Jay continued exploring the Frankfurt School through major works on Adorno (1984), Reason after Its Eclipse (2016), Splinters in Your Eye (2021), Immanent Critiques (2023), and three edited volumes for Japanese readers.[6]
He expanded his scope to the intellectual migration from Nazi Germany (Permanent Exiles, 1985; Kracauer l’exilé, 2014) and Western Marxism (Marxism and Totality, 1984), including extensive discussions of Jürgen Habermas.[7] His engagement with French post-structuralism led to Downcast Eyes (1993), recognized as a seminal text in the study of visual culture, and the widely cited essay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” (1987).[8]
His book Songs of Experience (2004) examined the role of “experience” in scientific, religious, historical, political and aesthetic discourses in Europe and America, while The Virtues of Mendacity (2010) tackled lying in politics. It drew on Hannah Arendt, and defended the inevitability of strategic deception even in democracies against the search for a monolithic truth; so long as it doesn't escalate into the "big lie.”[9]
Jay contributed to methodological debates in intellectual history in Cultural Semantics (1998) and Genesis and Validity (2022).[2]
His Magical Nominalism (2025) argued that a covert strain of religiously inflected philosophical thought, from Benjamin and Duchamp to Adorno, Barthes, and Kracauer, sought to escape subsumptive categorization, valorize singularity and resist the disenchantment of the world often traced to conventional nominalism.[10] It manifested itself in diverse places, ranging from the linguistic elevation of the name over concepts and the role of the “event” in disrupting historical continuity to what Barthes called the “punctum” of certain photographs.[11]
Since 1987, he has written the semi-annual Force Fields column in Salmagundi, with many entries republished in collections of his essays (including several compiled in French and Spanish).[citation needed]
Jay’s current project on “theological fellow-traveling” analyzes secular philosophers who selectively draw on theological concepts without observing the religious practices they justify and sanction. He is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.[12] In 2023, he published a sequel to The Dialectical Imagination on the contemporary turns in Critical Theory, entitled Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure.[13]
He also has a regular column in the quarterly journal Salmagundi.[14]
Jay was born on May 4, 1944, in New York City.[15] He is Jewish. He married English professor and literary critic Catherine Gallagher circa 1973; they met in 1970 at Berkeley when she was an English graduate student and he was an assistant professor of history.[16]
He was born in New York City to Edward and Sari Joslovitz (née Sidel), who shortened the family surname to Jay in 1951.[15] His sister, Beth Jay (b. 1948), was principal attorney to three California Supreme Court Chief Justices.[17] He is Jewish but not religious.[17] He married Catherine Gallagher in 1974, and has a daughter, Rebecca Jay, stepdaughter Shana Gallagher, and four grandchildren.[15][18]
Published works
1973 The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-50
1984 Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas
↑ Jay, Martin (1971). Frankfurt School: An Intellectual History of the Institut für Sozialforschung, 1924–1950 (PhD thesis). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. OCLC24165892.
The Modernist Imagination:Intellectual History and Critical Theory: Essays in Honor of Martin Jay, eds. Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn and Elliot Neaman (New York, Berghahn Books, 2009).
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