Martin Jay is the Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of nineteen previous books, including The Dialectical Imagination, Marxism and Totality, Downcast Eyes, and Songs of Experience.

"In this bold and wide-ranging book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces across several centuries the conflict between two versions of nominalism-"conventional" nominalism and what he calls "magical" nominalism. According to Jay, since at least William of Ockham, the conventional form of nominalism contributed to the disenchantment of the world by rejecting the notion of general terms as anything other than names we use to group particular objects together, rejecting the idea that they have any reference to a further, "higher" reality. Magical nominalism, instead, performs a reenchanting function by investing names with an auratic power of their own. Starting with the initial revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay proceeds to unpack various "counterrevolutions" against nominalism itself. Ranging from theology to critical theory, philosophy of history, aesthetics, and political theory, engaging with thinkers including Adorno, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, and Derrida; artists such as Marcel Duchamp; and a range of contemporary theorists, this book provides us with a new way to understand humanity's intellectual path to modernity and its aftermath. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language and reality, Jay shows, allows for surprising, illuminating connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience"--