REENCHANTMENT, INEFFABILITY, AND “THE DIALECTIC OF NOMINALISM”

Abstract

Martin Jay's newest book, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph, aims to reveal the presence of a third current of thought in modern thinking. This current, which he calls “magical nominalism,” does not fit the traditional dichotomies (voluntarism–determinism, subjectivism–realism, and so on) around which the field's prevailing narratives are organized. As he shows, magical nominalism participates in the process of destroying the Scholastic idea of a perfectly ordered cosmos (an idea that was initiated by nominalism in the fourteenth century) but introduces into the nominalist matrix of thought a reference to an ontological dimension of reality that was initially absent from it. However, as he insists, magical nominalism does not constitute a homogeneous current. This form of thinking resists definition in unequivocal terms. Studying it therefore requires an approach that is capable of articulating a plurality of views.