By Kenneth Surin
Frederic Jameson in conversation at Fundacíon Juan March.
I have known Fred Jameson for 38 years, and was his colleague for 31 of those years. Many would say 90 is a ripe old age, but the loss of Fred is devastating nonetheless. The following is a long read, but it details in outline how I came to know Fred and become his colleague.
When I came to Duke in 1987, the Literature Program and English Department were in the ascendency. The then provost, the late Philip Griffiths (incidentally a mathematician who later headed the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton), decided that Duke, with its relatively small endowment compared to the Ivy League, Stanford, Chicago, et al, could rise to prominence more easily and rapidly by boosting the humanities rather than STEM—recruiting STEM faculty incurred relatively large start-up costs, such as providing a fully-equipped lab with expensive equipment, lab staff, and of course bigger salaries to entice scientists and engineers to Duke, etc, whereas a start-up in the humanities typically involved providing a computer and a research and travel budget that was relatively small. The humanities “stars” would also be given their own secretaries.
I was recruited by the religion department, in part because my work was informed in a rudimentary way by theory, and the provost wanted to hire faculty in other departments who could create “synergies” (a buzzword still among university administrators) with Lit and English. My appointment was of course overdetermined by other considerations.
The Religion PhD Program was shared by the department and the divinity school, and the two sub-units coexisted uneasily. I surmise the perception that I could, in principle, work with faculty and students in both religion and the divinity school in a “non-ideological” way was thus given some weight. The freighted term “non-ideological” however meant this or that in whatever way to my colleagues in largely undeclared ways.
Fred was one of the people whom I met during my campus visit in 1986.
The Lit Program was on east campus, and all my meetings were on west, so Fred came over to the Allen Building office of the then undergrad dean, the late Richard White. White left his office to the two of us for our meeting, Fred was wearing his usual plaid shirt and khakis, the trademark pocket-watch fastened by a chain to his belt.
I had just written a book on the theological problem of evil, in which I briefly discussed Paul Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil. The only other work by Ricoeur I’d read was his text on the “masters of suspicion” Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Fred launched into a discussion of the entirety of Ricoeur’s work on hermeneutics, in which I struggled to keep up because I’d only read those 2 books by Ricoeur. Years later I found that hermeneutics had been an early interest of Fred’s—he translated, and wrote an introduction to, Dilthey’s 1900 essay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics”, which he later described as a “false start”.
I had read Fred’s Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious and wanted to discuss these with him but he was engrossed in his descant about Ricoeur and hermeneutics, and it was soon time for me to go on to my next meeting.
The position in Religion I was hired for was a “target of opportunity” hiring, so there were no other contenders for the job.
As a theologian I was acceptable to most of the divinity school, while some in the department didn’t think a (Christian) theologian should have a place in a religious studies department. With some exceptions, theory in both sub-units was regarded by some with hostility, and by others with indifference and/or stark incomprehension. I recall one biblical studies colleague asking me, in the nicest way over drinks, to tell him who Derrida was. Fair enough, he was an expert in half-a-dozen ancient Semitic languages of which I knew not a single word, and besides he read dictionaries for pleasure.
I was starting to lose interest in theology, and almost all my classes had a theory syllabus which grew in size with each semester. As a result of my graduate courses being cross-listed with Lit, Lit students could take my classes. In some of my courses they preponderated.
In the early 1990s I had a campus visit for a position in philosophical theology at Harvard Divinity School. I didn’t get the job, somewhat to my relief, since I would have to continue teaching theology if I got the job. Harvard ranked more highly than Duke on the invidious totem pole of university rankings, so I was able to parley my Harvard campus visit for a nice salary increase. But what else?
Here is where Fred came in. He suggested I ask the administration for a transfer to Lit, and that the administration allow the religion department to keep my (former) position. Since religion had nothing to lose by my going to Lit, its then chair, Hans Hillerbrand, had no qualms in signing-off on the transfer. The administration had 2 conditions: (1) that the Lit faculty vote on my transfer; and (2) that I come up for tenure again, this time as a bona fide Lit scholar (by now I had enough publications in theory to jump the requisite tenure hoops). Fred shepherded me through both proceedings, and that is how I became his colleague.
I used to tell my students that Fred was the last member of the Frankfurt School. A certain conventional wisdom has it that Habermas occupies this titular position, but Habermas is a neo-Kantian liberal, Europe’s counterpart to John Rawls. I place Fred on a par with Adorno, while acknowledging that Fred had an even wider range of interests than the magus of Frankfurt. Fredric Jameson was sui generis.
Kenneth Surin teaches at Duke University, North Carolina. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
