spasticrobot

Fredric Jameson: Archaeologies of the Future

Holy Shit! Fredric Jameson has a new book called Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire of Utopia and Other Science Fictions that examines the utopian narrative of fringe SF novels. From the publisher's description:

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson's project on the Poetics of Social Forms.

I found out about this book by reading Joshua Glenn's excellent essay in yesterday's Boston Globe called Back to Utopia: Can the antidote to today's neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction? I haven't been this excited about a work of theory in a while.

Derrida has died

Jacques Derrida, the French deconstructionist, died of cancer yesterday in Paris. His death makes me wonder if some of the big-name thinkers of his generation will ever be properly succeeded. It seems to me that theorists like DeLanda, Hardt, and Zizek have pretty big shoes to fill with the passing of Foucault, Deleuze and now Derrida.