In October 1996 I gave a lecture on the Frankfurt School "Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment" at the University of Pennsylvania. Vance Bell, editor-in-chief of Other Voices, expressed an interest in publishing the text of my lecture in the first issue of his e-journal. I agreed, and the text of my lecture has been available on-line ever since.
My lecture is devoted to the first two chapters of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Over the years I've received emails from readers who wanted to express their gratitude at finding something that helped them to make sense of at least a part of that puzzling book. I kept these emails in mind as I continued to teach the book, and then I decided that the first book that I would try to write would be a commentary on Dialectic of Enlightenment. Those emails had convinced me that there would be an audience for the book that I wanted to write.
Well, for several years many things got in the way. Now that I'm now an independent scholar, I have time to take up my project in earnest. I'm working on a proposal to send to an editor who is interested in my project. I thought, though, that I should make a few revisions to the text of my lecture. I cleaned up the punctuation a little bit, deleted a few irrelevant passages, added some small clarifications, and the like. I also added a postscript dated February 2005.
As my book project progresses, I'll post updates about it to my blog.