Splinters in Your Eye
Also by Martin Jay
The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt Schooland the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (1973 and 1996)
Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of aConcept from Lukács to Habermas (1984)
Adorno (1984)
Permanent Exiles: Essays on the IntellectualMigration from Germany to America (1985)
Fin-de-Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (1988)
Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (1993)
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision inTwentieth-Century French Thought (1993)
Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (1998)
Refractions of Violence (2003)
La crisis de la experiencia en la era postsubjetiva, ed. Eduardo Sabrovsky (2003)
Songs of Experience: Modern European and AmericanVariations on a Universal Theme (2004)
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (2010)
Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (2011)
Kracauer l’exilé (2014)
Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016)
Splinters in Your Eye
Frankfurt School Provocations
Martin Jay
First published by Verso 2020
© Martin Jay 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-601-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-604-6 (LIBRARY)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-603-9 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-602-2 (UK EBK)
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Library of Congres Control Number: 2020936045
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For Sidney
Contents
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1 Ungrounded: Horkheimer and the Founding of the Frankfurt School
3 Max Horkheimer and The Family of Man
4 “In Psychoanalysis Nothing Is True but the Exaggerations”: Freud and the Frankfurt School
5 Leo Löwenthal and the Jewish Renaissance
6 Adorno and Blumenberg: Nonconceptuality and the Bilderverbot
7 Chromophilia: Der Blaue Reiter, Walter Benjamin and the Emancipation of Color
8 Timbremelancholy: Walter Benjamin and the Fate of Philately
9 The Little Shopgirls Enter the Public Sphere: Miriam Hansen on Kracauer
10 Irony and Dialectics: One-Dimensional Man and 1968
11 Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe
Notes
Index
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When you’ve been grappling with the intellectual challenges and historical development of the Frankfurt School for over half a century—the dissertation that became The Dialectical Imagination was begun in 1967—you incur a virtual lifetime of debts to the people and institutions that kept you going. Luckily, I have had the opportunity in previous books to acknowledge my gratitude to the legions of friends, family members, supporters, critics and fellow devotees of Critical Theory who made those works possible. Let me now focus only on those whose generosity and stimulation provoked the essays collected here to come into being.
First, I would like to thank those whose invitations to conferences, talks or essay collections induced me to focus on the specific issues in individual essays or who helped publish the first iterations of the results: Sidonia Blättler, Jonathan Boyarin, Judit Bokser, Briankle Chang, Moritz Epple, Johannes Fried, Richard Gipps, Shai Ginzburg, Peter Gordon, Raphael Gross, Janis Gudian, Espen Hammer, Gerd Hurm, Andreas Huyssen, Mathias Jehn, Max Pensky, Anke Reitz, Jeffrey Rubinoff, Bernd Schwibs, Jay Winter and Shamoon Zamir. As I have so often had a chance in the past, I would like to express my special thanks to Robert Boyers, the indefatigable editor of Salmagundi, where two of the entries first appeared as my biannual Force Fields column.
In ways both direct and indirect, I have also benefited enormously from my ongoing contact with members of the burgeoning international community of scholars engaged with the legacy of Critical Theory. Despite the inevitability of my failing to include many who deserve mention, let me single out John Abromeit, Andrew Arato, Richard Bernstein, Paul Breines, Susan Buck-Morss, Seyla Benhabib, Detlev Claussen, Jean Cohen, Deborah Cook, Maeve Cooke, the late Helmut Dubiel, Andrew Feenberg, Fabian Freyenhagen, Lydia Goehr, Espen Hammer, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Axel Honneth, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Anton Kaes, Robert Kaufman, Douglas Kellner, Stefan Müller-Doohm, Henry Pickford, the late Moishe Postone, Anson Rabinbach, Gerhard Richter, Michael Rosen, Alfons Söllner, the late Albrecht Wellmer, Joel Whitebook, Rolf Wiggershaus, Richard Wolin, Robert Zwarg and Lambert Zuidervaart. Their fingerprints are all over the essays that follow. Let me also thank my more proximate colleagues at Berkeley, especially in the History Department and the Program in Critical Theory, who have sustained me both while I was actively teaching and now as I fade into retirement: Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, John Efron, Carla Hesse, David Hollinger, Thomas Laqueur, Anthony Long, Jonathan Sheehan, Hans Sluga and the late Paul