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Magical Nominalism
The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph
Series: The Life of Ideas
Brief Description
A bold and wide-ranging study across centuries, examining the conflict between "conventional" and "magical" nominalism in philosophy, history, aesthetics, political theory, and photography. In this magisterial new book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces the long-standing competition between two versions of nominalismβthe "conventional" and the "magical." Since...
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Description
A bold and wide-ranging study across centuries, examining the conflict between "conventional" and "magical" nominalism in philosophy, history, aesthetics, political theory, and photography.
In this magisterial new book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces the long-standing competition between two versions of nominalismβthe "conventional" and the "magical." Since at least William of Ockham, according to Jay, the conventional form of nominalism has contributed to the disenchantment of the world, by viewing general terms as nothing more than mere names we use to group particular objects together, rejecting the idea that they refer to a further, "higher" reality. Magical nominalism, instead, performs a reenchanting function, by investing proper names, disruptive events, and singular objects with an auratic power of their own. Drawing in part on Jewish theology, it challenges the elevation of the constitutive subject resulting from Ockham's reliance on divine will in his critique of real universals.
Starting with the fourteenth-century revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay unpacks various "counterrevolutions" against nominalism itself, including a magical alternative to its conventional form. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language, thought, and reality, Jay illuminates connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience. Ranging from theology and philosophy of history to aesthetics and political theory, this book engages with a range of artists and thinkers, including Adorno, Ankersmit, Badiou, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Derrida, Duchamp, Foucault, Kracauer, Kripke, and Lyotard.
Ultimately, Magical Nominalism offers a strikingly original way to understand humanity's intellectual path to modernity.
Series: The Life of Ideas
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780226837215
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 22 January 2025
Country: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 33.0mm
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 708g
Pages: 416
About the Author
Martin Jay is the Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of nineteen previous books, including The Dialectical Imagination, Marxism and Totality, Downcast Eyes, and Songs of Experience.
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