Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph

Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph

Jay, Martin

Hardcover

Series: Life of Ideas

Philosophy

ISBN10: 0226837211
ISBN13: 9780226837215
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Jan 22 2025
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.27
Height: 1.18 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.06
Language: English
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.

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