Ars Vitae by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Author:Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Despite such interjections, Jay does not openly endorse Adorno’s view of experience over Benjamin’s—in fact, Benjamin’s “desire to overcome the modalization of experience into its component parts and heal the split between subject and object,” Jay writes, “might well be called the most complex and lyrical song of experience in the long history we have been following in this book” (314).

Jay does subtly communicate reservations about the so-called “linguistic turn” in poststructuralist theory. In the work of historian Joan Scott and philosopher Richard Rorty, Jay seems to see a kind of reductionism or determinism whereby no objective reality appears to humankind “unmediated” by language (and the conceptual apparatus it implies), so that language thus actively constitutes experience itself. Beginning in the 1980s, Scott’s views in part responded to the emphasis on workers’ experience as the primary and most telling subject of historical inquiry—as the main agent of historical change—by earlier social historians like E. P. Thompson. Rorty also criticized the celebration of experience, a reaction to the absence of foundational beliefs in objective or universal truth, as a “pseudo-solution, a kind of crypto-foundationalism for thinkers who lacked the courage to live without one” (302), in Jay’s words. Instead of relying on experience as a basis for any notion of truth or verification, Rorty urges an acceptance of the contingency of truth and belief, famously counseling “ironic skepticism” about human experience itself as something separate from language (307).

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