Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America.

Introduction; Chapter 1 Urban Flights: The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York; Chapter 2 The Debate over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists; Chapter 3 The Morals of Genealogy: Or Is There a Poststructuralist Ethics?; Chapter 4 The Reassertion of Sovereignty in a Time of Crisis: Carl Schmitt and Georges Bataille; Chapter 5 Women in Dark Times: Agnes Heller and Hannah Arendt; Chapter 6 "The Aesthetic Ideology" as Ideology: Or What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?; Chapter 7 The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn; Chapter 8 The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism; Chapter 9 Scopic Regimes of Modernity; Chapter 10 Ideology and Ocularcentrism: Is There Anything Behind the Mirror's Tain?; Chapter 11 Modernism and the Retreat from Form; Chapter 12 The Textual Approach to Intellectual History; Chapter 13 Name-Dropping or Dropping Names? Modes of Legitimation in the Humanities;