Charts the flight of some of this century's most important thinkers from Nazi Germany to the United States. Jay explores the theories of The Frankfurt School -- among them, the work of Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse -- as well, such as George Lichtheim, Hannah Arendt, and Henry Pachter.
Charts the flight of some of this century's most important thinkers from Nazi Germany to the United States. Jay explores the theories of The Frankfurt...
The metaphor of a force field, taken from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, suggests a constellation of juxtaposed rather than fully integrated impulses or elements in a relational network. Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America. The metaphor not only describes the ways these essays are drawn into a patterned whole, but also serves to clarify many of the substantive issues they treat.
The metaphor of a force field, taken from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, suggests a constellation of juxtaposed rather than fully integrated impu...
In recent radical theory generally, and French theory in particular, vision has been seen as a means of control. But this view is often unnuanced. It bypasses questions such as: Why is it that contemporary theories have been so critical of vision, and generous towards listening (in psychoanalysis) and language (in philosophy)? This collection of essays brings together historical studies and contemporary theoretical perspectives on vision. The historical papers focus in turn on Ancient Greece, medieval theology, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the 19th century. These historical studies...
In recent radical theory generally, and French theory in particular, vision has been seen as a means of control. But this view is often unnuanced. It ...
Refractions of Violence collects essays of leading cultural critic and intellectual historian Martin Jay. Ranging over a wide variety of subjects, from Walter Benjamin's response to World War I to the Holocaust and the events of 9/11, this collection addresses the troubling issues of the intersection of violence and visual culture. It argues that we live in a closed economy of violence in which no outside can provide us with a safe haven from the treat of sudden, perhaps even fatal injury, either real or symbolic. By examining a number of ways in which the dialectic of violence and...
Refractions of Violence collects essays of leading cultural critic and intellectual historian Martin Jay. Ranging over a wide variety of subjects, fro...
Refractions of Violence collects the recent essays of leading cultural critic and intellectual historian Martin Jay. Ranging over a wide variety of subjects, from Walter Benjamin's response to World War I to the Holocaust and the events of 9/11, this collection addresses the troubling issues of the intersection of violence and visual culture. It argues that we live in a closed economy of violence in which no outside can provide us with a safe haven from the treat of sudden, perhaps even fatal injury, either real or symbolic. By examining a number of ways in which the dialectic of violence and...
Refractions of Violence collects the recent essays of leading cultural critic and intellectual historian Martin Jay. Ranging over a wide variety of su...
Totality has been an abiding concern from the first generation of Western Marxists, most notably Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, and Bloch, through the second, exemplified by the Frankfurt School, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Della Volpe, up to the most recent, typified by Althusser, Colletti, and Habermas. Yet no consensus has been reached concerning the term's multiple meanings--expressive, decentered, longitudinal, latitudinal, normative--or its implications for other theoretical and practical matters. By closely following the adventures of this troublesome but central concept,...
Totality has been an abiding concern from the first generation of Western Marxists, most notably Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, and Bloch, through the secon...
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such...
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominan...
A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter -- and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of "received ideas" and Raymond Williams's explorations of the "keywords" of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from "theory" and "experience" to the meaning of "multiculturalism" and the dynamics of cultural "subversion." Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and...
A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter -- and about why ideas matt...
Remembering the Holocaust explains why the Holocaust has come to be considered the central event of the 20th century, and what this means. Presenting Jeffrey Alexander's controversial essay that, in the words of Geoffrey Hartman, has already become a classic in the Holocaust literature, and following up with challenging and equally provocative responses to it, this book offers a sweeping historical reconstruction of the Jewish mass murder as it evolved in the popular imagination of Western peoples, as well as an examination of its consequences. Alexander's inquiry points to a...
Remembering the Holocaust explains why the Holocaust has come to be considered the central event of the 20th century, and what this means. Pr...
