Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena

Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena

by Martin Jay

Overview

Over his distinguished career as a European intellectual historian and cultural critic, Martin Jay has explored a variety of major themes:
the Frankfurt School, the exile of German intellectuals in America during the Nazi era, Western Marxism, the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought,
the discourse of experience in modern Europe and America, and lying in politics.
Essays from the Edge assembles Jay’s writings from the intersections of this intellectual journey. Several essays focus on methodological debates in the humanities and social sciences: the limits of interdisciplinarity,
the issue of national or universal philosophy, cultural relativism and visuality,
and the implications of periodization in historical narrative. Others examine the concept of "scopic regime" and the metaphors of revolution and the gardening impulse. Among the theorists treated at length are Theodor Adorno, Hannah
Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The essays also include several of
Jay’s Salmagundi columns, dealing with subjects as varied as the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, the impact of Colin Wilson’s The
Outsider, and the demise of the Partisan
Review.

All of these efforts can be considered what
Arthur Schopenhauer called, to borrow the title of one of his most celebrated collections, "parerga and paralipomena." As essays from the edges of major projects, they illuminate Jay’s major arguments, elaborate points made only in passing in the larger texts, and explore ideas farther than would have been possible, given the focus of the larger works themselves. The result is a lively,
diverse offering from an extraordinary intellect.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813931333
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Publication date: 06/10/2011
Pages: 280
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Virtues of
Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (Virginia), among other works.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity 9

Adorno's Critique of Genuineness

Is Experience Still in Crisis? 22

Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament

Mourning a Metaphor 36

The Revolution is Over

Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn 40

Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited 51

No State of Grace 64

Violence in the Garden

Visual Parrhesia? 77

Foucault and the Truth of the Gaze

The Kremlin of Modernism 90

Phenomenology and Lived Experience 99

Aesthetic Experience and Historical Experience 112

A Twenty-First-Century Constellation

Still Waiting to Hear from Derrida 123

Pseudology 132

Derrida on Arendt and Lying in Politics

The Menace of Consilience 149

Keeping The Disciplines Unreconciled

Can There Be National Philosophies in a Transnational World? 162

1990 177

Straddling a Watershed?

Allons enfants de l'humanité 186

The French and Human Rights

Intellectual Family Values 198

The Partisan Review William Phillips Hannah Arendt

Still Sleeping Rough 207

The Outsider at Fifty Colin Wilson's

Notes 215

Index 253

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