Status Updates From Dialettica dell'illuminismo

Last real chapter. This book is honestly disappointing. A&H have said NOTHING about the Dreyfus Affair, the fascist March on Rome, or even the triumph of Nazism in Germany. (They’ve also been curiously silent on racial imperialism.) They seem completely uninterested in actual Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. And really, I don’t find their thesis convincing.

Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness. To moments of happiness, laughter is foreign; only operettas, and now films, present sex amid peals of merriment. But Baudelaire is as humorless as Hölderlin. In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.

The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. … It calls for Mickey Rooney rather than the tragic Garbo, Donald Duck rather than Betty Boop.

Very very pessimistic but I find myself agreeing to their description of the instrumentation of pretty much everything…maybe except for the media part.

I think this is the first philosophy book that I read which contains 2 authors.

So far only read the required chapters for class. I’ll complete the last chapter one day.

forgot to update yesterday (yes this is me lowkey having a uni crashout lol)