Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, Gail Day, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-144
Author(s):  
Benjamin Noys
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New Left ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Postwar Art ◽  
Negative Thought ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Art And Architecture

Abstract Gail Day’s Dialectical Passions not only traces the trajectories of leading New Left critics of art and architecture – T.J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Massimo Cacciari, Craig Owens, Fredric Jameson and Hal Foster – it also provides a meditation on the problem of negation and the experience of defeat. This review retraces Day’s arguments, reflecting on her recovery and re-interrogation of negation and dialectics in postwar art theory. In particular, it aims to critically assess her stress on the ‘negative thought’ of Tafuri and Cacciari and the possibilities of reactivating a thought of negativity in the contemporary moment.

scholarly journals The Columbia Social Essayists

2000 ◽  
pp. 198-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Bergesen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Research ◽  
New Left ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
Third World Development ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
University City

Wallerstein came of age intellectually at Columbia University, where he was an undergraduate, graduate student and faculty member for a quarter of a century (1947-1971). While we often think of his work on African politics and his concern with third world development as precur-sors to world-system theory, a large part of his intellectual biography was shaped by those Columbia years. They mark the high point of a triple hegemony of university, city, and nation, as at this time Columbia was the leading university in the leading city of the hegemonic nation. It was a time before the 1960s when the New Left and Berkeley would challenge the centrality of New York and Columbia as undisputed centers of American social thought and it was before what would be called the policy intellectuals would emerge in Washington DC in the 1970s/80s. It was also a time before the great in?ux of federal money in the 1960s which spurred social research and lifted other universities to prominence. It was a time of what I will call The Columbia Social Essayists, referring to scholar/intellectuals such as C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, Richard Hofstadter and Meyer Schapiro.

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