L'éclipse de l'intellectuel

by Elémire Zolla

It explores the limiting nature of a society to think that you have choices but only within their constraints. Like a multiple choice test that limits your answers to only the ones provided, society also limits the options available while maintaining the illusion that you are free to choose anything you want.

Another part talks of a viewer of modern art. They criticize the work and then add the ultimate insult by saying "I really don't understand modern art at all." It goes on to explore how and why people condemn what they do not understand or what is not common to them.

mass-man, culture industry, bourgeois, sophisms, avant-garde, kitsch, abstract art, D. H. Lawrence, Industrial Revolution, peyote, stereophonic, gambler, Simone Weil, Fascist, matriarchy, mescaline, Baudelaire, homosexual, T. S. Eliot, jazz

Translated by Raymond Rosenthal

Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Elémire Zolla was an Italian essayist, philosopher and historian of religion. He was a connoisseur of esoteric doctrines and a scholar of Eastern and Western mysticism.

Reviews

[Lee Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of this is a bit old-fashioned, perhaps even grumpy, as in the diatribe against music recordings, cinema, and film scores--ironic since cinema had once been the lingua franca of Italian society. That said, this was absorbing for my first reading of Zolla. The translation seems a bit clunky but who am I to say? (“Scansion of jazz” as opposed to “rhythm of jazz”? Even heady jazz musicians wouldn't use "scansion").

Brilliant: Chapter on the Breviary of Black Magic--an almost perfect corollary with the aspersions of the current state of the world.

I could include this with books on media theory, contemporaneous with MuLuhan, Eco.

[David Defiant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives a great perspective on control and the current mechanisms used to distract the sheeple. Plan on enlarging your vocabulary, it is a scholarly, yet, verbose translation.