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Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)
01:22:23
An interview with Martin Jay
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- [00:01]
Martin Jay
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- [00:53]
Martin Jay
Hello everybody.
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Marshall Poe
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
- [02:00]
Ryan Tripp
Welcome, everyone. This is Ryan Tripp, your host for New Books in History, New Books Network. I'm here today with Martin Jay. He's the Sidney Ehrman professor of History Emeritus at UC Berkeley. He recently published eminent critiques, the Frame for School Under Pressure, which we're going to be discussing today. Welcome, Professor J.
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Martin Jay
Great to be here, Ryan. Happy to do this again.
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Ryan Tripp
All right, yes. This is our third time talking, so let's just dive into the questions again. Your book is Eminent Critiques, published earlier this year by Bristow Press. So, to start, can you first explain the negative dialectic of trans transcended an imminent critique? And if you want to focus on imminent critique, you can the title of your book and the two's reconcilability or irreconcilability, that is the transcendent and imminent critique in the context of Walter Benjamin and the history of Bradford School ideas.
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Martin Jay
Okay. The idea of imminent critique is taken, of course, from the practice of the Frankfurt School, which for a very long period of time felt compelled to give a justification for its critical vantage point. Now, there is actually, in the history of the reception of critical theory, a debate over whether or not such a justification is necessary. And some people, or, you know, you simply need a kind of intuitive sense of injustice or oppression. And you don't have to give a, what we might call plausible explanation of where you're coming from. But there are others in the critical theory tradition who have said, no, it's necessary to do so. And the reason they give is that basically critique has to be directed not merely towards an object, towards the world outside, which needs to be in some ways criticized and improved, but also needs to be directed inwardly. That is to say, one has to ask, who is doing the criticism? What is the ground of the criticism? What is the justification of the criticism? As a result, critical theory, the tradition of the Frankfurt School developed by Max Horkheimer and his colleagues, often sought to find some sort of what the French would call point, a pui, a kind of point from which critique can be launched. And broadly speaking, there were two alternatives. The first we might call transcendent, that is to say, the belief that there are eternal, abiding and universal norms that need to be brought into play whenever one does a critique of actually existing circumstances. So, for example, equality or freedom or justice or the end of exploitation. We can give a lot, a lot of examples of what might be seen as ahistorical, eternal, transcendent ideals which then can be brought to bear. Now, the argument against this was, of course, that these allegedly universal internal ideals were themselves grounded in particular historical circumstances. That seemingly transcendent critique was really the expression of the viewpoint, the interests, even of what we might call local and parochial groups. And therefore it was necessary to put them under pressure to do a kind of, we might call it metacritique of transcendent norms. And the alternative to this was the idea of an imminent critique, one that was not based on allegedly historical and eternal and universal norms, but one that took instead the standards of a particular community, the standards of particular form of life, the standards of a particular moment, and said that there was a gap between those standards, those what we might call professed values and practice. So that, for example, in the case of countries that call themselves democratic and give you a kind of series of explanations of what democracy really means, if their practice is not democratic, if in fact certain groups are excluded or certain voices are not allowed to be heard, then there is an imminent critique based on the value of the ideology or theory or the philosophical understanding of the society. In addition, imminent critique was based on the idea that there can be what is sometimes called a performative contradiction, in which, for example, there is a critique of the idea of rational discourse, the critique of the idea of giving reasons, because it seems to be something that is done only by certain people who have the capacity to reason, the capacity to make educated arguments, and this capacity is then called into question. But if it is done so by giving reasons, if it is done so by giving justifications for undermining it, then there is a performative contradiction, because what is being attacked is in fact being practically performed. And so immunocratique also brings that kind of contradiction into play. Now, the story is a very complicated one, because immunicritique itself comes under question, becomes problematic when the gap between the professed values of a society and what the society actually is doing narrows. And in the history of the Frankfurt School, there was an alarm that was sounded, a toxin that was sounded, we might say, when Aduano and Horkheimer talked about an entirely administered society, and when Herbert Marcuse talked about a one dimensional society, because what they suggested by that was that the society's values were themselves somehow so corrupted that there was no gap between what was called for and what was actually done. So if the society, for example, valued what we might call neoliberal economic self sufficiency and was opposed to the ideals of solidarity or even socialist communitarianism, those ideals were in fact realized by a society which was based on selfishness, self protection, self interest and self, we might call it even selfishness. So the gap between values and practices was shortened, was narrowed and lost itself, lost the ability to be a source of in imminent critique, which brought back the necessity, we might say, of something that was transcendent, transcending this particular society. The other issue, of course, that the transcendent critique raises is the fact that every society has competing values. Every society has values which are introduced from, as it were the outside. So if in a particularly, let's say, close communitarian, even totalitarian society, there are some people who appeal to human rights as transcending that society as universal and basically somehow supported by values that are not imminent in the society at the moment, it's possible for them to use those as a critical vantage point. So the upshot of all this, we might say, is that there is a negative dialectic of transcendent and immigrant critique, one that understands the inadequacy of each and also the difficulty, if not impossibility, of combining them in a seamless way. So critical theory, we might say, is dependent on historically variable sources of critical energy. And I think that's one of the valuable lessons of the history of the theory, that at times it was close to the imminent, at times it was close to the transcendent critique. Now, having said that, and I'm sure I haven't explained it with full clarity, it's one of those issues that needs to be really unpacked very carefully. The book itself is called Immunicrity because it includes a number of essays written over the past few years. One of them is a bit older, the 2000s essays that are based to a certain extent on pitting the values of critical theory, or at least some of its, let's say, critical impulses, against its own practice, against its own perhaps inconsistent practices. I'm not going to call it hypocritical, but at least there's a tension that existed. And so the book tries to tease out some of the, let's say hidden, or at least hitherto not fully appreciated tensions. I wouldn't call them fully contradictions within critical theory itself. And so I call the. The book the. The under title is Frankfurt School under Pressure. So what I'm trying to do is put a little pressure on the tradition rather than simply be its spokesman. And to each of the essays, to one degree or another, presents a kind of imminent critique of some of the Frank School's own arguments, some very explicitly, others more indirectly. That's, I would say, what ties the book together, using imminent critique in an imminently critical way.
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Ryan Tripp
Okay, well, sufficiently impacted for me, but I sure are audiences who would like to read the book further, further understand that concept so. Or rather that negative dialectic. So next, how does the idea of an expanded field. You discuss this in the book, and it's kind of interesting this. How does the idea of an expanded field in historical narratives, and you use the example, or you actually rather focus on the so called German 1968, and then expand that to 1967 and 1945. So how does this idea of expanded field in historical narratives and methodology engage with concerns over Frankfurt School possible Eurocentrism without infusing their shifting ideas with the kind of amorphous post structuralist thought?
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Martin Jay
The idea of expanded field is one that I take to a certain extent from the work of Alta Benjamin, who argued for dialectical images which broke through a single historicist narrative with a, let's call it major protagonist, whose adventures are followed over time, and instead argues that there has to be a kind of active destruction of that narrative and a reassembling of the fragments in new constellations which include our own interests today. So 1968, the German 1968, the essay that opens the book is pitted against the war in the Middle east in 1967 and also the memory of 1945 on the part of German Jewish survivors. The Franklin School mostly were German Jewish survivors, and also against the new. When the essay was first composed, I think it was 2019. So all of these are put into play as different moments in an expanded field. Now, later, it's interesting that you would notice the implications of this for Eurocentrism later, in an essay which has not yet been published, which I gave at the conference at Harvard a couple of weeks ago on the centenary of the Frankfurt School, where the Institute of Social Research, I argued that the idea of an expanded field can also help us understand the Eurocentric limits, but also the ways in which Eurocentrism is undermined in the history of the school. First of all, it's often charged that the Frankfurt School was indifferent in its long history to the so called Third World, what we now call the Global south, that it focused mostly on the Northern Hemisphere, on Europe and of course the United States. Now my argument there is that, well, first of all, by being forced out of Germany in 1933, and many of them of course were meant that was immediately to the United States lived there for a dozen years and a good number of them were stayed. After the Second World War ended, the Frankfurt School's critical theory was already decentered, deterritorialized. It was already engaged in a kind of, I would call it Euro or Westocentric self critique because it understood that there was something different that was happening in the United States and one had to take that into account. Detlev Claus famously said that without the American experience there would have been no critical theory. But it is certainly true, and Enzo Traverso and others made this point, that there was very Little interest in the so called Third World. I remember having conversation with Herbert Marcuse where I asked him if he was interested in going to Castro's Cuba. And he said, well, you know, I don't speak Spanish and I. I think I probably will avoid the opportunity of going there. And he never, as far as I know, actually did go. Now, one could argue today, and of course, this begins really, let's say, perhaps 30, 40 years ago, the internationalization, the globalization of critical theory has meant that there is now an extraordinary interest outside of the Northern Hemisphere, outside of the United States and of Europe, all throughout the world. And I was struck when I went to a conference in Frankfurt in September which dealt with the centenary of the Institute. How many of the speakers came from other parts of the world? And there is a consortium of critical theory organizations. There are programs, there are conferences, there are journals. A consortium which Judith Butler basically began to organize at Berkeley many years ago, which includes something like 500 different critical theory groups around the world. And this shows the extent to which critical theory has no longer, you know, been confined to Europe and America. Now, the point I make in that paper that I gave at Harvard is very simple. But this is not yet a theory which has been, let's call it, symmetrically influenced by what is coming from the outside. Instead, it is basically a question of the reception and discussion of critical theory initiated in Europe, initiated in the United States elsewhere. So there are, you know, lots of articles about what Adorno or Benjamin taught in, say, the reception of Brazil or in China or elsewhere. What needs to be done now? What is the importance of the 21st century expansion? The second century in the history is the. The symmetricalization, we might say, of the influence, that is to say we in the first World, that we still want to use that locution, are very hopeful that we'll be instructed by. By the critical theorists who have emerged elsewhere, and that the expansion of critical theory is one which will decenter it from its origins. And this is ultimately a healthy thing. And traveling theory, as Edward Said famously pointed out, involves a kind of creative misreading, a stretching, a translation process which loses something in terms of precise application, the original ideas, but gains something by the creative misreading that produces new and unexpected insights, that recontextualizes and gives us a sense of the opportunities that were not fully appreciated the first time through. One could argue the importance of history in critical theory. The critical theory was never interested in the, we might call the canonical sacralization of their original texts or ideas, but rather understood Them as produced by, or at least reflected through, we might say, their historical context. And as that context changed, changed when they came to the United States, as it changed when they returned to post Nazi Germany, it now is changing. Its critical theory is expanding into a global discussion now. There is, of course, and people have argued this, the issue of dilution, where critical theory becomes kind of empty slogan meaning absolutely nothing. And the issue of post structuralism, which you raised, a complicated one. Because my general feeling is that the opposition between critical theory and French thought, which was so prevalent in the 1980s, 1990s, is now no longer, I think, a valid way to look at things, because we've learned from post structuralist thought. There's been, I think, a productive dialogue which includes, you know, the, the heirs, we might say, of Coe and Lecol and Derrida and Deleuze and Lyotard, with Habermas and Axel Honan and other more recent critical theorists. So that it's not an either or. And the expanded field includes insights from all these traditions, which of course have had their impact outside Europe as well. So I'm, I would say, cautiously optimistic about the implications of expanding the field and allowing us to think through the history of critical theory not simply as a historic narrative with a hero, a kind of meta narrative which is basically coherent and has a telos even, but rather one that is open ended and will continue to create what Bennion would have called dialectical images rather than historicist metanarrat.
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Ryan Tripp
So to extend this discussion, particularly given post structuralist influences and post colonial thought, how, how, why did Theodore Adorno, and he's a, he's a major member of the Frankfurt school. How did he employ what in your, in your book is referred to as posterior sublimation? And let's tack on the aesthetic sublimation to both affirm and critique assessments of authenticity in ritual material culture, which was often stolen from colonized peoples. Did Adorno challenge or confer Freudian ideas or both?
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Martin Jay
We have to step back a bit and ask what sublimation, when it comes to aesthetic questions might mean. Riordano was skeptical of the, what we might call official Freudian view. To a certain extent. Freud reduced aesthetic products to the sublimation of libido desires, the sublimation of personal neurotic impulses which were then realized in forms that gained not simply idiosyncratic, but rather, we might call them, culturally valuable and collectively meaningful new works that was somehow able to transcend the original neurotic impulses that created them. But no one was very anxious to avoid this analysis because he thought that basically sublimation ended up taming, domesticating, and creating a kind of affirmative version of culture, one in which the libidinal desires, the impulses that were transgressive, were to a certain extent domesticated in ways that made them basically no longer critical, that made them somehow conformist. He also disliked the idea of reducing works of art to simply an expression of the neuroses or the desires or the sublimation of their creators. The works of art gained their own autonomy. Works of art gained, we might say, a force that was material, that transcended that of the vital, spiritual, creative energies that created them. So he argued against sublimation and talked about the works of art and the artist, expressing a kind of idiosyncrasy that was peculiar to the artist and led to works that gained relative autonomy. He was a believer in the modernist notion of a kind of art that became basically for its own sake, with ultimate potential to be reintegrated into the world in a critical way, but which could not be reduced back to the artist, him or herself. Now, having said that, and this is the argument of the essay that you're poking a bit at now, there was a notion of sublimation in Adorno. 1. There are two dimensions. The first is the idea that the artist sublimates rage, sublimates not libidinal desire, but anger. And this sublimation keeps alive, we might say, in the work the indignation at the inequalities, the exploitation, the suffering that the artist is in touch with. So works of art are not simply sublimation of desire, but also may in fact involve the sublimation of anger, rage, and the justified critique of the actual suffering that still goes on in our society. But secondly, this is, I think, the point of the question you're asking. It was what I argue could be called posterior aesthetic sublimation, in which objects or practices which were initially understood in different terms then become redescribed and in certain sense, we might say salvaged in an aesthetic context. Now, the first example I give this is devotional objects. In other words, we know in the history of Western art that many objects, for example, altars in medieval cathedrals or works that were, you know, there for the glory of a prince, that these were then stripped of their religious or political function and redescribed in aesthetic terms, the great example in visual arts being the putting of works of art into the Louvre during the French Revolution as part of the patrimony of the country and saving them from the iconoclastic impulse of some of the revolutionaries. And the second great example which I talk about is the redescription of a Bach St. Matthew Passion, which, 100 years after its first performance in the church in Leipzig, becomes basically a work of aesthetic enjoyment when Mendelssohn performs it in a secular context in the 1830s in Berlin. Now, the point about this is that there's also a second posterior aesthetic sublimation, which is not of devotional objects, but rather of objects that were ethnographically interested in, that came from, as you point out, the culture that's often stolen or at least appropriated from peoples outside of the west, peoples who were initially argued to be simply primitive. Now, there are lots of reasons to bemoan this, to lament the. We might call it appropriation of the cultural legacy of these so called primitive people, partly because it robs them of their, we might call original function as objects in practices that have meaning for those people, and instead sees them as simply formally beautiful. Now, Adorno argues against this for two reasons. One, he's against the idea of an authentic original function. He's very much opposed to the ideology of authenticity. Instead, works that can be redescribed in aesthetic terms show their ability to be decontextualized, to transcend, we might say, their original context, to become more than just what they were first functionally used for, and gain a kind of power that moves us beyond that use. And so, therefore, the aesthetic salvation, we might say, of works of ethnographic art, simply in a museum that was used for, you know, just anthropological purposes, into a museum where they are recognized as equally valuable from an aesthetic point of view, something like a museum of modern art. This is, to a certain extent, an advance in our appreciation of their, we might call it potential possibilities, their potentiality to be understood outside of their original context. In addition, there is also what he argued was the. We might call it displaced, but nonetheless still powerful preservation of the original memetic impulse in works of art. Impulses that involved works that were used, perhaps ritual purposes to bring into life what had been lost, what had been medically somehow appreciated when it happened, but which then had been, you know, basically lost over time. Works of art preserve memetically the experience of that initial wonder that was felt by, if you want to call them, primitive people or early peoples in front of a world, a world of nature, world of animals, a world of magical realities, we might say, that had been lost. And so these works contain within them not only the Sublimation of rage that he mentioned before, that I mentioned before. But also the sublimation, we might say, of the mimetic relationship to nature, to animals, to external reality, which had the ability, Phil Adorno hoped, to challenge an instrumental relationship, a dominating relationship between humans and nature. So works of art had that capacity and they are what we might call posterior sublimation. Preserve that in works that were previously simply understood in their ethnographic context.
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Ryan Tripp
Collection, actually. So thank you. That was a really fascinating facet of your collection. So the next topic we're going to address, I think kind of a two part question and I think both focus on this notion of quoting here Jewish responsibility and sustaining antisemitism. And that seems surprising to me. I've read arguments about that. So again, this notion of Jewish responsibility, they suppose more anti Semitism or sustaining anti Semitism. So Adorno and Erik Erickson both use psychoanalysis in relation to this question. Can you address their arguments?
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Martin Jay
This is an extraordinarily sensitive and difficult question which has to be addressed very carefully and with lots of nuance. And I can't do justice to it to adhere. But let me, let me just begin. The essay is on the issue of blaming the victim. And the essay begins with the discussion of the joke, which I'm sure many of you, the audience, recall, which concerns blaming the Jews for the First World War. And the joke involves asking somebody who was responsible for the First World War? And the person answers, the Jews and the bicycle riders and the philochulosis. The Jews and the bike. Why the bicycle riders? And the answer is, well, why the Jews? And the implication of that joke is that in both cases bicycle riders and Jews, there's absolutely arbitrary choice that is crazy to involve either of them in the explanation to the First World War. It's a simple scapegoating which has no resonance, no validity in terms of actual responsibility. Now, what's striking is that Hannah Arendt very explicitly attacked this joke and very implicitly. Adorno and Erickson also agreed that the joke was insufficient to explain why the Jews were singled out not only for things like the origin of the First World War by anti Semites in Germany after the war, but also over millennia, alas, for various, we might call them, alleged sins, crimes or whatever. So the question is a very delicate one. What not is the. What is not the blame, but rather the active responsibility that the Jews play in creating the animus that sometimes leads to anti Semitism and sometimes at its worst leads to even exterminist. Exterminist Anti Semitism. Now, the first point to be made in responding to this is to say that there is something called a phantasmatic version of the Jews. The idea that there is a coherent and eternal community which shares in every possible way all characteristics, that there is some sort of reified notion of an essential Jew, of a Jew who exists no matter what pretensions are made to assimilate, no matter what historical differences, that there is something called the Jew which is even crazier than the idea of the Jews. And I think all three of our protagonists in this essay, Adorno, Erikson and Hannah Arendt, are very uneasy with that idea because it's quite clear that empirically we take it from what we might call anomalous point of view, all we have are individuals who are grouped under that category. And just to take random examples, Albert Einstein is not the same thing as Bernie Mada. And politically, George Soros is not the same thing as Stephen Miller. So the idea that the Jews present a kind of united front with some sort of conspiratorial elders ruling what they think is obvious, absolute nonsense. And he said that it's also true that for 2000 plus years, the community of people who identify with the category of being a Jew has survived, has survived diasporic dissemination and dispersion, has survived incredible attacks on its integrity. So there's something, there's some glue, there's some, you know, complicated series of, let's call them self understandings as well as external stigmatization sometimes that keeps this tribe, as it were, together. Now it's a tribe that is, you know, very self, let's say lacerating, is by no means unified, and yet somehow, somehow it stays together. So having said that, the next question is, is what is the. What are the characteristics which have created animus which you've created? The feelings of hostility which, alas, we now see, as I'm speaking today, have their force around the world. I mean, it's one of the saddest things about the current moment that what was seen as something that was subsiding is now once again cresting. And antisemitism shows its ugly face in many, many different contexts. And all three of them gave extremely complicated answers. And I can't, you know, I would go on for hours if I try to do justice. And I would have to actually go back to the paper because it's so nuanced. But there were several questions that were addressed by them. One Freud himself brings into play, which is the idea the Jews invented a monotheistic. God, a jealous God, a God who was basically a demanding God. A God who was also morally very, very strict and helped introduce a certain amount of guilt and a certain amount of self restriction about bodily desires. And as a result there was a kind of resentment against that God. And the God of monotheism was a God who asked an awful lot of his believers. And there was a certain reaction against that. In addition, there are other moments. Erickson, for example, argues that one of the things that was resented was the very capacity of Jews to remain unified as a. An identity over long periods of time when other groups. And here he points out the Germans in particular were very nervous about the, we might call it, longevity of their self identity that it was very difficult to know what it was to be a German. I mean, after all this was a country that did not have a unified nation state until well into the 19th century and its boundaries change rather dramatically throughout the 20th century. And it's not clear what it meant to be German. And so there was a kind of envy of Jews who had a certain identification over time. There's also complicated critique of the idea of the Jews and relativization which also meant that they had the ability to adapt in ways that undermine a rigidity of identity. So that's a slightly different, maybe even opposite position that they were envied not merely because they had a, I've called it abiding identity, but also because they were able to live in different contexts, able to relativize their situation through assimilation. Two very different arguments. Adorno was much more interested in other aspects of the reasons for anti Semitism. One, we might say was because of things the Jews did which might be problematic, such as being the. So he argued, the sort of canaries in the mind for capitalism and resentment against capitalism could easily be turned into resentment against Jews. This was of course what August Babel, the 19th century German leader, called the socialism of fools. But secondly, the Jewish rule also in a way capable of gaining enmity through envy because they seemingly achieved a kind of happiness without having to work. They achieved a kind of unity of their, their community. A lot of things that were seen as essentially, you know, positive but nonetheless enviable traits. There are many other aspects of what constitutes the sources of hatred of Jews that Adorno points out. Turning to Hedda Arendt, however, a very different position is articulated which has to do with what she sees as the Jewish political deficit. That is to say, after the end of the Jewish nation and the destruction of the second temple, there was a kind of diasporic worldlessness and alienation from the world, which meant that the Jews found their, let's say, utopia not in this world, but in the next, and as a result lacked a kind of experience in the world of politics. They lacked a basic tradition of Jewish self rule. And from her point of view, this was a, a loss that it was from her point of view, freedom was a, a function of being politically active. Now the irony of this position, and this is where we, you know, really go into complicated territory, is that when the Jews did gain political sovereignty with the creation of the state of Israel, it was the wrong kind of politics for Hadarin, because it was politics basically as ethno tribalism rather than as democratic pluralism. Politics that was based not on ethnic identity, being a Jew, but rather politics that was based on the inclusivity of anybody who wanted to join the demos rather than the ethnos. And so, she argued, the Jews were attacked for being ethnically too, we might say parochial. Now this is, you know, as I say, these are all very complicated arguments. I can't do them justice. But what they alert us to is the extremely awkward and difficult issue. I'm trying to make sense of why there is some sort of abiding hostility to Jews which may involve their own agency, which may involve their own, not to be blamed because they obviously don't bring it upon themselves intentionally, but may involve a kind of, let's call it explanatory responsibility, which means that it's more than just random scapegoating that the bicycle rider joke seems to, in a kind of shallow way, imply.
- [40:06]
Ryan Tripp
Yeah, I was going to address. All right, in the second part of my question. Thank you so much. So let's shift gears to your essay on, well, part of it on the authoritarian personality published in 1950. I did want to note that this influenced Richard Hofstadter in US Historiography, Richard Hofstadter's paranoid style thesis. I mean, really, I think the question here is the difficulties for pathologizing political positions in the context of authoritarian personality. If you can explain the macaillery, briefly explain the macamillary thesis of the authoritarian personality and your, your critique and then also Adorno's take.
- [40:58]
Martin Jay
Well, first of all, you have to make sure as an authoritarian personality was the collective work that was done by Adorno and a number of members in the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group. Leo Longfall's work was on with Norbert Goodman, the Prophets and Deceit, which was one of the other texts in the five PART SERIES OF THE STUDIES AUTHORITY Having said that, the authoritarian personality was an attempt to apply social scientific techniques of opinion study, survey opinion study with psychoanalysis to come up with syndromes which would explain why some people, despite their, we might call it alleged ideology, their surface political positions, had characterological inclinations to turn in either authoritarian or non authoritarian directions. So the figures of Larry and Mack were, we might call them ideal typical figures based on the data that was amassed through the surveys. Now, precisely how the surveys were done, much contested in contemporary political science. But the point being that Mac and Larry were two ideal typical terms. Mac being an authoritarian personality, Larry being non authoritarian. Now, without going into what makes these syndromes, you know, tick, and it would take a long time to go through each of the various characteristics, the point I want to make in this essay is that there is a potential problem. This is where the eminent critique of critical theory comes in with creating pathological types, pathological character structures, because it assumes that there is something called a normative type, a normal as opposed to mathological, one that is healthy, quote unquote, one that is not degenerate, but rather vital, and so forth. Now, I begin the essay by saying that if you look at how the Chinese tradition and I wrote this essay after a trip I took to Beijing in 2019, how the Chinese tradition of authoritarianism is really difficult to map onto the analysis in authoritarian personality. You realize how we might say provincial or historically specific. The analysis was because in China, notions of authority are very different from notions of a personality that is authoritarian in the way in which it's described in the work of the authoritarian personalities writers. It has to do with a benign notion of authority which is more reciprocal. It has to be notions of patriarchal or paternal relations which are hierarchical in the society. There is no. In other words, Larry, in the Chinese context who is a liberal democratic alternative to the farther in personality. And therefore it would be very difficult to map it onto the Chinese experience. Not entirely impossible, but difficult. The second problem is the non authoritarian personality, which the Frankfurt School had a lot of difficulty in establishing in its earliest work. And this goes back to Erich Fromm's discussion of workers personalities in the late Weimar period. There the alternative was not between authoritarian and liberal or authoritarian and democratic, but rather authoritarian and revolutionary. The revolutionary personality was shown to be or the rebellious personality, slightly different, shown to be the opposite of the authoritarian. By the time they got to the United States, however, the revolutionary personality as the antithesis of the authoritarian had dropped out. Instead, something called the liberal personality or the Democratic personality was put in its place. Now, what that precisely means is difficult to say, because at the very same time, Adorno and the other Frankfurt School members outside of the study were attacking liberalism as itself, in a way, a weak and not very powerful alternative to authoritarianism, which had maybe even the potential to become more authoritarian. Now, the real issue, though, is a more, I would say, substantial problem with the idea of contrasting normal and pathological. And here I draw on Foucault and Conguillem and others who argued that pathologization, both of psychology and of social behavior was based on a very distorted notion of the norm, but the norm itself contained within it latent, we might call them, political and ideological prejudices. And what was considered pathological was itself problematic. So, for example, in the period of the 19th century and early 20th, when something called degeneracy was seen as the opposite of normal, that included sexual deviance, which we today would not apply as a pathological, you know, category. It included sometimes aesthetic modernism. In Max Dordo's book, and Arto with degeneration, the 1890s, the aesthetic modernist was seen as somehow sick. And so we're aware of the fact that pathologization of external problems is deeply, I think, problematic. And this is even worse when it becomes extended to our political opponents. So today, sometimes the authoritarian personality argument is applied to the supporters of authoritarian populism, the Maga Trump supporters, who were seen somehow as part of a lunatic fringe. Now, the difficulties of doing this is, first of all, it says, I'm okay, I'm healthy, I'm normal. You, my opponent, you're nuts, you're crazy, you're part of a little different. And this becomes a kind of dismissal of whatever legitimate grievances the other person might have, and also makes it impossible to have a deliberative democratic exchange with that person based on the better argument, the kind of Habermasian notion that democracy necessitates listening and arguing rather than simply asserting and imposing one's own position. So it short circuits that democratic alternative. And I think that's the major issue at hand. The pathologization of our opponents makes it very difficult to have a legitimate democratic discussion with them. Now, this is not to say that some of our opponents aren't really nuts. And I would, you know, be the first to agree that there are some people who seem to support radical authoritarian populism from position not only of ignorance, but also resentment and what might be called on some level, a kind of, you know, psychological disturbance. I mean, I. I can't deny that. But you know something? Sometimes people on our side of the fence also are acting out their own craziness. And so we have to be very careful before we tar everybody on the other side of the political divide with the notion that they are simply pathologies, pathologically rather than responsible adults.
- [48:25]
Ryan Tripp
Fully agree. Okay. So moving on. This is kind of. This next question is kind of. I don't know if it's a standalone essay because it is in dialogue with the rest of the essays. I thought it was interesting, really. Briefly, can you compare Martin Scorsese's Irishman, published in 2019? He actually has a film out this year from actually an author that's been on this podcast. And again, you compare the film with Ortheimer's analysis of racket society, the idea of racket society. Can you delve into that just really briefly, and the impact on our current political culture?
- [49:05]
Martin Jay
Well, in that essay, I compare Scorsese's the Irishman with on the Waterfront, the film that Elia Kazan made a generation earlier. In the latter film, corruption of the waterfront is met by a kind of heroic willingness to become, you know, basically an informer and a, you know, someone who was religiously motivated as a priest involved and motivated by the love for the woman. Now, there are complications in the origin of the Aaliyah Kazan film because he was trying, some people have argued, to justify his own informing during the anti the UN American Activities Committee witch hunt against Communists in the early 1950s. But be that as it may, that film presents an alternative, we might say, to the the absolute domination of corruption and racketeering. The Irishman, on the other hand, the film that Scorsese did five or so years ago is a film in which virtually everybody is infected by corruption by racketeering. People in politics, people in economics, trade unions, so forth. Everybody is in a way part of the racist society. And to make clear what I meant by that, I went back to an argument that the Frankfurt School developed but never fully completed. It was never published in a kind of final form about racket society in the 1930s, early 40s to explain Nazism. Now, the implication of this argument is that traditional society based on rule of law or based on the anonymous principles of the marketplace, was being replaced by something that went back to an earlier stage of human development, a stage based on a dialectic of loyalty and protection, in which instead of universal rules or moral principles, instead of the rule of law, there was a rule of the powerful protecting the weak, who then submitted to the powerful through A kind of loyalty which did not question what deeds were done and what means were used by the powerful. Now, this racket society meant that there was a breakdown, we might say, of traditional notions of universality in the service of particularity. And alas, what this type of analysis argued and what the film, like the Irishman shows, is that racket society has come back. And I argued, and this was, you know, the middle of Trump's presidency, that the power of Trump was like that of a racket lord, a mobster who was a figure who provided protection for the people he demanded loyalty of. And we see, you know, still today. I mean, it's really rather shocking the extent to which Trump's loyalty is, you know, basically demanded of people who work for him who are willing, in some cases, to break the law. Now, what's, I think, particularly telling is that he is now under indictment for racketeering, that the RICO law, which is applicable in Georgia as well as the United States, has been used in the cases that are attacking his involvement in the January 6th insurrection. So in a way, we might see. See the RICO laws as the revenge of a society where rule of law holds against Trump's attempt to create a racket society. Now, we're in the middle of this, and it's not clear that the rule of law will triumph. And it's not clear that Trump, even if he is indicted and even, and this is amazing, even if he's evicted, will perhaps become the next president of the United States. And if that's the case, then racketeering will once again dominate the rule of law as he puts into, you know, positions in the Department of Justice and elsewhere, his cronies, his subordinates, the people who owe him loyalty. So the basic argument of that piece is that we're now at a very, I would say, vulnerable moment in which the rule of law and even, you know, let's say the impersonal, the impersonal workings of the marketplace are being challenged by the regressive racketeering model of loyalty and dependence based on powerful figures, warlords, we might say, like Trump and others around the world, see other figures who also are trying to undermine the rule of law in their own society. So it's, I think the film itself was very precedent, prescient, precisely that respect.
- [53:52]
Ryan Tripp
So in 2020, literary criticism, Frederick Jameson published the Benjamin Files. How did he attempt to reconcile Benjamin's theological ideas with historical materialism? That's the first part of the question. And then also your criticism of Benjamin's limitation on the rise of nominalist modern astronomy, as well as Jameson's earlier essay on Benjamin, which he argued Capstone's a 2020 argument. So again, Frederick Jameson's attempt to reconcile Benjamin's theological ideas with historical materialism. And then second, how this links up to Jameson's earlier arguments and then the idea of figurative.
- [54:43]
Martin Jay
Well, this is also a very hard question to answer quickly. I mean, Benjamin was a remarkably inventive and risk taking theorists who attempted to integrate elements of theology which you may not have fully understood into a kind of historic materialism that would not become, you know, basically dependent on a philosophy of history which was triumphalist, and on the necessity of the change, capitalism, socialism, which perhaps it animated second international Marxism and maybe even the third international as well. So what Benny was trying to do more or less, was to win the powers of intoxication, as he put it in his essay on surrealism, for the Revolution. And included among those powers of intoxication were the residues of theological, let's say, fantasies or hopes or theological elements which often were basically, you know, seen as heterodox and even blasphemous by mainstream theologians. Now, among these there are quite a number of them is the idea of apoctostasis, which is the idea that ultimately at the end of time, everything that was, you know, basically negative or sinful will be redeemed and every person who committed sin will ultimately be saved. A kind of ultimate forgiveness and ultimate hope that things will produce a kind of utopia in the afterlife or judgment of God which will get rid of the difference between those who sin and those who do not. And this goes back to the Church, Father Origen, and it was considered in fact a heresy. But Benjamin thought it was one that could be in fact useful for a renewed version of historical materialism, that there was a kind of ultimate utopian hope. There were other aspects of his utopian belief in the restoration of Adamic names, very complicated argument and so forth. Now, Jameson has had over his long career a very complicated relationship to Benjamin's work. And at one point he argued that it was too melancholic, that Benjamin was simply unwilling to see in the actual history that existed in the current world possibilities for emancipation, but instead held out for an impossible notion of redemption that can never be achieved. And therefore Benjamin was ultimately a defeatist, the kind of idea of a kind of eternal melancholy. Now, in his most recent work in the Benjamin Files, he tries to move against that earlier version that he had given us of Benjamin towards one that stresses Benjamin's positive redemptive utopian hopes. And one of these is in the idea of apocalypses. Now, my argument in this review of that book is that this is deeply problematic, largely because it makes the claim, and this is one that Horkheimer and Marcuse explicitly argued against, that suffering in the past can be redeemed. Instead, they argued that people who were some ways exploited or who suffered in the past, that their suffering cannot be redeemed through a kind of what might be called historicist theodicy, in which partial evil becomes functional in the service of a greater good, the partial evil of the suffering of the past being redeemed, or somehow, you know, in a way a sacrifice becomes useful and redeeming or saving people can be justified. And so they had what might be called, I would say, a more realistic version that Benjamin did. And I don't think that Jameson gives us a satisfactory defense of Benjamin's theological claims here in trying to reconcile them with the reality of the historical materialism, which doesn't try to cover over the suffering that existed in the past and which, alas, is still going on today. Now, as for the nominalist, I mean, I don't know if we move to that question. The nominalist modern astronomy moment in Benjamin's critique. This is also somewhat complicated and it's a point that I make in greater detail in my forthcoming book on magical nominalism, which is an empress from the University of Chicago. I mean, there the argument is simply this. The rise of nominalism in the 13th century helped to create the context in which modern astronomy destroyed the notion of an ordered cosmos, a cosmos in which there were harmonious relationship between the celestial world and the sublunary world of human existence. One that, say, astrology still continues to argue is the case that it created a much more contingent world, a world of infinite rather than finite uniformities and regularities, a world that was ultimately illegible, a universe that was illegible, the open universe rather than the closed cosmos. Now, what's fascinating about Benjamin is he had a certain nostalgia for the world that was lost, the world of cosmic unity. It's the world that was still preserved in astrology, preserved in graphology. It served in a number of different places, for example in Baudelaire's notion of correspondences, and that this would some somehow be a valuable tool, we might say a resource in the critique of the nominalist world of absolute, we might call it singularity and non repetitive infinity. Now, Jameson is, you know, obviously not a believer in cosmic harmonies, but does think that historical narratives involve the possibility of figural representation. The idea that there are patterns in history which may repeat themselves. Something that to a certain extent gets from Alain Badieu or even more originally from the study he did with Eric Auerbach, who talked about figure. The idea here is that we have to be hopeful that as the Old Testament allegedly prefigured the New Testament in Christian thought, the revolutionary acts of the past and evolutions of say, 1789 of 1848, of 1905 of 1917, maybe even the quasi revolutionary activity in 1968, all of this can be understood as prefiguring in a way the revolutions that will be achieved in the future and which will bring into reality what had only been potentially hope for in the failed revolutions of the past. And this is a kind of, you might say resurrection of the figural notions of cosmic harmony which are then of course displaced from something that's static and repetitive to something that was historically open ended and pre figural in terms of the achievement of something which is potential rather than something's repetition of something which actually was achieved in the past. Now, I'm not, you know, fully happy with this. The argument in the essay is that it doesn't do full justice to the need for human agency rather than the hope for prefigural repetition. So I'm not sure if that gives you a full answer to the question. It's a very complicated issue. But the essay tries to spell out my qualms against Jameson's reading abandonment.
- [62:52]
Ryan Tripp
There's satisfactory for the audiences. I've read it and I think I understand it. So the next is about the dangers of collapsing the early 20th century notions and beyond that of French and German or these ideas of Rieben Korper, if you can explain that briefly, as well as Beijing means attentiveness to corporate mortality and your concerns about so called necropolitics.
- [63:28]
Martin Jay
Well, this essay is based. This essay is based on the mobilization of a distinction that was introduced by a number of early 20th century thinkers in Germany and in France, people like Helm Plessner and Maurice Merleau Ponty. The distinction between the body, understood as lib l E I b and kerpa K O umlad R P E r leib and kirpa. Libe means the body basically in terms of its vitality, its subjective agency. The body as containing creativity, the body is containing vivacity. The body as something which feels in a kind of existential way rather than the body as kirpa which is the body as observed from the outside. The body as the flesh that is, perhaps this is the experience we all have in the doctor's office. The flesh that is looked at as if it were an object which can be, you know, cut into for surgical purposes, which can be massaged, which can be externally, you know, somehow basically the restored in a world to a world of objects external to itself, animals as well as. Now, the larger point here is that rather than seeing one as good and the other is bad, one is healthy and the other is pathological, one as involving life and the other as death. And therefore, since it involves death for something we want to avoid or abject or simply not take into account, it would be healthier to understand our bodies, as always, both at the same time as containing within them. And this is why Kerper is connected the idea of corpse, the reality of our mortality, the reality that is expressed, we might say, by our bony infrastructure which survives after we die. And this is important to take into account not because it celebrates death, not because it celebrates, as Nanopolitics argues, we should not do the. We might call it, let's say, dispensability of the mere life that we. But instead, because it understands that we are always already, we might say, our potential inert and objective realities that will become the full reality where we are indeed corpses. And it does this, and I argue elsewhere, because of the distinction between people and population and political discourse and why we should take that distinction into account. And what I want to argue there is that the idea of the people, the idea of the active people that we think of when we talk about popular sovereignty or the will of the people, whether we understand it as a demos, that is to say, politically active collectivity, or as an ethnos, which is a tribal identity. We talked a bit about that earlier. We discussed Anahara's critique of Zionism as overly tribal. When we understand those two versions of the people, we also have to take into account the inert notion of a population which is not active politically as citizens. So, for example, the migrants who come to our countries, or the children who don't have a full vote as a citizen, or people who are incarcerated or prisons that are not full citizens, they're members of the population, of the society. They are members of a group that needs, as it were, to be honored, protected, taken into account, and not simply dismissed as outside of the people and therefore not having power, not having a claim on us. And the reason for this is that if we take seriously our role as Kerper, we ourselves will always be, as it were, part of the population. We will always be vulnerable. We will always be in need of the care of those people who have the power of peoplehood. And therefore it alerts us to the fact that we have a continuity of interest, continuity of identity with people who are normally stigmatized as not part of the people, not citizens, as not us, but as them. That there is always, you might say, a them in us. There is a dead body, a kerper in our lib, in our. In our own selfhood, and that we ought not to overly privilege the agency that we feel as lie, but also accept the passivity that we should feel as kerper. Now, this distinguishes itself, I would argue, this recognition of the death that the Kerber portends from necropolitics or thanatopolitics, terms that have been introduced by Giorgio Agameben and Variety, Achille Mbembe and Roberto Esposito to describe. And they based this on Foucault's notion of biopolitics, to describe a certain notion of a deliberate attempt to treat people as if they were expendable and to treat them as basically pathological enemies in a healthy society, which needs to be nurtured. It also avoids the very, very complicated and problematic belief that some people can be sacrificed, that their deaths are justifiable in terms of the ultimate health, the ultimate vitality of a community. I mean, we see this today, just to give it a kind of very current point. We see it in the way in which Hamas not only killed 1300 Israelis when they attacked Israel on October 7th, but also very self consciously, very cynically created the situation which the Israeli response has sacrificed at least 10,000 Palestinians. That Hamas made the argument that, or at least tacitly accepted the argument that these people could be sacrificed, their deaths did not matter because the larger cause of Palestinian freedom, which might not be achieved for 100 years, could justify their deaths. This is a sacrificial logic, and it's used by virtually everybody who defends war, that somehow it's functional in the service of an ultimate goal. And occasionally we can make, I think, a legitimate argument for that. But in many cases it becomes a horrible justification for the deaths of innocents who were sacrificed today with some alleged benefit in the future. Why a person's life today is less valuable than the person's life 100 years from now is extremely hard, I think, to argue now the live purpa alternative says, no, no, we all have, we all share a kind of mortality which cannot be understood in terms of sacrificing for lie that we have to, as it were, honor that mortality by taking ourselves seriously as sharing in the vulnerability of others. We ought not to have the belief that we can sacrifice those others, say suicide bombers do, in the service of a larger alleged cause which is justified in terms of the people or the nation or the health of the nation, which basically reduces us simply to live writ large rather than corporate writ small.
- [71:21]
Ryan Tripp
So your final essay, I thought, was really, really interesting. So I want to end on this. So you offer a pretty chunky critique of Karl Marx's sort of a reification of truth and politics. Your criticisms did derive in part from Karai's analysis of lying in politics. So I guess my question is how ultimately does the reification of, I think you call it a beaten truth, periodically result in persecutions of individuals labeled hypocrites and fabulous? And, you know, I was thinking, is there any connection to Arendt's arguments in Banality of Evil?
- [72:13]
Martin Jay
This essay was an essay written quite a while ago when I was doing work on the book that became the Virtues of Audacity online in Politics. And it was basically an attempt to apply the argument there to Karl Marx and to Alain Badiou. We were supposed to be together, Badu and I, at a conference in Santiago de Chile. He never showed up, but the essay was really aimed at him. The argument here is fairly straightforward, that both Marx and Badiou may have erred in arguing that politics was a particular locus of truth telling and of trying to achieve the truth. And here I use Hannah Arendt's critique of that. I mean, it's a very complicated critique in her essays on truth in Politics and lying in Politics, which I also draw in the book Versus Mendacity. The argument here is that although there are truths that we have to take seriously, the truths of facts. For example, she points out that no one can argue that Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. You can't make that argument historically, but that this notion of truth in politics, factual truth, does not exhaust the realm of the political, and that we can't have, as Badiot argues, truth procedures in politics simply because politics is the realm more of opinions, of values, of worldviews, of discrete interests which are not reducible to a single truth. That the attempt for a singular, universally shared consensus in politics is inherently anti pluralist and always ends up by privileging one position and calling it the universal truth, that even if we have a general will, all do so. This will does not in fact represent the will of everybody. It's always a what might be called metonymic displacement from one particular to a universal. So having said that, the point is that politics involves at least a certain modicum of fabrication, of hypocrisy, of shading the truth, of varnishing the truth, of spinning the truth. And this is ultimately a good thing. Now it's a good thing, however, and here I introduced the argument that Erida takes from Plato in terms of the pharmakon. The pharmakon, as I'm sure many listeners recall, is a potion which has good effects when the portion, when the amount of it is small and bad effects when it's too large. That is to say, when it is given in small doses, it can be basically something that cures. It can be a drug that helps. Giving in large doses, it'll kill you. So, you know, you commit suicide by taking a whole bottle of, I don't know what, aspirin. But bottles, but a single aspirin will help your headache. So the pharmacotta lying means that basically in moderate and often very, let's say, you know, almost self referential terms. When people know that they are lying, it can be helpful. An example being when a politician is in a primary race with another politician and argues that the other politician will, if elected, be utterly, completely a disaster. And then when the other politician gets the nomination of his party, the first politician forgets that he had said that or she had said that and says, well, I am now backing the choice of my party and forget all the insults that I leveled against them a while ago. I wasn't really, you know, expressing my real beliefs. Now we know it's a game that's played, that there is a kind of hypocrisy here and it's a sort of healthy hypocrisy because politicians need, we might say, to bring together coalitions. And these coalitions have to have a certain amount of deception to create the possibility of acting together. It was fascinating when that book was translated into Russian. They put on the COVID not the COVID that I had had, which was George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, which showed basically the hypocrisy at the beginning of the American notion of honesty, but rather a picture of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. The implication there was that the three heads of the Allies during the Second World War knew that they were lying to each other, that Churchill was lying about the ending of the British Empire, that Stalin was lying about his beliefs over the spread of communism in Eastern Europe, that Roosevelt was lying about what he thought about the preservation of the British Empire and so forth, and that this was necessary to beat the Nazis. Now the pharmakon model, however, is helpful because it tells us that when a big lie is told, such as the lie that the Maga Trumpites tell us about the so called rigged election of 2020, this is dangerous to the nth degree. That's not the same thing as lots of small lies and half truths. But it is also in a way a mirror image. The big lie is of the idea of an absolute big truth in politics. And anybody who argues that there is a singular truth that he or she has that truth is going to be basically a problem and maybe even a totalitarian or autocratic leader. And so both the big why and the ideal of big truth seem to me deeply, we might say, anathema to the political pluralism and the openness to what we might call the realm of opinion and the realm of value and the realm of worldview that makes politics an endless process of negotiation, of compromise, of argumentation, of deliberation, rather than a process which ends with a singular truth and the deadness of a society where no change is possible, no critique is possible, no imminent critique to come back to our original point of departure could ever be made.
- [78:35]
Ryan Tripp
Okay, so that's it for the book at least. I have one follow up question. You mentioned a force coming or in publication book from the University of Chicago Press. Can you talk just really, really, really briefly about that?
- [78:52]
Martin Jay
Well, this is a book called Magical Nominalism and it's an extremely, I would say, risk taking, crazy, slightly impossible book which tries to argue that as opposed to what I call conventional novelism, there was a subterranean tradition which argued not simply to restore either real universals or to see the world as we might say, vacuous contingency upon which subjective imposition categories could be, you know, possible, instead argued for the response of the singularities, the magical or wondrous or enchanted particulars of a world which could not be subsumed under human control or the self assertion of a modern subject. And I try to look at this in a variety of different contexts. One is Walter Benjamin's theology politics of the name, which he gets to some extent from Jewish sources. The second is the discussion of the idea of the event in post structuralist theory. The third is what Nelson Goodman called irrealism, the American philosopher, nominalist philosopher realism, which I look at in terms of Marcel Duchamp's pictorial novel and Adorno's discussion of musical novelism. And finally, a chapter on the idea of the photograph of photography, but the photograph as interpreted by Roland Barthes and Sigfried Krakauer. So as you can tell from this very quick and hurried description, the book is attempting a lot. Whether it all pulls together remains to be seen, but I'm very excited about it. And it should be out by, I think, late next year, probably in the fall of 2024. Then we'll get a chance, I hope, to discuss it on another one of your broadcasts.
- [80:51]
Ryan Tripp
Oh, we will. Undoubtedly so, sir. All right. So thanks, Professor Jay, for being on the podcast today.
- [80:58]
Martin Jay
My pleasure.
- [81:00]
Ryan Tripp
Okay, so the book is Eminent Critiques, Prep for School Under Pressure, published a couple months ago by Mercel Press. This is Ryan Tripp. I've been your host for the New Books Network, History and Critical Theory channels. Please tune in next time.
- [81:36]
Martin Jay
And, Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating.
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Marshall Poe
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [81:52]
Martin Jay
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [81:55]
Ryan Tripp
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [81:56]
Martin Jay
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com. liberty.
- [81:59]
Ryan Tripp
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings.
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Jack Daniels Announcer
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