Odysseus and the Wandering Jew: The Dialectic of Jewish
Enlightenment in Adorno and Horkheimer
James I. Porter
Cultural Critique, Number 74, Winter 2010, pp. 200-213 (Article)
Published by University of Minnesota Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.0.0061
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/374646
Accessed 17 Jun 2017 01:13 GMT
ODYSSEUS AND THE WANDERING JEW
THE DIALECTIC OF JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT IN
ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER
James I. Porter
T
his essay explores some of the complex identiWcations at work
in the Wrst Excursus of Dialectic of Enlightenment (Wrst published in 1944,
revised and republished in 1947), “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” principally authored by Theodor Adorno in 1942. The Excursus,
framing itself as a reception of antiquity, encourages a series of strong
readings that themselves border on a mythical presentation of the
past. These myths in turn serve a diagnostic function. That is, they are
myths that are being used by Adorno to diagnose a set of myths about
the ancient past and the modern present. In the course of Adorno’s
analysis, which is disenchanting in the extreme, antiquity is used to
mirror the projections of modernity, as it always had (see Porter 2004).
Only, in the Adornian dialectic, this mirroring is brought out in a distortive fashion, and an unwanted reXection is returned to the modern, post-Enlightenment bourgeois reader. The mythical Greek hero,
the noble and exalted warrior of Troy, is transformed into a protocapitalist, and then, in the person of Odysseus, into a Jew. The Western
myth is Orientalized, then Semitized, and Wnally shattered altogether.
In the course of this redirection of classical reception history, Adorno
is performing several things at once. The following will attempt to
unravel a few of the many threads of Adorno’s intricate chapter of
Dialectic of Enlightenment as it resonates with the rest of that work and
its immediate and more remote historical contexts.
EPIC VERSUS MYTH
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance [lit., “progressing,” fortschreitenden] of thought, has always aimed at liberating
Cultural Critique 74—Winter 2010—Copyright 2010 Regents of the University of Minnesota
ODYSSEUS AND THE WANDERING JEW
human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly
enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity [Unheil].
Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It
wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.
So opens Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is, Wrst and foremost, a critique of enlightenment culture and its values. Composed in the throes
of Hitler’s brutal Second World War and his extermination of the Jews,
it views such barbarism, for better or worse, as the puzzling fruit of
European civilization since the eighteenth century. The materialist
hopes of the two young Jewish philosophers from the Frankfurt School
notwithstanding, palpable in the atomistic and above all Lucretian
echoes in the language just quoted,1 enlightenment proved to be a
derailed project; it passed from the promise of disenchantment (Entzauberung) to reenchantment, from knowledge to disavowal and a subtler form of ignorance and self-betrayal. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s
analysis, myth and enlightenment are inextricably intertwined, and
they have always been so: “Just as myths already produce [vollziehen]
enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more
deeply in mythology” (2002, 8; trans. adapted).2 The latter half of this
claim is perhaps easier to grasp than the former half. Enlightenment
veered off into darkness and self-delusion, as history showed. But how
does myth generate enlightenment? That is the question that the Excursus “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” is designed to answer.
There, Adorno turns to Homer, whose epic sets itself “against”
myth, by organizing myths and thereby “com[ing] into contradiction
with them” (35). The layers of this struggle are visible in the sedimented strata of Homer’s texts themselves, both in their philological
surfaces as texts, when viewed as rhapsodic stitchings put together
by editors, albeit never seamlessly, and as deposits of older and more
recent historical layers of consciousness, for instance, in the traces of
solar and Underworld mythology they contain, which point to older
strata, while the fates of the individual heroes such as Odysseus point
to more recent accretions (cf. 59–60). These are some of Adorno’s least
original thoughts: he is clearly drawing on conventional and sometimes dubious scholarship, be it traditional philology, Gilbert Murray’s
The Rise of Greek Epic (1911), or Nietzsche’s invocations of the grisly
“pre-Homeric” background to Homer and later classical mythology.
These constraints matter little, for all this is just so much scaffolding
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JAMES I. PORTER
for an ediWce that will be thrown away in the end. What Adorno is
seeking to establish is an account of the emergence of the rational,
“enlightened” subject in early antiquity as presented through Homer’s
epics. That account is allegorical in its method (cf. 27).3 Homer represents the “precipitate” of archaic mythology, the mere unity of his plots
standing for a willful imposition of intentionality on their chaotic,
massive sprawl. His heroes, in their very individuation (a Hegelian
idea), represent the rise of the individual subject and of enlightened
rationality against the background of seething and shapeless forces.
The Iliadic warriors contesting their mythical fate are one instance of
this kind of individuation, implicated as they are “in a cause which is
national, Hellenic, and no longer tribal.” Odysseus Xeeing disaster is
a still more vivid instance, representing as he does the case of a fragile, “single surviving ego” who is set off against “the multiplicity of
fate,” and who accumulates a “self-consciousness” that is wrested
from myth as he wanders along his way back home. Self versus fate—
that is tantamount to the very “antithesis of enlightenment and myth”
(37–38; trans. adapted).
ODYSSEUS
Odysseus is tailor-made for the role that Adorno has allotted to him.
The epitome of rationality and cunning (List), he is a perfect Wt for
an allegory of the enlightened Ego making its way toward eventual
autonomy from mythical constraints. Only, the path he takes is hardly
straightforward, and the cunning he exercises does not belong to him
alone. There is a dialectic to enlightenment that requires a kind of
pact between myth and its antithesis above and beyond the role of individuals. Odysseus is not the agent so much as the plaything of this
dialectic; his cunning is in ways like the cunning of reason (List der
Vernunft) familiar from Hegel.4 Thus, there is a “secret [Geheimnis] to
the process between epic and myth: the self does not exist simply in a
Wxed [or ’rigid,’ starren] antithesis to adventure but takes on its Wxity
[Starrheit] only through this antithesis, and its unity through the very
multiplicity which this unity denies” (38; trans. adapted). What is
more, the process involves an exchange that reminds one of a game of
hide and seek: “Odysseus, like the heroes of all true novels after him,
ODYSSEUS AND THE WANDERING JEW
throws himself away, so to speak, in order to win himself [back]; he
achieves estrangement [Entfremdung] from nature by abandoning himself to nature, trying his strength [lit., ’measuring himself’] against it
in all his adventures” (38). One is put in mind of Sappho in Longinus’s
description of her in On the Sublime: “Do you not admire the way in
which she brings everything together—mind and body, hearing and
tongue, eyes and skin? She seems to have lost them all, and to be
looking for them as though they were external to her [’as if they were
scattered elements strange to her’ (Longinus, 18)]” (10.3; trans. D. A.
Russell in Russell and Winterbottom 1989, 154). So, perhaps Adorno’s
Wgure of a self constituted in loss (or at least in the appearance of loss)
has a genuine precedent in Greek antiquity, though examples might
have been available from the Odyssey itself, for instance the magical
veil of Ino, which Odysseus is offered after leaving Calypso’s island
and suffering shipwreck at Poseidon’s hands on the high seas: in order
to avail himself of the veil and thereby save himself, Odysseus must
Wrst strip himself of his clothes and abandon the wreckage (Odyssey
5.339–50); the act is tantamount to accepting a radical self-negation
and near-death—and Odysseus is, indeed, reduced to a marginal “seed
of Wre” hidden beneath smoldering ashes once he washes up on the
shore of Scheria at the end of book 5, naked, brine-encrusted, a barely
pulsating piece of life.
This basic gesture of self-rejection in the name of self-reclamation
Adorno labels cunning (List; 39). It is the most elemental and primitive
gesture of selfhood and self-constitution in the Western imagination
in Adorno’s eyes, given that Homer enjoys the undisputed status of
being “the foundational text [Grundtext] of European civilization” (37;
trans. adapted), while cunning in this sense is the central feature of
the Odyssey. The exchange of selfhood for self-sacriWce, this winning
of something from nothing, not only describes the most basic “adventure” (Abenteuer) of the self or ego, it also captures the plotting spirit
of Odysseus in his journeys as he goes about deceiving his foes in his
various encounters. Here, Adorno’s language turns on wordplay between Tausch (exchange) and Täuschung (deception), as if marking their
fundamental equivalence. Likewise drawn into the mix are a series of
further associated concepts: equation, fungibility, (non-mimetic) identity (or repressed mimesis), sacriWce, secularization, calculation, (instrumental) rationalization, abstraction, internalization, renunciation,
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JAMES I. PORTER
lying, self-deception, and disavowal. Underlying all the terms is a
violent, often bloody process, the very violence of which is typically
repressed in the course of its rationalization, secularization, or systematization—in a word, in the course of enlightenment. But as Adorno
shows, such repression is futile, since squelching the traces of violence requires violence either of the same or of a different sort. The
secret pact between (violent, bloody, chaotic) myth and (puriWed, rationalized) enlightenment is the truth of their secret identity. The fungibility of the one for the other, the sacriWce of myth on the altar of
enlightenment, and the exchange of myth for reason, all come at the
cost of the loss (violent sacriWce) of reason and its reincorporation in
a disavowed form at the other end of the process. Just as “cunning
originates in cult” in the fraudulent and calculated duping of gods
into an exchange of favors for sacriWcial slaughters, so too does Odysseus embody this archaic cunning in heightened form, representing
in his person both victim and priest (40).
He is victim and priest, because he is both the agent and the patient
of his own self-immolation. Odysseus does commit sacriWce, but not
only the bloody sort. His sacriWce is an unthinkable kind: that of his
own identity and name. It is the most profound self-sacriWce, one that
displays a kind of “bloody rationality” (41).5 In reducing himself to
a nameless cipher, a Nobody (Outis), and in regressing, momentarily, to an empty, preverbal void (or nearly so), Odysseus pulls off
the greatest trick of demystiWcation possible: he breaks the chain of
mimesis between names and essences, and thereby cunningly reinvests language with a purely rational and intentional content. Such is
the triumph of sheer nominalism, on the ashes of the ancien régime
of mythical formalism (47). In this precise sense, he is the prototypical enlightenment Wgure, self-pre-possessing (literally so), the Wrst
bourgeois subject, founded in a gesture of self-disavowal and selfreappropriation. The strangeness of this founding gesture lies in the
fact that for all its rationality it is unwilled (“the artful Odysseus cannot
do otherwise,” 53), and that for all its demythifying and demystifying
qualities it ends up reenchanting what it had emptied out, likewise
nolens volens: rational identity is founded in an approximation to a preverbal action (“mimicry of the amorphous realm,” 53; trans. adapted);
language is the magical supplement of this void, and a glib and uncontrollable stream of chatter at that (53). “For this reason, the clever
ODYSSEUS AND THE WANDERING JEW
one is—in contrast to the proverb—always tempted to speak too much”
(54; trans. adapted), and Nobody reclaims his identity as Somebody,
namely Odysseus, whose name rhymes with Oudeis, while Oudeis ambivalently signiWes either “hero” (deWned in the essay as “one who is
able to break the spell of the name”) or “nobody” (47).6 Such is “the
dialectic of eloquence,” which is really a dialectic of stupid “garrulity”—of speech run amok, as it exists to Wll the empty void of a subject
who knows too much and is caught in the maws of myth and reason.
In his compulsive garrulity, Odysseus reveals himself to be not
merely a pathetic bourgeois subject avant la lettre, but also, surprisingly, a Jew:
“Oudeis,” who compulsively proclaims himself to be Odysseus, already
bears features of the Jew who, in fear of death, continues to boast of a
superiority which itself stems from the fear of death; revenge on the
middleman stands not only at the end of bourgeois society but at its
beginning, as the negative utopia toward which coercive violence tends
in all its forms. (54)
The nomination of Odysseus as a Jew is shocking, but it does not arrive
completely unprepared. Earlier, Adorno had remarked how Odysseus in his “pathetic guise of the beggar” recalls “the features of the
oriental merchant [Kaufmanns],” footnoting the work of Victor Bérard,
who had brought out the “Semitic element” of the Odyssey in 1930
(48, 262n.14). Jewish and Oriental traits are noticed elsewhere in the
Excursus, if brieXy and in passing: the metamorphosis of Odysseus’s
crew into pigs at Circe’s hands is speculatively considered to be a
reminiscence of the taboo on swine among Jews and of its possible
Ionian counterpart (55); the “lotus is an oriental food” (50). These are
only the explicit clues. Designating Odysseus a homo oeconomicus and
the Odyssey a Robinsonade, and stating that Odysseus is a shipwrecked
hero who makes of his “weakness . . . a social strength,” rounds out
the picture (48). Capitalist economy has its origins in Odysseus the
wandering Jew, in this, the founding document of European civilization, our Homer.
The convergence between Judaism and the Enlightenment, which
Odysseus embodies in his own person, is foreseen by Horkheimer and
Adorno early on in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and this same theme can
be fairly said to govern the book as a whole. Judaism and the Enlightenment share several key traits. In tendency, they are both disenchanting
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JAMES I. PORTER
ideologies; both are nominalist (that is, severing the natural or magical link between words and things or essences), both antimimetic,
simply in another, nonrepresentational way from the nominalist tradition of the West and its ban on the naming of substance in general.
Yet, at the same time, both are prone to reenchanting the disenchanted
domains, by reanimating what they negate: in short, both are prone
to a dialectic of denial and illusion. Thus, if “enlightenment as a nominalist tendency stops short before the nomen, the non-extensive, restricted concept, the proper name” (17), the same holds for Judaism:
“In the Jewish religion, in which the idea of the patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth, the link between name and
essence is still acknowledged in the prohibition on uttering the name
of God. The disenchanted world of Judaism propitiates magic by negating it in the idea of God” (17). Odysseus’s willingness to forfeit his
name is itself a Jewish gesture, as is, Wnally, his clinging nonetheless
to the properties of his name. By doing so, he reinvests the name with
an essence it cannot properly have. Odysseus, in his self-immolation
(as Oudeis), in desecrating and then reinventing the bond between his
name and his being, is a perfect blend of Greek and Jew, at least in
Adorno’s terms.7
Blaming Jews for the ills of the Enlightenment was a well-practiced
cultural pastime on the German Right from the nineteenth century
onward (see Gross 2005). And yet, for all this, Odysseus as Wandering Jew and homo oeconomicus was already an obsolete mythologeme,
though perhaps not quite an obsolete ideologeme, at the time of the
composition of the Wrst Excursus in 1942. He was obsolete, not just
because Jews were being exterminated in the death camps, but in the
Wrst instance because Jews were no longer economically viable: “Now
that [their existence] is no longer needed by the rulers for economic
reasons, the Jews are designated as their absolute object, existing
merely for the exercise of power”—so reads the Wnal and culminating
essay of the book, entitled “Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of
Enlightenment” and dating from 1944 (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002,
137; trans. adapted).8 Condemning Odysseus qua Jew to the status of
an archaic myth makes some sense after all. For as “Elements of AntiSemitism” goes on to add, “The Jewish middleman fully becomes the
image of the devil only when he has ceased to exist economically”
(171; trans. adapted).
ODYSSEUS AND THE WANDERING JEW
On the other hand, even if the contamination of Homer with the
East was a longstanding tradition, from Meleager, Ptolemy Chennos
(the “Quail”), and Lucian in antiquity to Gerard Croese, Robert Wood,
Thomas De Quincey, William Gladstone, Samuel Butler, Victor Bérard,
and others in modernity, the distastefulness of this Orientalized image
of Homer at the height of the Nazi appropriation of Homer and Hellenism can only have been inordinate. It seems fair to assume that Adorno
was counting on this contemporary reaction in the Excursus, and that
he was doing his best to provoke it in the course of a probing psychological and cultural analysis of the contours of a phantasm—those
that together conjured up the modern alienated subject in his or her
fantasies about antiquity and the anti-Semitic passions that constitutively underlay them. The result is a heavily politicized reading of
Homer, though such a characterization fails to capture what Adorno
was attempting to do in his essay, which is literally a piece of political,
as well as cultural, provocation. Nor was Adorno alone in this kind of
critique at the time.
TROUBLING IDENTIFICATIONS AND THE POLITICS OF
RECEPTION: ADORNO AND AUERBACH
There are a number of striking overlaps between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, especially the latter’s “Odysseus’ Scar,” which was written in the same year (1942). In fact, the
Dialectic of Enlightenment helps Wll in some of the more obscure background issues of Mimesis. One of the more puzzling questions in Auerbach’s treatment of Homer, which I believe presents Homer to a degree
as the Nazis wished to see him, is how we can establish that this kind
of reading was common among Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. There
are clues here and there (the Wrst volume of Jaeger’s Paideia from 1934
is as good an indication as any),9 but outright declarations are hard to
come by. And yet when we read the Wrst two pages of the Wrst Excursus of Dialectic of Enlightenment, we seem to be on surer ground, for
instance, in the remarks about “the cultural fascists’ attitude to Homer”
with their “blind eulogy of blind life,” which represents an extreme
form of Nietzschean “nihilism” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 43).
The context is the “perversion” of Nietzsche’s conception of nihilistic
power at the hands of his pre-fascistic successors:
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JAMES I. PORTER
Whereas Nietzsche’s attitude to enlightenment, and thus to Homer,
remained ambivalent; whereas he perceived in enlightenment both the
universal movement of sovereign mind, whose supreme exponent he
believed himself to be, and a “nihilistic,” life-denying power, only the
second moment was taken over by his pre-fascist followers and perverted into ideology. This ideology became a blind eulogy of blind life,
which imposes a praxis by which everything living is suppressed. This
is seen in the cultural fascists’ attitude to Homer. In the Homeric depiction of feudal conditions they detect a democratic element, brand the
work a product of seafarers and traders, and condemn the Ionian epic
for its overly rational discourse and its communication of the commonplace. . . . Connections with reason, liberality, and middle-class qualities
do indeed extend incomparably further back than is assumed by historians who date the concept of the burgher from the end of medieval feudalism. In identifying the burgher where earlier bourgeois humanism
had imagined some pristine dawn of culture, which was taken to legitimize that humanism, the neo-Romantic reaction equates world history
with enlightenment. The fashionable ideology, whose most urgent concern is to liquidate enlightenment, thus pays it involuntary homage. It is
forced to acknowledge enlightened thinking even in the remotest past.
For the bad conscience of present-day devotees of the archaic [lit., “contemporary archaics,” der heutigen Archaiker] it is especially the earliest
traces of enlightenment which threaten to unleash the process they seek
to hold back, but which they themselves obviously promote. (36–37)
Here, and above all in the Wnal sentences, we can catch a glimpse of
how Adorno’s entire reading in the Excursus consists in an elaboration of a pre-existing commonplace. Elaboration, but also grotesque
parody. It is a position from which he cannot fail to entrap his target
audience, those he wittily labels “contemporary archaics,” and earlier describes as “German neopagans and administrators of war-fever”
(24), by which he means those who are, as it were, post-Nietzschean
revelers in a lost Dionysian excess. He goes on to characterize what it
is they are after when they read Homer: “the dubious nobility [that
Rudolph Borchardt, a member of the Stefan George circle and ‘apologist of German heavy industry’] idolizes in myth: naked force,” and
“the alleged authenticity of the archaic, with its principle of blood
and sacriWce” (37).10 Yet this authenticity is “alleged” because it is
“already tainted by the devious bad conscience of power characteristic of the ‘national regeneration’ today, which uses primeval times for
self-advertising,” while the original myth itself bears the marks of bad
ODYSSEUS AND THE WANDERING JEW
conscience in itself (37). While threatening to liquidate enlightenment,
exponents of romantic archaism merely afWrm enlightenment; indeed,
they incarnate it in a new and heightened form. These are the kinds
of readers Auerbach could rely on at least to attempt to identify the
principles of National Socialism with those of aristocratic Homeric
epic in his essay on “Odysseus’ Scar” when he wrote this in 1942, and
whose identiWcation he would frustrate in any number of ways, not
least of all by showcasing the Old Testament as the deeper, more historical, more searching, and more divinely sanctioned of the two epics
in his famous cross-cultural comparison. If today “the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simpliWcation,”
then it follows that Homeric Wction and Nazi propaganda occupy the
same moral realm, that of ahistorical myth and legend, whereas the
Old Testament—emphatically Jewish on Auerbach’s account—occupies the opposite realm of revealed truth.11
Auerbach was playing his own intricate games with Nietzsche,
as I have sought to show elsewhere, for example, in denying to the
archaic Greeks any access to Dionysian excess, but instead constraining them, literally and almost cruelly, to the mere surface: “ The general considerations which occasionally occur [to their minds] reveal a
calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no
compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate impulse either
to rebel against them or to embrace them in an ecstasy of submission”
(Auerbach 2003, 14; see Porter 2010). Adorno goes the other way:
instead of constraining the archaic Greeks with Apollonian simplicity, which is to say with the straightjacket of Winckelmannian classicism, he concedes, provisionally, their brutish, active proWles—the
regressive world of fascistic mimesis—and then reveals discordant
traits within them. We should note the sorts of complications that
Adorno imparts to his image of the bloodthirsty nobles of the archaic
Homeric epic, for example in the passage just quoted. The inclusion
of the trait of Schlauheit (cunning) in the ruling elite, like that of “bad
conscience,” is oddly out of place. Something has gone badly wrong
here. In Nietzsche-speak, the nobles are being painted with reactive
pigments (a move not unfamiliar to Nietzsche).12 These traits point
ahead to a disturbance that will infect the whole of Adorno’s essay,
which rather than satisfying the curiosity of “the cultural fascists” and
treating them to more “blood and sacriWce,” instead veers off into an
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JAMES I. PORTER
“excursus” into an epic hero, true, but one who embodies cunning
rather than “naked force,” indeed one who quite possibly embodies
bad conscience and other reactive traits: Odysseus.
In dishing up to his Germanic readers a Homeric hero who is a mirror image of the modern self, and thus demonstrating how the dialectic of reading is an endless and viciously closed hermeneutic circle,
or worse, a trap from which readers can never escape, as though from
a bad (ideological) dream—namely, from themselves—Adorno compounds the shamefulness of the experience by adding a twist to his perversion of the tale, as we saw: he makes Odysseus into a Jew. The last
step of logical identiWcation is the one that would close the circle but
would also prove most difWcult to make for a reader: it would render
contemporary anti-Semitic Germans into ancient wayfarers and merchants, or else into Nobodies, that is, into Jews. If Adorno’s analysis of
modern subject formation is correct, such self-annihilation is a step that
the Jew-haters had already taken, whether knowingly or not. In Freud’s
words, “their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians,” and
therefore, a hatred that is self-directed rather than other-directed
(Freud 1969–75, 9:539). Such is the lethal irony of anti-Semitism.
Needless to say, none of this can hardly have been acceptable to a
German reader in 1944, when Dialectic of Enlightenment was published
in a limited edition (in mimeograph) by the Institute of Social Research, under the title Philosophische Fragmente, and even in 1947, when
it appeared in print in Amsterdam under its present title. The circularities of the passage quoted above from page 54 about Odysseus’s
compulsive self-betrayal and, as it were, his compulsive Jewishness,
convey the circularities of the reader’s own entrapment: word is poised
against word, Odysseus is compelled, willy-nilly, to act as he does
(confessing to be who he is, namely nothing and everyone), his Jewish traits consisting in a fear of death that stems from a sense of superiority (while existing in an actual state of inferiority, or is it in fact
one of superiority?—wherever rationality faces off against naked force,
one is hard pressed to say which is which), which sense of superiority in fact stems from a fear of death, while the vengeance enacted
against the mercenary middleman turns out to be not the residue of
history but its originary moment, and worse, the genuine motor of
history, to which every kind of force has been drawn like a magnet.
However unhappy the result might be, this is an inversion worthy of
ODYSSEUS AND THE WANDERING JEW
Nietzsche. For in the end, what stands revealed are not a blond beast
and a Homeric hero, but a German Beamter on the one hand and a
Jewish shopkeeper on the other, while their mutual identities can
barely be kept apart. Such a reading deserves to be called a true, because savage, unmasking, a genuine genealogy of power.13
Through this double identiWcation of Odysseus with the Jew and
with the (German) bourgeois subject, Adorno has created a doubleobject of hatred for his German readers, in case these had any profascistic leanings. And he has endlessly complicated his own genealogy
of the modern bourgeois subject. The only question is whether Odysseus as Jew represents a Schreckbild for modern non-Jewish Germans
alone, or whether he represents the assimilated German Jew who has
undergone “a second circumcision” in his efforts to “pass” as German since the Enlightenment (138). It is not at all clear that these
options have to be mutually exclusive, least of all in the highly sensitized political climate like that of German-Jewish relations during
the 1940s. Tearing at the heart of German philology, Jewish-German
thinkers such as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Auerbach were exposing
the very soul of German classicism. Reception could not help but be
political in their hands, or for anyone who dared to read them.
Notes
1. Lucretius: “When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the
earth, crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her faced from the realms
of heaven, . . . ’twas a man of Greece who dared Wrst to raise his mortal eyes to
meet her, and Wrst to stand forth to meet her: him neither the stories of the gods
nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar, but all the more
spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to burst through the close-set bolts
upon the doors of nature,” etc. (29 [= book 2, verses 62–71]).
2. Henceforth, unless otherwise stated, all references by page number only
will be to this work. References to the German original are drawn from Horkheimer and Adorno 1971.
3. As is true with a dizzyingly complex fragment from the same Excursus,
which was published under a separate title, “On Epic Naiveté” (in Adorno). This
latter essay creates something like an allegory of the very idea of epic itself.
4. The more so as the cunning of reason explicitly involves the “sacriWce” of
the individual and the particular for the sake of the general and the universal (Hegel
1956, 33; 1971 12:49), a point that will resonate in Odysseus’s case in a moment.
5. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 17: “Enlightenment as a nominalist
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JAMES I. PORTER
tendency stops short before the nomen, the non-extensive, restricted concept, the
proper name. Although it cannot be established with certainty whether proper
names were originally generic names, as some maintain, the former have not yet
shared the fate of the latter. The substantial ego repudiated by Hume and Mach
is not the same thing as the name.”
6. In its other form, Outis as Mêtis signiWes cunning as well as Nobody, but
Adorno does not stress this fact in his essay.
7. The Jewishness of Odysseus in this work is surprisingly little commented on, but for good contextual analysis, see Rabinbach 1997, 184–98; Rabinbach 2000; Wiggershaus, 346–47.
8. On the background of the Frankfurt School’s attitude to the economic
status of the Jews and the Jewish Question, see Jay.
9. See Porter 2010.
10. On Borchardt, about whom Adorno wrote at length elsewhere, see Schmidt.
11. See Porter 2008, where this contrast is developed.
12. See Porter 1998.
13. For the unmasking of the blond beast as a German civil servant (Beamter),
see Porter 1998.
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