Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination,
his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects
on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating
it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes
seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing
historical circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School's practice
of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its
own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are
the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing
"authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises
of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members'
analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are
asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of
alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of
a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather,
however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an
unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole,
the essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments.
They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket
society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation,
and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse
for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving
theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding
of - and perhaps even practical betterment - of our increasingly
troubled world.
General
Imprint: |
Verso Books
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
October 2023 |
Authors: |
Martin Jay
|
Dimensions: |
234 x 152mm (L x W) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
240 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-80429-252-5 |
Categories: |
Books
Promotions
|
LSN: |
1-80429-252-4 |
Barcode: |
9781804292525 |
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