Noel’s Reviews > Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments > Status Update
Noel
is on page 137 of 282
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.
— Mar 20, 2026 08:15PM
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Noel’s Previous Updates
Noel
is on page 112 of 282
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.
— Mar 17, 2026 11:02AM
Noel
is on page 106 of 282
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.
— Mar 17, 2026 10:46AM
Noel
is on page 45 of 282
The superiority of nature in the competitive struggle is repeatedly confirmed by the very mind which has mastered nature. All bourgeois enlightenment is agreed in its demand for sobriety, respect for facts, a correct appraisal of relative strength. Wishful thinking is banned. The reason, however, is that all power in class society is beset by the gnawing consciousness of its powerlessness in face of…
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— Mar 04, 2026 08:00PM
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Noel
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Mar 20, 2026 08:17PM
The critique of American mass culture is way out of proportion to the text, probably misguided, and should be obvious to anyone who has stopped to think. Well, at least today. Essential reading, this probably isn’t…
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After this I’m going to go back to Marx and Freud.
Noel, I am afraid I saw this coming. You’re way too sensitive a reader to buy in to this over-simplistic and, truth be told, very abstract, condemnation of mass culture. I genuinely like some of Adorno’s applied readings (like the chapter on Homer or some of the essays in Noten zur Literatur) but as a sociologist and philosopher I cannot take him too seriously.
Aw, shucks. Thanks for the tip-off, Jeroen :) I did like Minima Moralia, but in retrospect probably more for Adorno’s personal reflections on stuff like insomnia and exile than anything else (which I found very relatable). I feel similarly about him, really.
