Part.1 The concept of enlightenment

Enlightenment takes no account of itself at all; it erases all traces of its self-consciousness.

Die Hitler Jugend, the swagger of the rabble, did not regress to barbarism, but was a triumph of mandatory equality, which developed just equality into equal injustice.

The individual is reduced to a collection of habitual reflections and actually desired ways of behaving. Animism spiritualizes the object, whereas industrialization objectifies the human soul.

In the earliest known stages of mankind, there was an obscure religious code called Mana, which existed in the splendid Greek religious world. All that is unfamiliar and unknown is original, undifferentiated, and beyond the sphere of experience; Everything has more implications than we have previously known. In this sense, what the primitive people experienced was not a spiritual entity corresponding to the physical entity, but a die Nature corresponding to the individual.

Throughout the centuries of Christian history, love for one's neighbour has always covered up a latent hatred of the woman, which is now forbidden by coercive means - the woman is only the object used to reclaim that futile fact. This hatred compensates for the worship of the Virgin through the persecution of witches, a form of revenge that survives in the memory of pre-Christian prophetess, a vestige of a latent suspicion of a deified patriarchal ruling order.

Part.2 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Under monopoly, all mass culture is consistent, and the framework it produces through the way it thinks begins to manifest itself clearly. Those at the top no longer consciously shy away from monopoly: violence has become more public and power has ballooned. Movies and radio no longer have to pretend to be art; they have become fair trade, truth transformed into ideology in order to judge the rubbish they produce. They call themselves industries.

However, the paradise of the culture industry is also a kind of drudgery. Escapes and elopements are pre-programmed to come back in the end. Pleasure is supposed to help people forget to submit, but instead it makes people more submissive.

The desperate search for consistency is bound to lead to failure. In order to avoid this failure, all great works of art stylistically achieve a self-denial, while bad ones often rely on similarity to other works, on a coherence with an alternative character.

Scritto nel 1944, va letto soprattutto come reazione alle dittature fasciste, ed è a esse che va sempre legata la critica della distorsione e decadenza degli ideali lluministici. La parte migliore e più forte del libro resta ancora oggi quella dedicata all'industria culturale (espressione che qui compare per la prima volta). Più deboli, in particolare, le parti legate al mito di Odisseo e quella sull'antisemitismo. Molto intelligente quella su Sade. ( )

Größtenteils sehr unterhaltsam. Hab mich beim Lesen des Kapitels über "Kulturindustrie" kichernd im Bett gekugelt. Den Rest habe ich nicht verstanden. Glaube ich. ( )

Writing in the immediate wake of Nazi rule, Horkheimer and Adorno ask how Enlightened Western civilizations turn to fascism. Their answer that the Enlightenment mindset itself has totalitarian elements and that strict rationality's uncompromising nature creates a trap that forces us to participate in our own oppression.

Horkheimer & Adorno's pessimism can easily be excused, as can their missed calls on jazz music and Hollywood film. But in the end, their overarching narrative reaches too far, sees no hope, and turns absurd as even Donald Duck is seen as an instrument of totalitarianism. ( )

Pure and hearty intellectual soup. The density of some of the passages often insist on a double- or even triple-read, but Dialectic of Enlightenment is a goldmine of intellectual thought that's sure to enrich and reorganize some of your thinking. Would highly recommend reading, but actively, as I don't think an inactive or passive read would be very enjoyable here. ( )