Professor Karen Feldman Joins Martin Jay for Berkeley Book Chat

Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay (History Department, UC Berkeley) reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating the Frankfurt School with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, Jay puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. He was joined by Karen Feldman (German Department).