Martin Jay
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow - Class of Fall 2010

Martin Jay, a leading scholar of European intellectual history, visual culture, and critical theory, is the author, most recently, of The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying and Politics (Virginia, 2010). Other books include Songs of Experience: Modern European and American Variations on a Universal Theme (California, 2004), Refractions of Violence (Routledge, 2003), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (California, 1993), Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (Columbia, 1985), and Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (California, 1984). His influential study of the Frankfurt School between 1923 and 1950, The Dialectical Imagination (Little, Brown, & Co, 1973) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Award from the American Historical Association Award for best first book in European history. Jay has received prizes and fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Aby Warburg Foundation, among others.

Project Description

Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Reenchantment of the World

Jay used his residency at the American Academy in Berlin to work on his book project “Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Reenchantment of the World.” The project aims to explain how medieval nominalism challenged the scholastic traditions in philosophy, thereby fostering the concept of human self-assertion in a “disenchanted” world. Although nominalism is primarily understood in theological, philosophical, and linguistic terms, Jay fleshed out how it has also had an impact on visual culture. Drawing on theories of visuality, he examined aspects of photography in the hope of establishing “an alternative meaning of nominalism, one that is object rather than subject-centered and that is ‘magical’ enough to provide a weak mechanism of re-enchantment.”

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