Interview with Martin Jay

doi: 10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.6.2.0334 In this interview, which took place by email in the summer of 2021, Samir Gandesha engages in a discussion with Martin Jay, UC Berkeley, one of the preeminent US intellectual historians since the 1980s and author of the ground-breaking Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (1973), which was followed by other important books on totality, ocularcentrism, experience, and lying in politics. The result is in a wide-ranging philosophical (aesthetic and political) discussion of a variety of topics, including the Frankfurt School and the trajectory of critical theory, the rise and importance of social media platforms, ensuing the digitalization and commodification of the life-world, “algorithmic populism” and “cancel culture,” as well as the role of art between theory and criticism.