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 nominalism—the "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.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
The Nominalist Revolution
The Realist Counterrevolution
1. Conventional Nominalism
The Via Moderna
Nominalism and the Turn toward Language
Nominalism and Political Theory
2. Magical Nominalism
Magic and Science
Magic and Religion
Magic and Social Science
Jewish Nominalism
Walter Benjamin and Magical Nominalism
Intermezzo: Magical Nominalism and Negative Theology
3. History, Sublime Experience, and the Event
Conventional Nominalism and the Idiographic Method
The New Experientialism
Magical Nominalism and the Post-1968 Exaltation of the Event
Unanswered Questions
4. Irrealism in Aesthetics: Conventional or Magical Nominalism?
The Decline of Aesthetic Platonism
Marcel Duchamp and “Pictorial Nominalism”
Adorno and the Ambiguous Implications of Musical Nominalism
5. The Photograph
Indexical Traces: Realist or Nominalist?
Barthes and the Punctum
The Photograph as Event, Readymade, and Proper Name
Coda: Siegfried Kracauer on the Photograph
In Lieu of a Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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.
Review :
“As we have come to expect from one of our most distinguished and influential intellectual historians, Magical Nominalism is characterized by a broad genealogical sweep, detailed and circumspect historical and cultural analyses, and a masterful internal architecture. There is a great deal of wisdom in Jay’s text, as well as an incorruptible generosity of Geist (mind, spirit, and intellect) that traverses the book’s entirety.”
“Jay’s intellectual historical elaboration of a struggle between “conventional” and “magical” nominalism is a tour de force that shows a deeply learned scholar pursuing an incredibly creative project that has the potential to impinge on a range of debates about modernity, whether in theology, political theory, aesthetics, history, or philosophy. It is a truly exciting book that will interest many. It is also just a joy to read.”
