Refractions of Violence

A new collection of essays by the internationally recognized cultural critic and intellectual historian Martin Jay that revolves around the themes of violence and visuality, with essays on the Holocaust and virtual reality, religious violence, the art world, and the Unicorn Killer, among a wide range of other topics.

Martin Jay is Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books including Fin-de-Siéle Socialism and Other Essays (1988), Force Fields (1993) and co-editor of Vision in Context (1996), all published by Routledge.

Introduction 1. Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn 2. Peace in Our Time 3. Fathers and Sons: Jan Philipp Reemtsma and the Frankfurt School 4. The Ungrateful Dead 5. When Did the Holocaust End? Reflections on Historical Objectivity 6. The Conversion of the Rose 7. Pen Pals with the Unicorn Killer 8. Kwangju: From Massacre to Biennale 9. Must Justice Be Blind? The Challenge of Images to the Law 10. Diving into the Wreck: Aesthetic Spectatorship at the Turn of the Millennium 11. Astronomical Hindsight: The Speed of Light and Virtual Reality 12. Returning the Gaze: The American Response to the French Critique of Occularcentrism 13. Lafayette's Children: The American Reception of French Liberalism 14. Somaesthetics and Democracy: John Dewey and Contemporary Body Art 15. The Paradoxes of Religious Violence 16. Fearful Symmetries: 9/11 and the Agonies of the Left