Summer 2024 Reading Group: The Fight for the Dialectic of Enlightenment

I. Topic

Starting Saturday, June 1st, join us for seven, once-weekly collective struggle sessions over Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a book (to tweak Nietzsche’s subtitle for Zarathustra) for no one and no one. In this exploratory session, we’ll have it out with the authors, the last half-century of their readers, and each other as we work to establish a general sense of the core problematic and project of the text and try to reconstruct the reasons for its hyper-conscious and hyper-confounding method of presentation.

One of the primary desiderata of this session will be making the ‘esoteric’ (Marxist) text of DoE – in the (largely untranslated) preparatory sketches and notes, internal IFS seminars, letters, and Diskussionsprotokolle – exoteric by (1) collecting the strongest extant English-language secondary literature on the topic and making it accessible in a shared file and (2) working together on first-pass English translations of some previously untranslated primary source materials.

II. Full schedule

1. June 1st, “Prefaces” to DoE. (James/Crane)
2. June 8th, “Concept of Enlightenment” (James/Crane)
3. June 15th, “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” (Mac Parker)
4. June 22nd, “Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” (Esther Planas Balduz)
5. June 29th, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Zachary Loeffler)
6. July 6th, “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment” (J.E. Morain)
7. July 13th, “Notes and Sketches” (TBD)

III. Sign-up

Sign-up now by sending a direct message to our ‘X’ or by emailing us directly.

The CTWG Editorial Board: Anatarah Bin AlKaf, Esther Planas Balduz, James Crane, Jefferson Lin, Zachary Loeffler, Mac Parker, Sam Thomas, J. E. Morain, Re Tejus