In this major new study, philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers an innovative reading of a book that forms part of the bedrock of modern Western thought: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Whereas other writers have interpreted the Phenomenology as a rigidly closed system, Jameson discovers it to be a more fluid, open-ended work. Hegel’s mind is revealed to be a less systematic mechanism than normally thought, one whose ideas never solidify into pure abstractions. The conclusion of the Phenomenology, on the aftermath of the French Revolution, is examined as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social—a situation from which Jameson draws important lessons for our own age.
“Yields a series of audacious reading of a ‘non-teleological’ Hegel, throwing a distinctive light on such themes as master-slave dialectic, linguistic subjectivity, expressive production (‘the animal kingdom of spirit’), normative division in the Antigone (inaugurating chapter 6, ‘Spirit’), and the French Revolution.”
—Choice
“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.”
−Terry Eagleton
“Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today … It can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him.”
−Colin MacCabe
“Jameson establishes the revisionist nature of his latest study from the very outset. For a work on a Hegel it is a conspicuously short but nonetheless fascinating work, one which encompasses all of the elliptical nuances, digressions and expansive inter-disciplinary scholarship which has characterized his past studies.”
—Glasgow Review of Books
“Variations shows how tenaciously Jameson wrestles with his angel to complicate further his relationship to Hegelian Marxism.”
—Peter Hitchcock, Mediations
About the Author
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.
