Why am I popular on TikTok?

The American essayist Fredric Jameson died recently. One of his most famous quips (sometimes wrongly attributed to me) holds today more than ever: it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. What if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself? His entire way of life was much closer to what the French call les palissades, the stating of the obvious attributed to the mythical figure of Monsieur la Palice, like: ‘One hour before his death, Monsieur la Palice was still fully alive.’ For Jameson, death didn’t exist as long as he was still alive. I learned from Jameson’s family that he continued reading and writing until his last moments: a day or two before his death, he asked them to bring him a couple of books and a notebook to his hospital bed. So it was not Jameson who died, death just happened to him.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis has deservedly flopped.