"Mind-blowing... What we get here is not the insight in some secret core of Jameson's thought lost in later gentrified published versions but, on the contrary, a flow of improvisations and mental experimentations where the detours through secondary topics are often more precious than the main line of argumentation." - Slavoj Zizek Mimesis, Expression, Construction brings Fredric Jameson's Duke University seminar on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into print for the first time. Comprised of twenty-one seminar transcripts in which Jameson engages with his students as they explore Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, one of the most influential theories of modern art, this volume is also the first and only record of Jameson's teachings and pedagogic practice. Transcribed directly from audio recordings taken by the editor when the seminar was given in 2003, and presented like a play with closed captioning and stage directions, Mimesis, Expression, Construction is a new entry in the work of one of the greatest living philosophers.

"Jameson on Adorno? It's like reading Benjamin on Brecht, or Sartre on Baudelaire. A great Oedipal drama." "Mind-blowing... What we get here is not the insight in some secret core of Jameson's thought lost in later gentrified published versions but, on the contrary, a flow of improvisations and mental experimentations where the detours through secondary topics are often more precious than the main line of argumentation."

Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is a prominent American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is currently Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies (French) and the director of the Center for Critical Theory at Duke University. Among his best-known titles are Marxism and Form; The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; A Singular Modernity; Valences of the Dialectic; and The Antinomies of Realism. Octavian Esanu is an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History and Director/Curator of the American University of Beirut Art Galleries. He is the author of What Does "Why" Mean?; Transition in Post-Soviet Art; Art, Awakening and Modernity in the Middle East; Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization; and The Postsocialist Contemporary.