Martin Jay
Biographic Data
| ID | 76837 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin Jay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin |
| FAMILY NAME | Jay |
| SIGNATURE | JAY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 135 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 649 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 130 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Intellectual Historian as Spectator at the Shipwreck of Conceptual Coherence
Misrepresenting Representation? On the Significance of Ankersmit’s Sound and Fury
Anti-Empathy and the Mirage of a Secular Bi-National State Solution
The Vicissitudes of Empathy
Alex Edelman’s remarkable one-man show Just for Us, which I recently caught as an HBO special, is at once hilariously manic and deeply moving. Framed by an extended anecdote detailing his unlikely
Origami Philosophy of History
Drawing on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's monadological metaphysics, with its nominalist emphasis on the integrity of the individual, the eminent Dutch philosopher of history Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit proposes a radically new interpretation of the way historical representations create "historical reality" based on the "death" of the no longer actual past. Representation: The Birth of Historical Reality from the Death of the Past is an unapologetical…
Can History Absolve? Can History Judge
Appealing to history, rather than to God, to provide an ultimate judgment about human actions can have a justificatory or consolatory function. The former grants proleptic absolution for acts that may be morally dubious because of their benign consequences, while the latter enables victims in the present to gain a measure of relief by imagining they will be honored by posterity. In both cases, problematic assumptions about "history" and "judgment…
Laudation for Seyla Benhabib
As a female political philosopher, born in Turkey to a Sephardic Jewish family, educated in America and Germany, and enjoying an illustrious teaching career in the United States, Seyla Benhabib has long pondered the limits placed on the validity of transcendent ideas by their contextual genesis. This "laudatio" for the Adorno Prize she was awarded in 2024 by the city of Frankfurt examines her work, with its special debts to Habermas and Arendt, a…
La historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en campos expandidos
El presente texto fue leído por Martin Jay como conferencia de apertura del I Congreso Nacional de Teoría Crítica “La Argentina y el centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social”, celebrado en la ciudad de Buenos Aires durante los días 1, 2 y 3 de noviembre de 2023, con el apoyo de la Agencia Nacional de Promoción de la Investigación, el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación, la Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, la Universidad de Buenos Aires…
The Weimar Republic Sourcebook
Intersecting with PB
Berdamai dengan Keterbatasan Epistemologis
Following the proliferation of digital media usage, the world has seen an increasing amount of digitally-mediated lives in everyday contexts. While anthropological scholarship has started to address this ever-growing subject, anthropologists are mainly preoccupied with human engagements in virtual worlds that have their own tangible and embodied sense of spatiality (e.g., online role-playing and gaming communities). In so doing, anthropologists h…
The Authoritarian Personalityand the Problematic Pathologization of Politics
Attempts to apply the methods and findings of The Authoritarian Personality to Chinese culture and politics reveal the limits of its cross-cultural reach. Additional qualms result from a consideration of the history of displacing the rhetoric of pathologization from medicine to psychology to society and finally to politics. Critical Theory's warning against the subsumption of non-identical individuals under homogenizing categories is only partly …
Go Figure
Fredric Jameson's new book, The Benjamin Files, gives him an opportunity to revisit a figure he initially discussed more than fifty years ago. At that time, he lamented what he saw as Walter Benjamin's melancholic resignation at the failure of his redemptive hopes; now, he wants to affirm the future-oriented implications of Benjamin's work as coming from a "time-traveler from some messianic future." Focusing on theological strains in Benjamin's t…
Ei! Qual é a grande ideia
Em resposta à recente exortação do historiador David Armitage para retornarmos a uma história de "grandes ideias" traçada por longos períodos de tempo, este artigo examina as razões para a resistência a suas propostas, conforme expressa por estudiosos da História Intelectual textualistas e contextualistas. Discutindo a "História Conceitual" e a "Metaforologia" como alternativas à História das Ideias tradicional, defendem-se as virtudes de um méto…
Adorno and the Role of Sublimation in Artistic Creativity and Cultural Redemption
Theodor W. Adorno resisted Sigmund Freud's explanation of artistic creation as the sublimation of the artist's libidinal drives. It focuses too much on the artist rather than the work and is in the service of accommodation to the status quo. But Adorno also questioned the simple reversal of Freud's formula, pointing out the dangers of unmediated desublimation. The artist, he suggested, should sublimate his or her rage instead. No less significant…
Theory and Philosophy
Building on the argument of a 1996 piece called “For Theory,” which situated “theory” in a force field of its putative opposite terms, this essay explores the way “philosophy” has come to be considered an antonym of “theory” in much contemporary discourse. It argues that despite their often contrasting meanings and connotations, the two terms would benefit from a dialogue in which the strengths of each were acknowledged without their being either…
Moishe Postone and the Vicissitudes of Abstraction
In an Expanded Field
No longer capable of serving as a nodal point of a single coherent narrative or as a marker for parallel events across national borders, “1968” is best understood in a tense relation to “1967”. Juxtaposed rather than reconciled, they can only be brought together in a dynamic field of conflicting forces still in play even after a half century has passed. Such an approach alerts us to the relativization of what seems to be a punctual moment in a si…
Regimes escópicos da modernidade
Neste texto, Martin Jay debruça-se sobre a perspectiva cartesiana, explorando principalmente as consequências de sua invenção para o regime visual da modernidade. Ele defende que a perspectiva cartesiana, dada sua grande adesão durante o Renascimento, foi tomada desde então como equivalente do modelo escópico moderno. Diante disso, Jay reavalia a suposta unidade desse arranjo visual, enunciando os momentos de inquietação a ele inscritos: a arte d…
Dialectic of EnLIGHTenment
The Dialectical Imagination
Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this editi…
Sublime Historical Experience, Real Presence and Photography
In addition to the testimony of the author’s own “sublime historical experience” during a visit to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, this essay draws on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis of four photographs from the Holocaust in his Images in Spite of All to demonstrate the power of Ankersmit’s argument. It speculates on the relationship between such experiences and theological notions of “real presence,” which also seek to collapse the dista…
Chromophilia
Color, long denigrated by philosophers and painters as inferior to form, was “emancipated” by a number of modernist artists, perhaps most notably Wassily Kandinsky and his collaborators in Der Blaue Reiter. Not only was it elevated above form, but it was also freed from the imperative to imitate the perceived colors of the real world and its identification with mere surface appearance. Among Kandinsky’s greatest enthusiasts was Walter Benjamin, w…
Fidelity to the Event? Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and the Russian Revolution
Irony and Dialectics
[Ironía y dialéctica: El hombre unidimensional y 1968] ABSTRACT In this article, the author analyses the role of irony in one of the texts that had the most influence in the 1968 movements around the world: The One-dimensional Man, by Herbert Marcuse. Understanding irony as an evident sign of human two-dimensionality, and emphasizing its dialectical potential, the author questions the subversive viability and the specific characteristics of every…
Reification
This work examines whether the concept of reification, largely abandoned by the end of the 20th century, can inspire 21st century political theory. Axel Honneth, the leader of the Frankfurt School's third generation, draws on his theory of recognition and then responds to three critics - Judith Butler Raymond Geuss and Jonathan Lear
The Dialectical Imagination
Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this editi…
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Lowith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized b…
The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950
Visual Culture Questionnaire
1. It has been suggested that the interdisciplinary project of is no longer organized on the model of (as were the disciplines of art history, architectural history, film history, etc.) but on the model of anthropology. Hence, it is argued by some that visual culture is in an eccentric (even, at times, antagonistic) position with regard to the new art history with its social-historical and semiotic imperatives and models of context and text
"The Aesthetic Ideology" as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics
In 1930, Walter Benjamin reviewed a collection of essays edited by the conservative revolutionary Ernst Junger and entitled War and Warrior. Noting its contributors' avid romanticization of the technology of death and the total mobilization of the masses, he warned that it was nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l'art pour l'art to war itself (122). Six years later, in the concluding reflections of his celebrated es…
Historical Explanation and the Event
Contextualization has become the reigning shibboleth of historical analysis, especially for intellectual and cultural history. Although acknowledging the achievements of the Cambridge School of historians, led by Quentin Skinner, who have done so much to promote awareness of the need to situate texts in their original illocutionary contexts, this essays explores two critical responses. The first focuses on challenges to contemporary historians to…
Liquidity Crisis
After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was growing more 'liquid' and 'lighter' than before. This essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize Bauman's insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the 'Mercurian' culture of diasporic Jewish life
The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism
The Limits of Limit‐Experience
Unsympathetic Magic
A Review Article on The Nervous System (Routledge, New York, 1992), And Mimesis and Alterity: Aparticular History of the Senses (Rolttledge, New York, 1993), by Michael Taussig
Taking On the Stigma of Inauthenticity
search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times, writes Marshall Berman in his book on Rousseau, The Politics of Authenticity, is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are. ... desire for authenticity has emerged in modern society as one of most politically explosive of human impulses.1 Even those with less radical agendas, like Sigmund Freud, have been seen as sharing same desire. According to Lionel Trilling …
The Frankfurt School's Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge
In its initial contract with the Education Ministry of the city of Frankfurt signed in 1923, the Institut für Sozialforschung agreed to provide office space for two university professors on the first floor of its soon-to-becompleted building on the Victoria-Allee. During the early thirties, in the period that began with Max Horkheimer's accession to the directorship and ended with the Institut's forced departure from Germany, the tenants were two…
The Disenchantment of the Eye
For theory
The Authoritarian Personalityand the Problematic Pathologization of Politics
Attempts to apply the methods and findings of The Authoritarian Personality to Chinese culture and politics reveal the limits of its cross-cultural reach. Additional qualms result from a consideration of the history of displacing the rhetoric of pathologization from medicine to psychology to society and finally to politics. Critical Theory's warning against the subsumption of non-identical individuals under homogenizing categories is only partly …
Against Rigor
In the various texts posthumously published in translation in 2017 as The Rigorism of Truth, Hans Blumenberg audaciously compared Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as efforts to debunk founding myths of Jewish identity. He accused both thinkers of robbing the Jews of the ideological ammunition needed to confront anti-Semitism and defend the creation of the state of Israel. Both, he claimed, were moral …
Mourning a Metaphor
(2003). Mourning a Metaphor: The Revolution is Over. Parallax: Vol. 9, Mourning Revolution, pp. 17-20
Relativismo cultural e a virada visual
Relativismo Cultural e a Virada Visual
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature
Reconciling the Irreconcilable? Rejoinder to Kennedy
Among Carl Schmitt's most notable and controversial contributions to political theory was his claim that "all the significant concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts." First formulated in 1922 in his Political Theology, this contention remained constant throughout his long career, as evidenced by its return in his Political Theology II, published in 1970. Here Schmitt's Cadtholic background was clearly ap…
The Jews and the Frankfurt School
The posthumous appearance of Max Horkheimer's Notizen of 1950 to 1969 in same volume as a new edition of Dammerung, his aphorisms of 1926 to 1931,1 amply documents many of transformations of theoretical and political positions of Frankfurt School's leading figure. None is perhaps as striking as that of his attitude towards anti-Semitism and what was once known as the Jewish question. In later collection, at least a dozen entries discuss these and…
Fidelity to the Event? Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and the Russian Revolution
Adorno and Musical Nominalism
The challenge of nominalism in philosophy and theology to the reality of universals has been a motor of modern thought. Translated into aesthetic terms, it has abetted resistance to generic conventions and helped undermine essentialist notions of aesthetic form. Theodor W. Adorno had a characteristically dialectical response to nominalism, applauding its subversion of categorical reifications, but alarmed by its indiscriminate leveling of the dis…
Lafayette's Children
In l994, Princeton University Press launched with considerable fanfare an auspicious series of translations called "New French Thought," edited by Thomas Pavel, Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Mark Villa of the Political Science and French Studies Departments at New York University (both recently transplanted to the University of Chicago). Pavel, the author of an earlier critique of structuralist and post-stru…
Scholarship and Partisanship
Die deutsche Emigration in den USA
The Austrian Mind
From Marx to Hegel. George Lichtheim
The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals. Robert Boyers
Crutches vs. Stilts
James Schmidt's attack on my reading of the Frankfurt School, despite his intemperate and sarcastic tone, frequently muddled understanding of Critical Theory, and unwarranted reliance on Russell Jacoby as some sort of authority, raises a number of crucial and disturbing questions. In answering him, I hope to clarify some of the issues I treated in my earlier Telos piece and to contribute to what should be an ongoing debate on the merits of the Fr…
The Frankfurt School
The Dialectical Imagination
The Frankfurt School's Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge
In its initial contract with the Education Ministry of the city of Frankfurt signed in 1923, the Institut für Sozialforschung agreed to provide office space for two university professors on the first floor of its soon-to-becompleted building on the Victoria-Allee. During the early thirties, in the period that began with Max Horkheimer's accession to the directorship and ended with the Institut's forced departure from Germany, the tenants were two…
The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950
The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950
The Frankfurt School Revisited
Marxism and critical theory
Critical Theory
Further Considerations on Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism
In the past decade, New Left Review and Telos have jointly done more to open up the ongoing tradition of continental Marxism to English-speaking readers than any other journals. Through their lengthy and frequent commentaries on what until recently has been an “unknown dimension” of Marxist theory, they have stimulated a discussion more sophisticated and open-ended than any in the previous history of radical thought in Britain or America. Without…
Critical Theory Criticized
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Kurt Mandelbaum
Main Currents of Marxism
The Jews and the Frankfurt School
The posthumous appearance of Max Horkheimer's Notizen of 1950 to 1969 in same volume as a new edition of Dammerung, his aphorisms of 1926 to 1931,1 amply documents many of transformations of theoretical and political positions of Frankfurt School's leading figure. None is perhaps as striking as that of his attitude towards anti-Semitism and what was once known as the Jewish question. In later collection, at least a dozen entries discuss these and…
Positive and Negative Totalities
This article explores the inherent tensions within Critical Theory regarding interdisciplinary research, particularly as envisioned by the Frankfurt School. Jay argues that Critical Theory oscillates between two contrasting conceptions of totality: a "positive totality," which seeks a comprehensive and unified understanding of society, and a "negative totality," which emphasizes the fragmented and contradictory nature of social reality. He examin…
Introduction to Horkheimer
In the steadily burgeoning literature on Critical Theory, the figure of Max Horkheimer has assumed an ambiguous status. Although his seminal role in organizing the work of his colleagues at the Institute of Social Research is widely acknowledged, the precise nature of his own contribution remains somewhat clouded. Aside from his programmatic theoretical and methodological statements — most notably his so-called “manifesto” of 1937, “Traditional a…
For Gouldner
Anamnestic totalization
Books in review
Carl Schmitt
Philosophy (76 works) · Epistemology (57 works) · Political science (54 works) · Sociology (51 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (39 works) · History (39 works) · Art (38 works) · Law (38 works) · Philosophy (34 works) · Aesthetics (29 works)