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Theodor W. Adorno resisted Sigmund Freud’s explanation of artistic creation as the sublimation of the artist’s libidinal drives. It focuses too much on the artist rather than the work and is in the service of accommodation to the status quo. But Adorno also questioned the simple reversal of Freud’s formula, pointing out the dangers of unmediated desublimation. The artist, he suggested, should sublimate his or her rage instead. No less significant was the retrospective cultural sublimation of objects from exhausted devotional or cultic contexts, which preserved the unfulfilled yearnings originally expressed in them.

In addition to the testimony of the author’s own “sublime historical experience” during a visit to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, this essay draws on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis of four photographs from the Holocaust in his Images in Spite of All to demonstrate the power of Ankersmit’s argument. It speculates on the relationship between such experiences and theological notions of “real presence,” which also seek to collapse the distance between past and present and confound conventional historicist notions of temporal continuity and contextual determination. Against Ankersmit’s claim that sublime historical experiences occur only when a civilizational transformation causes nostalgia for a lost past, it argues that they may also be felt when traumatic events for whose return no one yearns disrupt the intelligibility of historical narratives and meaningful representation.

The underlying assumption of Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness is that “history” can be understood as a unified and meaningful meta-narrative, which can be read along the lines of a realist novel. Although the future is not guaranteed, the present contains “objective possibilities” which can be identified and realized through activist intervention in the world by those who are destined to “make” history, the proletariat. In the intervening century since the Russian Revolution, it has become impossible to read “history” as a singular, triumphalist story leading to human emancipation or identify any one group as its subjective agent. To salvage the revolutionary potential of Lukacs’ work, it has been read instead in terms of “fidelity to the Event” by such latter-day Leninists as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižik. But their recourse to a meta-historical notion of pre-figuration and future realization is itself no less beholden to a literary or rhetorical device, that of figura, which was traced by Erich Auerbach in originally religious terms.

Responding to the recent exhortation by the historian David Armitage to return to a history of "big ideas" traced over long periods of time, this paper examines reasons for the resistance to his advice voiced by both textualist and contextualist intellectual historians. Discussing the alternatives to traditional history of ideas in "conceptual history" and "metaphorology," it argues for the virtues of a method that acknowledges, even welcomes semantic ambiguity and the dynamic force field of relations in which ideas are historically embedded. Rather than settling for the smoothing out of differences entailed in "distant reading" techniques based on the digital retrieval of long-duration tendencies, it argues for attentiveness to the ruptures in meaning and unanticipated innovations that prevent the history of idea being an exercise in meta-narratives of growth, development and dissemination.

The challenge of nominalism in philosophy and theology to the reality of universals has been a motor of modern thought. Translated into aesthetic terms, it has abetted resistance to generic conventions and helped undermine essentialist notions of aesthetic form. Theodor W. Adorno had a characteristically dialectical response to nominalism, applauding its subversion of categorical reifications, but alarmed by its indiscriminate leveling of the distinction between concept and object, which could also efface the distinction between works of art and everyday objects. In musical terms, he appreciated the nominalist emphasis on individual works as opposed to generic formal categories, and praised Arnold Schoenberg's atonal revolution. But he was also aware that carried to an extreme, nominalism could lead to the subjective domination of a nature that was understood to be without essential characteristics of its own. In his late embrace of musique informelle, he admired a music that eschewed both reified categories and subjective domination of the apparent contingency of the material world, a music that expressed a nominalism that might better be called “magical” than “conventional.”

Over its long history, the Frankfurt School attempted to enrich its critique of modern society, largely rooted in its imaginative rereading of the Marxist tradition, by drawing on insights from psychoanalysis. Although the specific insights informing the work of Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor W. Adorno may have been different, all supported the productive integration of Marx and Freud. In particular, the Frankfurt School used Freudian theory to explain the failure of the working class to assume its putative revolutionary mission, the unexpected rise of fascism, and the possible ways in which utopia might be envisaged. In addition, most explicitly in the work of Adorno, they pitted the materialist impulses of psychoanalysis against the consciousness philosophy they identified with the Idealist tradition.

This chapter traces Leo Lowenthal's early intellectual life through a series of passionate engagements with traditional and modernist Jewish thought that continued to find expression in his work at the Institute for Social Research and, after 1933, in the United States. As a student in his twenties, Lowenthal was part of the community of young Jewish intellectuals surrounding Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel, an adherent of German philosophy and Orthodox Judaism. He was committed to the Weimar Jewish Renaissance, active in Jewish communal organizations, and joined the psychoanalytic group around Erich Fromm and Frieda Reichmann, an observant Jew whose sanatorium served kosher meals and observed Jewish holidays. The chapter then identifies the traces of Jewish identity in Lowenthal's reading of such traces in the life of Heinrich Heine. Ultimately, Lowenthal's Jewish visibility reflects both on Jewish sources in critical theory and the contributions of critical theory to the evolution of Jewishness.

As demonstrated by Marx’s fierce defence of his integrity when anonymously accused of lying in 1872, he was a principled believer in both personal honesty and the value of truth in politics. Whether understood as enabling an accurate, ‘scientific’ depiction of the contradictions of the present society or a normative image of a truly just society to come, truth-telling was privileged by Marx over hypocrisy as a political virtue. Contemporary Marxists like Alain Badiou continue this tradition, arguing that revolutionary politics should be understood as a ‘truth procedure’. Drawing on the alternative position of political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, who distrusted tin; monologic and absolutist implications of a strong notion of truth in politics, this paper defends the role that hypocrisy and mendacity, understood in terms of lots of little lies rather than one big one, can play in a pluralist politics, in which, pace Marx, rhetoric, opinion and the clash of values resist being subsumed under a singular notion of the truth.

In this article, the author analyses the role of irony in one of the texts that had the most influence in the 1968 movements around the world: The One-dimensional Man, by Herbert Marcuse. Understanding irony as an evident sign of human two-dimensionality, and emphasizing its dialectical potential, the author questions the subversive viability and the specific characteristics of every type of irony. To conclude, he focuses in the operability of irony in Marcuse’s work to encourage resilience and increase the possibility of inspiring political engagement through it., En el presente artículo, el autor analiza el papel que juega la ironía en uno de los textos que más influyeron en los movimientos de 1968 alrededor del mundo: El hombre unidimensional, de Herbert Marcuse. Entendiendo la ironía como una muestra evidente de la bidimensionalidad humana y haciendo énfasis en su potencial dialéctico, el autor se cuestiona sobre la viabilidad subversiva y las características particulares de cada tipo de ironía. Para concluir se centra en la operatividad que tiene la ironía en la obra de Marcuse para fomentar el desarrollo de resiliencia y aumentar la posibilidad de inspirar participación política a través de ella.

No contemporary intellectual historian has produced more influential reflections on the historian's craft than Hayden White and Quentin Skinner, yet their legacy has never been meaningfully compared. Doing so reveals a surprising complementarity in their approach, at least to the extent that Skinner's stress on recovering the intentionality of authors fits well with White's observation that irony is the dominant rhetorical mode of historical narrative in our day. Irony itself, to be sure, has to be divided broadly speaking into its dramatic or Socratic variants and the unstable and paradoxical alternative defended by poststructuralist critics. The latter produced in White an anxiety about the anarchistic implications of an allegedly inherent undecidability in historical interpretation and narration, which threatened to conflate history entirely with fiction. By recovering the necessary role of intentionality as a prerequisite for a more moderate version of Socratic and dramatic irony—in which hindsight provides some purchase on a truth denied actors at the time history is made—it is possible to rescue an ironic attitude that can register the frequency of unintended consequences without surrendering to the conclusion that no explanation or interpretation is superior to another. Against yet a third alternative, which tries to reconstruct the past rationally as a prelude to the present, acknowledging the ironic undermining of intentions avoids giving all the power to the contemporary historian and restores a dialogic balance between actors in the past and their present-day interpreters.

Ever since Clifford Geertz urged the “blurring of genres” in the social sciences, many scholars have considered the crossing of disciplinary boundaries a healthy alternative to rigidly maintaining them. But what precisely does the metaphor of “blurring” imply? By unpacking the varieties of visual experiences that are normally grouped under this rubric, this essay seeks to provide some precision to our understanding of the implications of fuzziness. It extrapolates from the blurring caused by differential focal distances, velocities of objects in the visual field, and competing perspectival vantage points to comparable effects in the intersection of different scholarly disciplines. Arguing against the holistic implications of Geertz's metaphor, as well as the even more totalizing concept of “consilience” introduced by E. O. Wilson, it suggests that blurring implies new types of complexity between or among those disciplines.

Two new books about the Pragmatist tradition, Richard Bernstein's The Pragmatic Turn and Colin Koopman's Pragmatism as Transition, represent respectively a summing up of the past half-century of the tradition's history and a possible program for its future development. Bernstein ecumenically considers the achievements of a wide range of thinkers from Peirce, Dewey, and James to Brandom, Putnam, and Rorty, drawing valuable lessons from each, while not sparing criticism of their flaws. Koopman also tries to bridge the gap between what he calls “classicopragmatism” and “neopragmatism,” although he finds more to admire in Rorty than in his predecessors. Whereas Bernstein attempts to supplement the pragmatist tradition by turning to Habermas, Koopman finds his inspiration in Foucault. Both authors emphasize the historicist, evolutionary, and transitionalist implications of pragmatism, paying as a result insufficient attention to the historical possibilities of repetition, rupture, discontinuity, and the unexpected event. In terms of the political implications they draw, Koopman advocates a meliorist incrementalism that lacks any real bite, while Bernstein expresses dissatisfaction with the democratic pieties of Rorty's final work, but doesn't really provide a sustained alternative.

After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was growing more ‘liquid’ and ‘lighter’ than before. This essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize Bauman’s insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the ‘Mercurian’ culture of diasporic Jewish life.

"The search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times," writes Marshall Berman in his book on Rousseau, The Politics of Authenticity, "is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are. ... the desire for authenticity has emerged in modern society as one of the most politically explosive of human impulses."1 Even those with less radical agendas, like Sigmund Freud, have been seen as sharing the same desire. According to Lionel Trilling in his classic study Sincerity and Authenticity, Freud's insis tence on the tragic dimension of the human condition "had the intention of sustaining the authenticity of human existence that formerly had been rati fied by God."2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Trilling added, dreaded "the inauthenticity

Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001)Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2002)“Great writers are either husbands or lovers,” Susan Sontag explained in a 1963 essay on Camus. “Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality—that they never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar—if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions, and dangerous sensations.” Camus was “the ideal husband of contemporary letters,” she opined, but “as in life, so in art both are necessary, husband and lovers. It's a great pity when one is forced to choose between them.”

(2003). Mourning a Metaphor: The Revolution is Over. Parallax: Vol. 9, Mourning Revolution, pp. 17-20.

The blindfolding of the allegorical goddess of Justice in the early modern period has been generally understood as a mark of the new stress on judicial impartiality, which led to the modern cult of the abstract norm in juridical positivism. This paper asks the question, what were the costs of denying images to the eyes of justice? It explores answers suggested by the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, Derrida and several feminist theorists. Although acknowledging the power of their argument against abstract notions of impartial justice, it concludes by proposing certain justifications for at least a temporary suspension of the ability to see visible differences in applying the law.

The popularity of films like Titanic betokens a massive shift in the nature of aesthetic spectatorship in our time. The contemplative, distanced viewer who is able to judge from afar the spectacle before him or her, has been replaced by a more proximate, involved "kinaesthetic" subject whose body is stimulated as much as his or her eye. This is evident not only in mass culture with amusement thrill rides and the return of what has been called the "cinema of attractions"; this new spectator can also be discerned in avant-garde culture, as shown by the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists which caused such a stir in London and New York. This spectator is especially attracted to simulacral scenes of destruction and catastrophe, in which he or she is virtually immersed. If aesthetic judgement is to be a model for its political counterpart, as has been argued by theorists like Lyotard and Arendt, it cannot do so on the basis of this aesthetics of violent immersion.

Vision and the gaze are key issues in the analysis of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism. In recent radical theory, generally, and French theory in particular, vision has been seen as a means of control. But this view is often unnuanced. It bypasses questions such as: Why is it that contemporary theories have been so critical of vision, and generous towards listening (in psychoanalysis) and language (in philosophy)? This collection of original essays brings together historical studies and contemporary theoretical perspectives on vision. The historical papers focus in turn on Ancient Greece, medieval theology, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. These historical studies are themselves thoroughly informed by poststructuralist theory. They provide a rigorous background for several new, exciting articles on vision and its bearings for feminism, race, sexual orientation, film and art. This collection is the first of its kind in juxtaposing historical and contemporary

Illustrations ix Reprint Acknowledgments xi Acknowledgments xv Introduction: The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires / Sumathi Ramaswamy 1 Section I: The Imperial Optic Introduction / Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy 25 Part 1: Empires of the Palette 1. The Walls of Images / Serge Gruzinski 47 2. Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science / Daniela Bleichmar 64 3. Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette / Jordanna Bailkin 91 4. Colonial Panaromania / Roger Benjamin 111 Part 2. The Mass-Printed Imperium 5. Objects of Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts in European Engravings / Nicholas Thomas 141 6. Excess in the City? Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1780-c. 1795 / Natasha Eaton 159 7. Advertising and the Optics of Colonial Power at the Fin de Siecle / David Ciarlo 189 Part 3. Mapping, Claiming, Reclaiming 8. Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space, and Hispanic Modernity / Ricardo Padron 211 9. Mapping an Exotic World: The Global Project of Dutch Cartography, circa 1700 / Benjamin Schmidt 246 10. Visual Regimes of Colonization: European and Aboriginal Seeing in Australia / Terry Smith 267 Part 4. The Imperial Lens 11. The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era China (1900-1901), Making Civilization / James L. Hevia 283 12. Colonial Theaters of Proof: Representation and Laughter in the 1930s Rockefeller Foundation Hygeine Cinema in Java / Eric A. Stein 315 13. Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema / Brian Larkin 346 Section II. Postcolonial Looking Introduction / Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy 377 Part 5. Subaltern Seeing: An Overlap of Complexities 14. Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse / Zeynep Celik 395 15. Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern India / Sumathi Ramaswamy 415 16. Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism / Christopher Pinney 450 17. "I Am Rendered Speechless by Your Idea of Beauty": The Picturesque in History and Art in the Postcolony / Krista A. Thompson 471 18. Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: The Politics of Identification / Robert Stam 503 Part 6. Regarding and Reconstituting Europe 19. Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection / Christopher Pinney 539 20. Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference / Simon Gikandi 566 21. Double Dutch and the Culture Game / Olu Oguibe 594 Conclusion. A Parting Glance: Empire and Visuality / Martin Jay 609 Contributors 621 Index 629

Reading the reviews of Downcast Eyes solicited by Comparative Studies in Society and History is an experience at once exhilarating and disturbing. The exhilaration comes from the realization that this book, whose genesis depended so deeply on the advice and criticism of colleagues in many different fields, can have something of interest to say to an interdisciplinary audience. What is, however, less pleasing, at least at first glance, is its evident inability to persuade the exponents of the different disciplines represented here to bracket, at least temporarily, the presuppositions they bring with them. Not surprisingly, the most sympathetic response comes from a fellow intellectual historian, Lloyd Kramer, whose professional deformation is the same as my own. Kramer astutely notes an indirect and unacknowledged debt to my dissertation director, H. Stuart Hughes, whose own approach often yoked together a welter of different thinkers by focusing on their common response to a question that seemed at first glance marginal to their central concerns. He also discerns a common thread in our unwillingness to join the (now even more) fashionable repudiation of the Enlightenment, even if we acknowledge the power of many of the criticisms made against certain of its variants. And he credits the book with a fair-minded engagement with the ideas taken "on their own terms" of figures whose general agenda may well seem anathema to any straightforward defense of the Enlightenment, however it may be understood. Although he chides me for invoking too many authorities and failing to provide images (a frequently voiced complaint to which I will later return), Kramer has a keen sense of the scholarly tradition in which the book can be best situated, and, happily for its author, judges it generously. Craig Calhoun, representing sociology, also credits the book's historical value and praises its "theoretical acuity" but wonders about its larger purpose, its message for our times. Unhappy with what he sees as its disengaged stance, he bemoans its lack of political commitment, or at least its failure to place in the foreground the political stakes involved in the French theorists' interrogation of vision. He also questions the coherence of the book's narrative subject, which he feels is less self-evident than the Western Marxist tradition I tried to explore in an earlier work, Marxism and Totality. Have I, he asks, created a discourse retrospectively rather than merely found one ready

En este artículo, el autor realiza un análisis filosófico sobre la actividad cotidiana de la experiencia real vivida. Para ello, se vale de algunos de los filósofos que han abordado la problemática del valor de la experiencia en el mundo: Benjamin, Adorno, Hegel y Heidegger, principalmente. En un análisis comparativo que oscila de las diferencias a las similitudes entre los filósofos por él estudiados, el autor va desglosando el significado actual del fenómeno de la experiencia en nuestros días, a fin de responder si éste continúa siendo toral en la existencia humana o, por el contrario, está en declive, ha degenerado o ha sido, irremediable y trágicamente, destruido por los horrores bélicos y tecnológicos de la modernidad. In this article, the author makes a philosophical analysis of activity of day-to-day real life experience. To this effect, he makes use of some of the philosophers that have approached the problems of the value of experience in the owrld, mainly. Benjamin, Adorno, Hegel and Heidegger. In a comparative analysis that oscillates between differences and similarities of the philosophers studied, the author unthreads today's meaning of experience or if, on the other hand, it is declining, degenerating or has been, tragically and without remedy, destroyed by wars and the technological horrors of modernity.

Let me begin by asking you to accept on faith a premise that I will not have the time to defend or even elaborate here, but which I have discussed elsewhere at length.1 That premise is the hitherto unremarked existence of a pervasive and deeply-rooted rejection of the ocularcentric bias of Western culture on the part of a wide variety of French intellectuals in the twentieth century. Whereas our dominant philosophical, scientific and aesthetic traditions have generally celebrated the ‘nobility of sight’,2 innumerable French thinkers from at least the time of Bergson have come increasingly to distrust its hegemonic role in modern epistemology, aesthetics and even social life. Beginning with a suspicion of the dominant scopic regime of the modern era, which combined Albertian perspectivalism with a Cartesian faith in the monocular gaze in the mind’s eye at ‘clear and distinct ideas’, their critique often widened to embrace any variant of visual primacy, whether it be dependent on speculation, observation or revelatory illumination.

Perhaps no twentieth-century philosopher was as favorably inclined towards the role of aesthetic experience in building a democratic culture as was John Dewey, the preeminent public intellectual in America during the first half of the twentieth century. His vision of democracy necessitated a robust commitment not only to an open-ended process of unimpeded free inquiry, which emulated that of the scientific community, but also to the self-realization that came through active participation in the public sphere. The model of that self-realization he saw best expressed in the sensually mediated, organically consummated, formally molded activity that was aesthetic experience. “That which distinguishes an experience as esthetic (sic),” he wrote, “is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversions, into movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close.” 1 As such, it was the quintessential exemplar of what is meant when we say we “have an experience,” rather than merely register an ephemeral sensation. In the words of Thomas Alexander, the foremost commentator on Dewey’s aesthetics, in the idea of art we find the moment in which human alienation is overcome and the need for the experience of meaning and value is satisfied. Through art, in the aesthetic experience, the rift in the world that frustrates our primordial desire for encountering a sense of meaning and value is healed. 2

In 1930, Walter Benjamin reviewed a collection of essays edited by the conservative revolutionary Ernst Junger and entitled War and Warrior. Noting its contributors' avid romanticization of the technology of death and the total mobilization of the masses, he warned that it was "nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l'art pour l'art to war itself" (122). Six years later, in the concluding reflections of his celebrated essay "The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin widened the scope of his analysis beyond war to politics in general. Fascism, he charged, meant the aestheticization of politics, the deadly consummation of l'art pour l'art's credo "Fiat arspereat mundus" (244). Like much else in Benjamin's remarkable corpus, the reception and dissemination of these ideas was delayed for a generation or so after his suicide in 1940. By then his remedy-the politicization of art by Communism in the 1936 piece,1 the transformation of war into a civil war between classes in the earlier review

The exemplary anecdotes are known to us all. Adorno arrived in America in 1938 to work on Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project. Lazarsfeld wrote of his new acquaintance: "He looks as you would imagine a very absent-minded German professor, and he behaves so foreign that I feel like a member of the Mayflower society."' Adorno traveled to the Project's offices in an abandoned brewery in Newark, New Jersey through a tunnel under the Hudson river and admitted: "I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature Theater of