50 Years after The Dialectical Imagination - Interview with Martin Jay by his Translator (original) (raw)
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Martin Jay: An Intellectual Picture (Interview)
Theory Now. Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, 2019
The following interview took place on June 6, 2018 as part of the interview series “The Intellectual and his/her Memory” of the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Granada. During the interview, Jay reflected upon his intellectual career, the current state of critical theory and dialectical categories, the status of truth in our time, postsecularism and identity politics.
History and Theory, 2012
This review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes-the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth-construction in the public realm-that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth-telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.
Martin jay: un retrato intelectual
2009
The following interview took place on June 6, 2018 as part of the interview series “The Intellectual and his/her Memory” of the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Granada. During the interview, Jay reflected upon his intellectual career, the current state of critical theory and dialectical categories, the status of truth in our time, postsecularism and identity politics.
Journal of Asia-Pacific pop culture, 2021
In this interview, which took place by email in the summer of 2021, Samir Gandesha engages in a discussion with Martin Jay, UC Berkeley, one of the preeminent US intellectual historians since the 1980s and author of the groundbreaking Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (1973), which was followed by other important books on totality, ocularcentrism, experience, and lying in politics. The result is in a wide-ranging philosophical (aesthetic and political) discussion of a variety of topics, including the Frankfurt School and the trajectory of critical theory, the rise and importance of social media platforms, ensuing the digitalization and commodification of the life-world, "algorithmic populism" and "cancel culture," as well as the role of art between theory and criticism. Samir Gandesha: It is common to speak of generational differences among those who understand themselves as working in the spirit of the Institute for Social Research. So, after the first generation-Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and so on-you have the second generation, Jürgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer; the third, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser; and then, perhaps, as a fourth, Rainer Forst and Christoph Menke. One way of looking at the trajectory of Critical Theory, as Habermas himself has already pointed out, is in terms of a force field of debates over the nature of the state (Pollock versus Neumann and Kircheimer), the emancipatory role of popular culture (Adorno versus Benjamin) and the status of ego psychology (Fromm versus Marcuse). From Habermas onward, the trajectory of Critical Theory could be understood in terms of a consistent movement away from critical social theory and an apparent "negative
What's Left of the Dialectic? A Polemic
We want to address this question in an oblique way-not by thinking about the state of the discipline, but by thinking about the conditions of and for thinking today. We present here a set of theses that we hope might help to re-imagine the role and scope of philosophy or theory in the age of fi nance capitalism; the links between these theses and (the politics of) literary studies will be left open. e sources of these theses are as eclectic as a music collection: they bear with them the traces of broken relationships, misdirected enthusiasms, the inevitable, short-lived fascination with the new, the enduring infl uence of old favourites that one cannot get past. ese theses should not be taken as prescriptive. ey might be read in the light of Friedrich Schlegel's conception of his philosophical fragments-as scraps or remnants of a total system that could never really exist. Fredric Jameson has recently described his own critical practice as a "translation mechanism, " a theoretical machine that makes it possible to convert other discourses into the central political problematic that animates Marxism (Zhang -). We conceive these theses in much the same spirit: as grasping towards a mediating code rather than as a set of truth-claims. e utility of these theses will thus be determined by their ability to help produce a philosophy politically rather than politically rather than politically conceptually adequate to fi nance conceptually adequate to fi nance conceptually capitalism-a philosophy or theory that takes up the political challenge of
l. In the analysis of the mythical conceptual structuration, the notion of totality is important where nature and culture, and, men, animals, plants and planets are in a continuous dialectical relationship. As a matter of fact, nothing that is human or related to human beings in one form or another, asserts Levi-Strauss, is foreign to the mythical thought, and as such, the dialectical reason finds in it its true application. Levi-Strauss opposes the differentiation that Jean-Paul Sartre makes between the analytical reason and the dialectical reason. At times, Sartre considers the former as an error, and the latter as a verity, and at others, he thinks that both lead to the same truth.