Noel’s Reviews > Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments > Status Update
Noel
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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
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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 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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Mar 17, 2026 12:15PM
Cartoons “hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous attrition, the breaking of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.”
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Sort of like Ariel Dorfman's thesis in HOW TO READ DONALD DUCK: IMPERIALIST IDEOLOGY IN THE DISNEY COMIC.
Haha, thanks for the link, Julio :)
