SOURCE: “Thoughtful Experience,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1991, p. 29.

In the following review of Late Marxism, Rosen regards Jameson's book as “thorough and well-informed,” though finds his anticipation of a “Hegelian revival” unconvincing.

“In the Winter Semester”, wrote one of Theodor Adorno’s graduate students, “we would read Kant and say that Hegel was right. In the Summer Semester Hegel and say Kant was right.” Hardly surprising, then, that Adorno should have left behind a reputation as a kind of philosophical butterfly, flitting from one epistemological vantage-point to another but never remaining in one place long enough to be pinned down.

To several recent interpreters the elusiveness is deliberate, part of a rhetorical strategy in the deconstructive spirit which aims not so much to refute the claims of traditional philosophy as to reduce its defenders to a kind of despairing acceptance of the hopelessness of their project. There...