Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)

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Nov 15, 2023

Martin Jay, author of Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure, explores the continuing relevance of the Frankfurt School in the 21st century. He critically examines various ideas within the school, such as the pathologization of political deviance, the theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the analysis of anti-Semitism and Zionism. The podcast also delves into the complexities of understanding authoritarianism, the support for authoritarian populism, and Walter Benjamin's integration of theology into historical materialism.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Immanent Critiques: Exploring the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory

02:48 • 19min

Sublimation in Art and Criticisms by Adorno

21:18 • 16min

Sources of Hatred and Political Deficit: Jews in Adorno's Perspective

37:31 • 4min

Analyzing Authoritarianism: Challenges and Implications

41:48 • 7min

Radical Populism, Corruption, and Racket Society

48:32 • 7min

Walter Benjamin's Theological Claims and Historical Suffering

55:36 • 27min

The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances.

Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world.

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