Thus, at once a retrospective, as well as a newly envisioned intervention, Archaeologies stands alongside other works in Jameson's oeuvre (such as Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernity, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) in terms of the critical significance of its interrogation of the formal limits and (since form is always the form of a specific content) political possibilities of cultural forms generally, and Utopia specifically. But Jameson's engagement with the Utopian problematic goes back to the early 1970s and Part Two of Archaeologies of the Future is a welcome collection of essays spanning four decades. Part One comprises an extended, systematic interrogation of Utopian form (half of this happily weighty book). What is the work of the Utopian Imagination, of Utopian form, in contemporary politics and culture? Indeed, what is the Utopian imagination of late capitalism, or postmodernity? These questions are at the core of Fredric Jameson's brilliantly adroit latest book (the concluding volume of his Poetics of Social Forms series, with Verso).
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