From cheap flights to binge watching, guilty pleasures are ubiquitous. The gestures of distinction, aesthetic judgements, and political desires attached to these pleasures have effects beyond the private realm: guilty pleasures, a complex mixture of enjoyment, shame, and regret, constitute a nebulous arena of societal and cultural dispute. The KWI annual theme for 2024/25 aims to do more than investigate the negative reputation of guilty pleasures by probing various forms, functions, and historical contexts of this phenomenon. (Longer version here)

In this session of the Colloquium, we will explore KWI’s current annual theme together, opening up the field with two texts: Firstly, an excerpt from „Totem and Taboo“ (1913), in which Sigmund Freud – by means of storytelling, no less – sketches out how all of culture originates in a complicated mediation of pleasure and guilt; secondly, a short essay on „Guilty Pleasures as Conspicuous Consumption? Cultural Omnivores, Snobbery, and the Distinguished Taste for Authentic Trash“ by KWI-Fellow Paul Buckermann. Curiously enough, in both cases practices and metaphors of consumption (modelled on the intake of food) play a pivotal role for the conceptualization of the entanglement of guilt and pleasure. These two rather different texts will ground our discussions on the strange intersection of society, aesthetics and politics inherent in guilty pleasures.