Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph

> Starting with the 14th-century revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay unpacks various "counterrevolutions" against nominalism itself, including a magical alternative to its conventional form. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language, thought and reality, Jay illuminates connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience. Ranging from theology and philosophy of history to aesthetics and political theory, this book engages with a range of artists and thinkers, including Adorno, Ankersmit, Badiou, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Derrida, Duchamp, Foucault, Kracauer, Kripke and Lyotard. It places photography in a suggestive new discursive context. Ultimately, Magical Nominalism offers a strikingly original way to understand humanity's intellectual path to modernity along with its vicissitudes.