utopia is revealed. The primary objective is to fortify the collective imagination, which demonstrates a world that surpasses the current status quo. Here, imagination is the making of a precise blueprint for the future which can materialize from the here and now. There is an infinite amount of future in the universe, but not for us... This is likely one of the most renowned quotations regarding utopia. However, Jameson, a devout Marxist, maintained that the question of utopia is a critical assessment of our ability to envision any form of change. This elysian view underscores the critical necessity of surmounting capitalism's ideology through utopian thought and utopian action. That being said, Jameson has also emphasized that utopian imagining does not provide a bauplan for a more ideal world; rather, it demonstrates “our own incapacity to conceive [utopia] in the first place”. (2)

Jameson was and remained a Marxist, in an era when any attempt to imagine a better world is dismissed as vulgar and fanciful. Jameson was a philosopher in the true sense of the word, and this is a title that is not taken seriously these days since, as Jean-Luc Nancy warned earlier, philosophy has become a “self-styled noble version of the reign of opinion – of which perhaps in truth there is no noble version, which is always vulgar and whose vulgarity is now mediatized.”(3) However, it is precisely this moment of madness, this emphasis on the cursed share that served as an ominous shadow following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and state communism, that marks the constitutive dimension of the subject.  

Still, Jameson's alternatives ought not to be regarded as integral to the postmodern endeavor concerning sub-narratives that may vary depending on elements such as geography or culture. Jameson's significance lies in his emphasis on a universality that stands against worldwide capitalism itself. His critique of the ideological “strategies of containment” for their tendency to isolate individuals and despair about the future provides us with a radical “cognitive mapping” tool, allowing us to navigate complex social realities and imagine possible utopias. His accentuation of the crucial task of overcoming capitalism’s ideology with and through utopian thought and utopian practice is an emphasis on the entire Hegelian point that true universality and particularity do not exclude each other, but universal truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position.

For Aristotle, philia is a goodwill for the other, philia is a quality or a virtue to discover. And what better concept than this idea of ​​friendship can summarize Jameson's worldview? Archeology consists of archae (ancient, beginning) and logy (study of). And it is here that the nature of utopia-logy in Jameson's work can be discovered in close affinity with friendship. Relationship to other as other, the other in its absolute otherness, is to think out of archae (from the Greek arkhaios, itself derived from arkhe), out of the present of today, in order to break the cycle of reproduction of sameness. Jameson argued that our contemporary understanding of time has become increasingly linear and deterministic, often leading to a sense of inevitability regarding social and political outcomes. Time goes by without actually making a change. This weakening of historicity practically paves the way for a different form of repression in which nothing remains for the subject except to believe in the mirage of liberation and freedom, and this causes one to no longer imagine the parallel, because one believes that everything is as it should actually be. For this reason, it is imperative to follow Jameson's call, his philia for the other present that is our coming future, to understand "the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners". (4) 

The psychological framework of utopia is predicated on the notion that the communication link among future, present, and past has been severed, as meaning is derived from the continuation of the deterioration trajectory. Jameson's radicalism offers an alternative perspective on the essence of utopia, inventing a new possibility of ex-sistence. 

“There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker,” once wrote Sadegh Hedayat, the celebrated Iranian modernist author. (5) So far as our world is concerned, Jameson was fully aware of these sores and their ultimate root, and perhaps now it is up to us to continue the recognition and surgery of these lesions.

NOTES 

1. Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, p.111. 

2. Jameson, Fredric. “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative.” Science-Fiction Studies 7 (1975): 221-230.

3. Nancy, Jean-Luc, “‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’”, Philosophy World Democracy, 30 July 2021, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/the-end-of-philosophy  

4. Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London & New York: Verso, 2005, p. 289. 

5. Hidāyat, Ṣādiq, The Blind Owl, Trans. D. P. Costello. New York: Grove Press, 1957, p.1.