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Praise for Splinters in Your Eye * : * In this sizzling collection of essays, Martin Jay demonstrates again that he is the unsurpassed reader of the group of thinkers known as the Frankfurt School. In fact, he challenges the false unity and coherence of ideas and views often imposed upon them, including his own earlier writings on the subject. Practicing episodic and fragmentary historiography, he uncovers astonishingly novel angles of interpretation as well as demonstrating brilliant re-readings of known texts. An absolute pleasure to read. -- Professor Seyla Benhabib With this collection of brilliant and insightful essays Martin Jay has returned to the topic that defined his early career: Critical Theory, i.e. the lives and works of theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Marcuse. Based on deep historical knowledge and endowed with great sensitivity for theoretical nuances, Jay traces the unfolding of what is commonly called the Frankfurt School. He succeeds in this endeavor by his refusal to treat their thought as the expression of a unified school. For this difficult task one could not have found a more suitable critic than Martin Jay. This book is a precious gift to America in these troubled times. -- Peter Uwe Hohendahl Splinters in Your Eye provides ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Loewenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times. -- Ryan Tripp * New Books Network * In elegant essays on subjects ranging from Benjamin's stamp collecting to the [Frankfurt School's] engagement with emerging psychoanalytic thought, Jay shows that its writings are not only historical curios, but indispensable for understanding our own age. -- Stuart Jeffries * New Statesman *

Praise for Splinters in Your Eye : In this sizzling collection of essays, Martin Jay demonstrates again that he is the unsurpassed reader of the group of thinkers known as the Frankfurt School. In fact, he challenges the false unity and coherence of ideas and views often imposed upon them, including his own earlier writings on the subject. Practicing episodic and fragmentary historiography, he uncovers astonishingly novel angles of interpretation as well as demonstrating brilliant re-readings of known texts. An absolute pleasure to read. -- Professor Seyla Benhabib Praise for Splinters in Your Eye : With this collection of brilliant and insightful essays Martin Jay has returned to the topic that defined his early career: Critical Theory, i.e. the lives and works of theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Marcuse. Based on deep historical knowledge and endowed with great sensitivity for theoretical nuances, Jay traces the unfolding of what is commonly called the Frankfurt School. He succeeds in this endeavor by his refusal to treat their thought as the expression of a unified school. For this difficult task one could not have found a more suitable critic than Martin Jay. This book is a precious gift to America in these troubled times. -- Peter Uwe Hohendahl Praise for Splinters in Your Eye : Splinters in Your Eye provides ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Loewenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times. -- Ryan Tripp * New Books Network * Praise for Splinters in Your Eye : In elegant essays on subjects ranging from Benjamin's stamp collecting to the [Frankfurt School's] engagement with emerging psychoanalytic thought, Jay shows that its writings are not only historical curios, but indispensable for understanding our own age. -- Stuart Jeffries * New Statesman *

"Praise for Splinters in Your Eye * : * In this sizzling collection of essays, Martin Jay demonstrates again that he is the unsurpassed reader of the group of thinkers known as the ""Frankfurt School."" In fact, he challenges the false unity and coherence of ideas and views often imposed upon them, including his own earlier writings on the subject. Practicing episodic and fragmentary historiography, he uncovers astonishingly novel angles of interpretation as well as demonstrating brilliant re-readings of known texts. An absolute pleasure to read. -- Professor Seyla Benhabib With this collection of brilliant and insightful essays Martin Jay has returned to the topic that defined his early career: Critical Theory, i.e. the lives and works of theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Marcuse. Based on deep historical knowledge and endowed with great sensitivity for theoretical nuances, Jay traces the unfolding of what is commonly called the Frankfurt School. He succeeds in this endeavor by his refusal to treat their thought as the expression of a unified school. For this difficult task one could not have found a more suitable critic than Martin Jay. This book is a precious gift to America in these troubled times. -- Peter Uwe Hohendahl Splinters in Your Eye provides ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times. -- Ryan Tripp * New Books Network * In elegant essays on subjects ranging from Benjamin's stamp collecting to the [Frankfurt School's] engagement with emerging psychoanalytic thought, Jay shows that its writings are not only historical curios, but indispensable for understanding our own age. -- Stuart Jeffries * New Statesman *"

"A century after its founding, the Institute for Social Research, now better known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, continues to generate provocative ideas and critical perspectives on the world that we inhabit. Just as from the vantage point of Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and others, however, there can be no genuinely critical thought that is not mediated in decisive ways by the history of its own genesis, thereby rendering the task of inheriting the refractory legacy of the Frankfurt School a difficult and ongoing undertaking. Martin Jay's powerful new study provides us with a beautifully articulated path through the thicket of that inheritance, thoughtfully lingering along the way to illuminate central tropes and concerns that emerge from this constellation of writers. By focusing on the characteristic critical gesture that unites many Frankfurt School thinkers-that of immanent critique-Jay succeeds in opening up a productive and unfailingly fascinating perspective on a critical legacy that, even a century on, remains open and still to come. In Jay's masterful hands, the texts that constitute this legacy have lost none of their urgency and abiding interest. -- Gerhard Richter, L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University Throughout these thought-provoking studies Martin Jay's characteristic lucidity and unrivalled command of the relevant source material is on display. Jay is sensitive both to the socio-political contexts of Frankfurt School thinking and to the continuing relevance of the School's legacy. Even those steeped in the tradition of Critical Theory will learn something new from his wide-ranging and sometimes provocative reflections. -- Peter Dews, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Essex That Martin Jay is not only the leading historian of the Frankfurt School, but one of its most creative and interesting practitioners in the third generation, becomes irrevocably apparent in this superb collection of articles. Circling around the notion of ""immanent critique"", these articles explore the viability of some of this tradition's core ideas in a time of political turbulences and postcolonial challenges. In so doing, Martin Jay teaches us how to actualize Critical Theory without credulously sticking to the original texts. -- Axel Honneth"

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Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught Modern European Intellectual History and Critical Theory for forty-five years. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination; Marxism and Totality; Adorno; Permanent Exiles; Fin-de-siècle Socialism; Force Fields; Downcast Eyes; Cultural Semantics; Refractions of Violence; Songs of Experience; The Virtues of Mendacity; Essays from the Edge; Kracauer: l’exilé; and Reason after Its Eclipse. He has been a regular columnist for Salmagundi since 1987.

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