Splinters in Your Eye: Essays on the Frankfurt School
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 21st 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 color 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 two essays tracing the still metastasizing demonization 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.
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Splinters in Your Eye: Essays on the Frankfurt School
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 21st 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 color 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 two essays tracing the still metastasizing demonization 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.
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Splinters in Your Eye: Essays on the Frankfurt School

Splinters in Your Eye: Essays on the Frankfurt School

by Martin Jay
Splinters in Your Eye: Essays on the Frankfurt School

Splinters in Your Eye: Essays on the Frankfurt School

by Martin Jay

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Overview

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 21st 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 color 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 two essays tracing the still metastasizing demonization 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781788736015
Publisher: Verso Books
Publication date: 07/14/2020
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 305,573
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught Modern European Intellectual History and Critical Theory for forty-five years. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (1973 and 1996), Marxism and Totality (1984); Adorno (1984); Permanent Exiles (1985), Fin-de-siècle Socialism (1989); Force Fields (1993);Downcast Eyes (1993); Cultural Semantics (1998); Refractions of Violence (2004); Songs of Experience (2005); The Virtues of Mendacity (2010), Essays from the Edge (2011); Kracauer: l'exilé (2014); and Reason After Its Eclipse (2016). He has been a regular columnist for Salmagundi since 1987.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xi

1 Ungrounded: Horkheimer and the Founding of the Frankfurt School 1

2 "The Hope That Earthly Horror Does Not Possess the Last Word": Max Horkheimer and The Dialectical Imagination 19

3 Max Horkheimer and The Family of Man 33

4 "In Psychoanalysis Nothing Is True but the Exaggerations": Freud and the Frankfurt School 48

5 Leo Löwenthal and the Jewish Renaissance 66

6 Adorno and Blumenberg: Nonconceptuality and the Bilderverbot 80

7 Chromophilia: Der Blaue Reiter, Walter Benjamin and the Emancipation of Color 98

8 Timbremelancholy: Walter Benjamin and the Fate of Philately 113

9 The Little Shopgirls Enter the Public Sphere: Miriam Hansen on Kracauer 124

10 Irony and Dialectics: One-Dimensional Man and 1968 135

11 Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe 151

Notes 173

Index 227

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