[D66] Frankfurt School Provocations

[R.O.]

Jay-splinters-in-your-eye


Splinters in Your Eye
Frankfurt School Provocations
by Martin Jay <https://www.versobooks.com/authors/2450-martin-jay>

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Paperback
£19.99£13.9930% off
256 pages / 14 July 2020 / 9781788736015

Assessing the legacy of the Frankfurt School in the twenty-first century

Although successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted 
to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its 
founding members continues in the twenty-first century to unsettle 
conventional wisdom about culture, society and politics. Exploring 
unexamined episodes in the school’s history and reading its work in 
unexpected ways, these essays provide ample evidence of the abiding 
relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and 
Kracauer in our troubled times. Without forcing a unified argument, they 
range over a wide variety of topics, from the uncertain founding of the 
School to its mixed reception of psychoanalysis, from Benjamin’s 
ruminations on stamp collecting to the ironies in the reception of 
Marcuse’s /One-Dimensional Man/, from Löwenthal’s role in Weimar’s 
Jewish Renaissance to Horkheimer’s involvement in the writing of the 
first history of the Frankfurt School. Of special note are their 
responses to visual issues such as the emancipation of colour in modern 
art, the Jewish prohibition on images, the relationship between cinema 
and the public sphere, and the implications of a celebrated Family of 
Man photographic exhibition. The collection ends with an essay tracing 
the still metastasising demonisation of the Frankfurt School by the 
so-called Alt Right as the source of “cultural Marxism” and “political 
correctness,” which has gained alarming international resonance and led 
to violence by radical right-wing fanatics.


    Reviews

“In this sizzling collection of essays, Martin Jay demonstrates again 
that he is the unsurpassed reader of the group of thinkers known as the 
“Frankfurt School.” In fact, he challenges the false unity and coherence 
of ideas and views often imposed upon them, including his own earlier 
writings on the subject. Practicing episodic and fragmentary 
historiography, he uncovers astonishingly novel angles of interpretation 
as well as demonstrating brilliant re-readings of known texts. An 
absolute pleasure to read”

– Professor Seyla Benhabib

“With this collection of brilliant and insightful essays Martin Jay has 
returned to the topic that defined his early career: Critical Theory, 
i.e. the lives and works of theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, 
Benjamin, Kracauer, and Marcuse. Based on deep historical knowledge and 
endowed with great sensitivity for theoretical nuances, Jay traces the 
unfolding of what is commonly called the Frankfurt School. He succeeds 
in this endeavor by his refusal to treat their thought as the expression 
of a unified school. For this difficult task one could not have found a 
more suitable critic than Martin Jay. This book is a precious gift to 
America in these troubled times.”

– Peter Uwe Hohendahl

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