Zoom Invite for F Scale Reading Group

January 27 8:30 am

We are going to be discussing the Culture Industry as Mass Deception and Anti-Semitism Chapters of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I was also thinking about how Adorno and Horkheimer compared the conformity of the culture industry to the obedience demanded by totalitarian regimes — in the 1940s, when liberal democracies were celebrating their absolute difference from the Axis powers. This is at the heart of the Jeffrey Williams essay on the changing meaning of the Holocaust in American culture.

Zoom invite below the paywall, but I promised some excerpts from Sade’s Juliette but here is a Link to English translation of Juliette

It’s going to be a more casual conversation on popular culture, Sadism, sexual liberation and enlightenment…the possibilities of pleasure and the use of others to attain that pleasure were reserved for aristocrats, like Sade, before the French Revolution.

The paintings of Boucher, meant to please privileged libertines were made to delight and seduce the members of a class that would be threatened by the guillotine.