One of the most accomplished literary and cultural critics in the world, Fredric Jameson returns to the philosophy of the dialectic in a grand and nuanced study of the concept and those who have developed it. The question of the dialectic remains at the center of contemporary theoretical debates: Is it Hegelian and idealistic? To what degree is it central to Marxism? Is a materialist dialectic really possible? How damaging are the “poststructuralist” critiques of the dialectic by Deleuze, and Laclau and Mouffe? <em>Valences of the Dialectic</em> addresses these questions, and studies individual thinkers both dialectical and anti-dialectical, from Hegel and Fichte to Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze and Lacan.<p />