Int class trad (2012) 19:107–128

DOI 10.1007/s12138-012-0312-5

Odysseus and Enlightenment: Horkheimer

and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung

Katie Fleming

Published online: 28 December 2012

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Abstract Dialektik der Aufklärung a seminal text in twentieth-century intellectual

history, at the heart of which lies a mournful reading of the Odyssey. Odysseus and the
adventures of his voyage home provide Horkheimer and Adorno with critical material
for exploring the history and nature of barbarous enlightenment and their – seemingly
paradoxical – thesis: namely, that myth is already enlightenment; and that enlighten-
ment reverts to mythology. This article argues that closer attention ought to be paid to
the authors' choice and interpretation of the Odyssey. Dialektik der Aufklärung is, this
article shall suggest, a confrontation with the German philhellenic tradition itself,
from Hegel to Wilamowitz, out of which arises a powerful, ethical statement about the
nature of that tradition, and the politics and cultural identity in which it plays a central part.

Keywords Odysseus . Odyssey . Enlightenment . Dialectic . Adorno . Horkheimer .

Classical tradition . Philhellenism . Hegel . Nietzsche . Wilamowitz . WWII

In an article written between 1939 and 1940, and published in the Cahiers du Sud in
Marseilles in 1941, after its original publication in Paris was made impossible by the
events of the Occupation,1 Simone Weil placed the Iliad at the centre of an eternal
human narrative of violence:
The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force. The force
that men wield, the force that subdues men, in the face of which of human flesh
shrinks back. The human soul seems ever conditioned by its ties with force,
swept away, blinded by the force it believes it can control, bowed under the
constraint of the force it submits to. Those who have supposed that force, thanks
1
See the ‘Note de l’Éditeur’ in Weil [96].
My thanks to the anonymous readers for their wise and helpful suggestions for improvement of this article.
Any faults which remain are, of course, my own.
K. Fleming (*)
School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
108 K. Fleming

to progress, now belongs to the past, have seen a record of that in Homer’s
poem; those wise enough to discern the force at the center of all human history,
today as in the past, find in the Iliad the most beautiful and flawless of mirrors.2
Weil’s famous3 essay is a reflection on the violent history of human nature,
epitomized in the Iliad, and continuing through to the present day. Written in praise
of the epic, and briefly of Aeschylus and Sophocles, it is also a damning critique of
the course of European literature, which, with the exception of the Gospels, has failed
to recapture ‘the Greek genius’ 4 through its inability to recognize the common fate of
all mankind – doomed subjects of force, whether friend or foe, victor or defeated.
Erich Auerbach, who escaped from Nazism to exile in Istanbul, also turned to
Homer and the Odyssey in his now classic work Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in
der abendländische Literatur [4].5 Drawing parallels between his subject matter and
contemporary reality, and by tracing the history of European culture and literature,
Auerbach deciphered a political - indeed anti-fascist - poetics of realism. His famous
interpretation of the story of Odysseus’ scar (Od. XIX 386-507), sharply set against
the writing of the Old Testament, quietly condemns the Homeric text for its ahistor-
ical, elitist, and totalizing narrative.6 Implicitly, then, Auerbach drew a line between
Homeric epic and the Third Reich.
Written during such an historically charged moment, these texts illustrate vividly
the continued role of the ancient world in some of the most significant intellectual
debates of the twentieth century, and the ways in which the Homeric epics remain
central to interpretations and representations of the politics of modernity.7
Between 1942 and 1944, two German-Jewish exiles in California – Max Horkheimer
and Theodor W. Adorno - also returned to the Odyssey.8 Their reading of the ancient
epic was to become part of one the most significant philosophical texts of the
twentieth century, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (hereafter
DdA).9
DdA is an intense lament which mourns the ‘eclipse of reason’10 amid the
catastrophes of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to answer what was, and still

2
Holoka [42] 45.
3
See, e.g., Macleod [59], Griffin [33], Taplin [88], Holoka [42].
4
Holoka [42] 68.
5
See Porter [74].
6
Auerbach [4] Ch. 1.
7
See, e.g., Cartledge [19], Porter [73].
8
Despite its subject matter, DdA has not been widely discussed within classical studies. See Pucci [77] 72,
77 & [78] 127; Porter [73] and especially (2010) for the most sustained engagements by classicists.
Bibliographical allusions are more common. See, e.g., Giesecke [26]. See also Rocco [80].
9
See, e.g., Rabinbach [79]. Considered by Adorno to be representative of his and Horkheimer’s shared
concerns and philosophy, this founding text of Critical Theory is seminal for any study of the development
of modern intellectual histories. See, e.g., Held [39], Wiggerhaus [99], Jay [49]. Yet the work had little
immediate international impact. First produced in 1944 in a mimeographic edition, and then officially
published in 1947 by Querido of Amsterdam, its availability was initially limited. See, e.g., Wiggerhaus
[99] 325-6. (Its accessibility to an Anglophone audience was also restricted, since an English translation of
the text was not published until 1972 as Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming [New York, 1972]).
Gradually, the work gained an important underground reputation, particularly in Germany during the
1960s, and consequently in 1969, although with apparent reluctance, Horkheimer and Adorno allowed
the work to be republished. See Horkheimer & Adorno [43] ix.
10
See Horkheimer [45] and ([46] [1941]).
Odysseus and Enlightenment 109

remains, one of the most pressing questions of the modern age: why, when the
Enlightenment seemed to guide the way to reason and progress, has modernity
plunged into a new era of horror and irrationalism, as typified by fascism?11 This
project was, by the authors’ admission, an ambitious one,12 promising to span
virtually the entirety of Western thought. Horkheimer and Adorno extrapolate the
inexorable and self-perpetuated descent of enlightened thought into barbarism, by
exposing the orientation of enlightenment towards calculation and domination over
nature.13 It is - contra Hegel - through its lack of self-consciousness that enlighten-
ment (unavoidably, and - the crux of the matter for Horkheimer and Adorno - in spite
of itself) regresses to the very mythology it attempts to supersede. It is also respon-
sible for the restrictive and oppressive structure of modern, capitalist, bureaucratic
society which is in fact the very opposite of freedom.14
For the authors, the defining and paradoxical characteristic of fatally flawed
enlightenment is this: that myth is already enlightenment; and that enlightenment
reverts to mythology.15 To demonstrate this, Horkheimer and Adorno turn to the
Odyssey, asserting its important place in the political, social, and cultural history of
the West: it is nothing less than ‘one of the earliest representative documents of
bourgeois Western civilization.16 Their analysis of the Odyssey stretches across the
first section of the work ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’, and the second, ‘Exkurs I:
Odysseus oder Mythos und Aufklärung’, (this latter the first step in their exposition
of the dual thesis that myth is enlightenment, and that enlightenment regresses to
mythology). Located at the very heart of their theoretical investigation of Western
culture, the Odyssey dramatizes the possibility of self-reflexive enlightenment, even
as it narrates its impossibility.

German Odysseys

In recent years the role of the ancient Greeks in the formation of the modern German
cultural and political psyche and its manifold consequences have been extensively
studied.17 Yet despite this, very little attention appears to have been paid by scholars
of Critical Theory to the particular significance of the Homeric text or indeed the
(classical and anthropological) scholarship to which the authors themselves re-
ferred.18 This is a critical lacuna which underreads dramatically the authors' choice

11
I shall, throughout, following the example of the authors of DdA, refer to the idea of fascism as
incorporating Nazism, Italian Fascism, and totalitarianism in general.
12
Horkheimer & Adorno [43] 1.
13
Horkheimer & Adorno [43] 9-10.
14
See also Marcuse [61].
15
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] xviii.
16
Horkheimer & Adorno [43] xviii.
17
The seminal statement of this theme is Butler [14]. See also Marchand [60] and Williamson [102].
18
This latter issue is, in part, the result of the text’s history. Adorno’s preliminary version was not widely
available until 1998, and so more detailed assertions about his sources were difficult to confirm. However,
it is my impression that despite the sometimes elusive nature of the allusions in ‘Exkurs I’, it was and is
possible to identify the influences marked upon it. These can now be corroborated by comparison with
Adorno’s previous ‘draft’. See Adorno [3].
110 K. Fleming

of the Odyssey, which has, I propose, specifically national significance. At stake in

Horkheimer and Adorno's re-reading of the epic is a re-evaluation and critique of the
legacy and primacy of Greece as an idealized spiritual home in the German intellec-
tual tradition. It is, I shall show, precisely the lens of the critique of the Homeric text
which offers such a sharp and excoriating focus on both the - deeply Philhellenic -
German philosophical tradition, from Hegel to Nietzsche, and its drier sibling, classical
philology, represented synecdochically and paradigmatically by Wilamowitz. In turning
to antiquity themselves, Horkheimer and Adorno can address the consequence of these
returns to Greece. Both traditions are shown here to be damningly complicit in the
trajectory of history which has culminated in the catastrophes of fascism, anti-Semitism,
and the Second World War.
In her study of Adorno’s work, and here of DdA in particular, Susan Buck-Morss
does suggest that:
[t]he polemical, iconoclastic intent of the study is the reason why it focused on
two sacred cows of bourgeois rational thought, the harmonious age of ancient
Greece and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. These moments of an ideal-
ized past were juxtaposed to the most barbaric, most irrational phenomena of
the present in order to demythologize the present and the past's hold over it.19
Robert Hullot-Kentor echoes Buck-Morss’ observation, noting that there
[…] is another intellectual tradition present to Dialectic of Enlightenment […]:
in various ways many German intellectuals since the eighteenth century con-
sidered themselves and Germany itself the bearer of the Hellenic torch. Greek
philology was a terrain of eminence on which the most substantial issues of
German culture and society were argued out. It is not because Nietzsche was so
perfectly wild that his philosophy first took shape as a critique of Greek tragedy
with the goal of reinvigorating the German will to do battle and sacrifice. In this
context it is not surprising that Adorno presents a schematization of history that
cites Odysseus as the key ancestor of the German bourgeoisie. But Adorno does
so primarily in order to develop a counterthesis to archaicists such as Klages
who, allying themselves with one tangent of Nietzsche’s work, called for a
return to primordial myth: Adorno steals away Klages’ invocation of life and
the critique of intellect by showing in his study of the Odyssey that myth is
already enlightenment, and that enlightenment becomes myth …20
As these quotations suggest, critics have emphasized the use, the immediate and
superficial impact, of the ancient model, rather than its specific significance. While it is
clear that the authors were indeed intent on ‘demythologizing’ the present and the classical
past and in redressing Klagesian mythical nostalgia,21 to insist that the authors’ own

19
Buck-Morss [13] 61.
20
Hullot-Kentor [47] 106.
21
Specifically Klages’ Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1929-1939). Generally left unspoken by most
scholars of DdA, is the fact that Klages, despite later hostility from the chief Nazi ideologue Rosenberg, was
beloved of many leading National Socialists, and had himself since the early 1900s expressed anti-Semitic
and anti-democratic views. See Schneider [82]. That the authors should choose to demolish his particular
form of spiritual psychology is thus unsurprising. This implicit anticipation of the later chapter on anti-
Semitism is a consistent feature of the early sections of their work.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 111

totalizing anthropological22 reductio ad absurdum - ‘myth is already enlightenment,

and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ – provides the most or only meaningful
explanation to their appropriation of the Odyssey runs the risk of neglecting the
critical intellectual history plotted by the authors, which is reliant on the specificity of
the ancient Greek model and its influence on the German intellectual tradition.
Immediately pertinent to this discussion is the reception of Homer within the
German aesthetic, philosophical, and scholarly tradition.23 Although part of a wider
‘modern Homeric Renaissance,’ which shaped ‘the development of Western culture
as a whole […],’24 and was embedded in the cultural fabric of Europe in the
influential and widespread aesthetics of ‘Nature’ and ‘Natural Genius,’ the
eighteenth-century German appropriation of Homer was distinct in its cultural and
political influence. The critical reevaluation of Homer as a national poet by Herder,
and the subsequent turn to the Homeric epics for material and inspiration by members
of the influential pre-Romantic ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement, with which Goethe,
for one, was closely associated, was a conscious attempt to forge a new, expressly
national, poetics.25 That which was previously perceived as the regrettably primitive
nature of German literature was now lauded for its deep, national affiliation with ‘das
Originalgenie des Homers’.26 Moreover, following the publication of F.A. Wolf's
controversial Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), the study of Homer was intrinsic to
the evolution of nineteenth-century classical philology which was to become such a
powerful cultural and educational force. Homer was central to German cultural and
national debate.27 Horkheimer and Adorno’s decision to reinterpret Homer must be
seen in the light of these formative traditions.
The part of the Homeric texts in the formation of German (literary) nationalism
offers further evidence for the resonance of the Odyssey in DdA in particular. By
rereading the paradigmatic tale of nostos, of longing to return home, with and against
a tradition which privileges and idealizes national identity, the authors evoke a
complex of ideas, weaving together several strands of thought and mapping onto
their construction of the primeval and Homeric worlds both national and universal
narratives of identity and non-identity, domination and subjection, homelessness and
homeliness, rationality and irrationality.
It is perhaps in this context that the following, critical, statement might be
understood:
Both reason and religion outlaw the principle of magic. Even in its resigned
detachment from existence, as art, it remains dishonourable; those who practice

22
Horkheimer and Adorno were concerned to tackle the Odyssey from a psychological-anthropological
perspective. It is tempting to imagine that, cast adrift in a strange new world, the authors were particularly
susceptible to the allure of cultural anthropology. Glancing at the footnotes of the first chapters of DdA, one
can immediately see that, apart from the occasional citations of Hegel, Nietzsche, Bacon, and other
philosophers, the majority of explicit references are to the work of anthropologists. See Bodei [12] and
Wulf [104].
23
See Finsler [24], Simonsuuri [85].
24
Most [62] 55. See also Stanford [86] and Nicosia (ed.) [66].
25
See Trevelyan [92]. Lohse [58] and Harth [34].
26
The notion of ‘the Original Genius of Homer’ was an English export, originally described by Robert
Wood in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London, 1769). This was translated by C. F.
Michaelis as Robert Woods Versuch des Originalgenie des Homers (Frankfurt, 1773).
27
Wohlleben [103].
112 K. Fleming

it become vagrants, latter-day nomads, who find no domicile [Heimat] among

the settled.28
The mention of ‘Heimat’ immediately draws the reader’s attention to the signifi-
cance of this brief observation. It is difficult not to associate this melancholy claim
with the authors’ situation. Exiled from Nazi Germany and alienated from the USA,
Horkheimer and Adorno often felt adrift.29
Yet this forlorn statement must also be a response to an influential (German)
philosophical and literary tradition. As the authors themselves note, it was the poet
and philosopher Novalis, the ‘prophet of Romanticism’, who first asserted that all
philosophy is homesickness.30 This definition and the parameters it consequently
established were to find particular resonance within the German intellectual tradition,
in which the Greeks were to play a large part:
Die deutsche Philosophie als Ganzes - Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer,
um die Großen zu nennen - ist die gründlichste Art Romantik und Heimweh
[…]. Man ist nirgends mehr heimisch, man verlangt zuletzt nach dem zurück,
wo man irgendwie heimisch sein kann, weil man dort allein heimisch sein
möchte: und das ist die griechische Welt! […] Vielleicht, daß man einige
Jahrhunderte später urtheilen wird, daß alles deutsche Philosophiren darin seine
eigentliche Würde habe, ein schrittweises Widergewinnen des antiken Bodens
zu sein […]. [W]ir werden von Tag zu Tag griechischer, zuerst, wie billig, in
Begriffen und Werthschätzungen, gleichsam als gräcisirende Gespenster: aber
dereinst, hoffentlich auch mit unserem Leibe! Hierin liegt (und lag von jeher)
meine Hoffnung für das deutsche Wesen!31
In discussing this passage Goldhill has shown that Nietzsche’s Heimweh for
Greece is not simply a universalizing, philosophical gesture.32 Rather, ‘Nietzsche is
firmly linked into a broadly developing contemporary nationalist account of Germany
[…] a nationalism deeply committed to discovering its own Greekness.’33
However, Nietzsche’s remarks also provide an insight into the genealogical com-
plexity of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text. In reiterating this idiom, Nietzsche not only
alludes to the aphorism of Novalis, but also traces his debt to and distance from
(among others) Hegel, whose concept of philosophizing with the Greeks both
appropriates and rejects the poet’s formulation: philosophy, Hegel argues, allows us
to look at the world rationally, and thus, with the Greeks, to be ‘at home’ in it.34
Philhellenism was a defining characteristic of Hegel’s modernity. As Kain writes,
‘the culture of Greece constituted an ideal, a high point of the human condition.
Hegel’s concern with this ideal permeated all levels of his social, cultural, and

28
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 13. Again, while maintaining its links with the magical way of thinking, the
‘art’ described by the authors here seems to be the ‘false’ art of the concert hall.
29
See Hohendahl [41].
30
See Novalis [70] 135.
31
Nietzsche [68] 679.
32
On Nietzsche and antiquity see also Cancik [18], Nehamas [65] 128-156, Zuckert [107] 10-32, Silk &
Stern [84], Porter [71] & [72], Lane [52] passim, Bishop (ed.) [11].
33
Goldhill [29] 6.
34
See the preface to Phänomenologie des Geistes.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 113

political thought.’35 Furthermore, this is precisely a German activity, because of the

deep affinity felt between Germany and ancient Greece.36
Of this Nietzsche might approve. However, his distance from Hegel lies in his
radical rejection of Winckelmann’s classicizing vision of the Greeks which had been
inherited by Hegel. Nietzsche’s manifesto, reiterated throughout his work, was that
Germany must return home to the dreadful, beautiful, and now completely alien life
of the tragic Greeks, the world of the struggle between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian, ‘Das Hellenenthum, die einzige Form, in der gelebt werden kann: das
Schreckliche in der Maske des Schönen.’37
Nonetheless, the sentiment of being ‘at home’ with the Greeks remains. For
Hegel it marks the comparable sensibilities of the Germans and the ancient
Greeks - ‘Among the Greeks we feel ourselves immediately at home [heimat-
lich], for we are in the region of Spirit[.]’.38 More than this, it embodies the
mutual political and social Weltanschauung of both, namely the shared (political)
characteristic of Heimatlichkeit:
All educated people, and we Germans in particular, feel at home [[heimatlich]
when we speak of Greece. […] We feel at home with the Greeks precisely
because they were at home with themselves in the world, because they them-
selves made their world into a homeland [Heimat]. We feel at ease with them
because they were at ease with themselves; a shared spirit of being at home
[Heimatlichkeit] is what binds us to them.39
Despite Hegel’s philosophical insistence on the universality of Geist, and the need
for consciousness to be fully realized before (any)one is at home in the world, this
relationship maps out a different landscape. To be German/to be Greek, is (always
already) to be at home in, and a citizen of, the world.
Note, however, the subtle tension implied by Hegel, and fully articulated by
Nietzsche in the passage above. This ‘Greekness’ is a nostalgia (a return, or desired
return to antiquity), and an ontology. Novalis’ definition is both appropriated and
transformed: Heimweh/philosophy is, for Hegel at least, simultaneously the longing
for Heimat, and its discovery.
It is this paradox which Horkheimer and Adorno critique. That Hegel and Nietzsche
should characterize their philosophy as ‘homeliness’ in or nostalgia for all things Greek,
provides Horkheimer and Adorno with evidence of the powerful coalescence and
complicity of these issues, and the material to expose their role in (false) enlightenment.
Moreover, this understated exploration of the collision of Philhellenism, German na-
tionalism, and enlightenment in the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche in particular, is
also a preliminary sortie into the exposure of the “enlightened” origins of anti-Semitism
and the use of antiquity within this history.40

35
Kain [50] 34.
36
For the importance of the Greeks to Hegel, see, e.g., Shklar [83], Nauen [64], Barcella [5], Cambiano
[16], Kain [50], Schmidt [81], Leonard [55].
37
Nietzsche [67] 80.
38
Hegel [37] 223.
39
Hegel [38] 9-10.
40
See Bernal [9], Gossman [31], Leoussi [57], Yovel [105], Prickett [76] and Leonard [55] and [56].
114 K. Fleming

As Glucksmann and Leonard have demonstrated,41 the opposition posited between

the categories of Greek and Jew is crucial to the comprehension of Hegel’s engage-
ment with antiquity. Hegel sets Judaism in marked and negative opposition to
Hellenism (and consequently to Christianity, which is seen as its spiritual and
political successor). For Hegel the opposition between Judaism and Hellenism/Chris-
tianity is central to the development of his ethical programme and the movement from
Kantian Moralität to Hegelian Sittlichkeit. The Greeks of the fifth-century Athenian
polis, so Hegel argued,42 had anticipated, indeed enacted, the ‘fusion of individual
and social good’,43 although being only in the ‘adolescence’44 of Geist they did not
pursue this in full self-consciousness. This would be the achievement of the Protes-
tant Germany of Hegel’s own day.45
Nietzsche too, in Die Geburt der Tragödie, signals his agreement with the Jew/
Greek antithesis.46 In this treatise, his most influential work on a classical subject,
Nietzsche turns to antiquity to discuss the nature of culture. Despite his presentation
of the equality and balanced necessity of both human impulses - Dionysian and
Apollonian - it is clear that Nietzsche favours the former individuation, the negative
and elatedly pessimistic force spawned of primitive terror. In the ninth section of this
work, in his discussion of Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Nietzsche extols the pessimistic
world-view. Prometheus is a ‘Dionysian mask’, the representation of the violent
struggle against the contradiction of existence, namely the conflict between man
and god. Both an ethical and philosophical problem, it is also the means to self-
fashioning, however futile.47
Prometheus, for Nietzsche, is an Aryan legend, which lies in sharp contrast
to the ‘Semitic’ legend of the Fall: it is nothing less than a charter myth of the
Aryan ‘Volk’:
Originally, the legend of Prometheus belonged to the entire community of
Aryan peoples and documented their talent for the profound and the tragic;
indeed, it is not unlikely that this myth is as significant for the Aryan character
as the myth of the Fall is for the Semitic character […].48
But Nietzsche does not merely make a distinction between the two legends, but
hierarchizes them:
Humanity achieves the best and highest of which it is capable by committing an
offence and must in turn accept the consequences of this, namely the whole
flood of suffering and tribulations which the offended heavenly powers must in
turn visit upon the human race as it strives nobly towards higher things; a bitter
thought, but one which, thanks to the dignity it accords to the offence, contrasts
strangely with the Semitic myth of the Fall, where the origin of evil was seen to

41
Glucksmann [27] and Leonard [55]. See also Derrida [22].
42
See Hegel (1961).
43
White [98] 37.
44
Hegel (1961) 320.
45
See Hegel (1961) 603-5.
46
See Cancik & Cancik-Lindemaier [17].
47
See Lecznar [53] for Nietzsche's Prometheus.
48
Nietzsche (1999) 49.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 115

lie in curiosity, mendacious pretnece, openness to seduction, lasciviousness, in

short: in a whole series of predominantly feminine attributes.49
In identifying as Aryan the manly and ethical principle of (Hegelian) self-
determination present in the contradictory, active sin of Prometheus, and in allying
this with the tragic Dionysian impulse, Nietzsche reveals his endorsement of the
Greek/Jew polarity:
The curse in the nature of things, which the reflective Aryan is not inclined
simply to explain away, the contradiction at the heart of the world, presents
itself to him as a mixture of different worlds, e.g. a divine and a human one,
each of which, taken individually, must suffer for the fact of its individuation.
The heroic urge of the individual to reach out towards the general, the attempt to
cross the fixed boundaries of individuation, and the desire to become the one
world-being itself, all this leads him to suffer in his own person the primal
contradiction hidden within the things of this world, i.e. he commits a great
wrong and suffers. Thus great wrongdoing is understood as masculine by the
Aryans, but as feminine by the Semites[.]50
It is important to note, however, that here and particularly in his later work, Der
Antichrist (1888), Nietzsche does not follow Hegel, whose philosophical programme
ultimately justifies Christianity.51 In this respect their appropriations of antiquity
differ dramatically. For Hegel, the Greeks are proto-Christians. For Nietzsche, Grie-
chentum is opposed to Christianity (which he places in the same negative category as
archaic Judaism).52 Nonetheless, for both philosophers, Jews (in contrast to the
Greco-Germans) are unable to be citizens of the world and to participate in Heimat-
lichkeit. In alluding to this philosophical tradition, and its crucial relationship with
antiquity, Horkheimer and Adorno reveal the national and personal nature of their reading.
By themselves returning to Homer and the Greeks, but now to critique this genealogy, they
out/un-do all previous Germanic nostoi and expose the politics constructed therein.
Additionally, in the course between the ultra-Enlightenment figure of Hegel and
the self-professedly counter-, indeed anti-, Enlightenment Nietzsche they plot their
peculiar model of enlightenment which circumscribes the Enlightenment. In so doing
they ‘pursue the irrationality of cultural rationalism to its sources’.53 While it is
arguable that Hegel’s appropriation of Greek thought favours its rationality and
Nietzsche’s its ‘truly’ Greek, pre-Socratic irrationalism, Horkheimer and Adorno, in
their critique of [E]nlightenment, eschew this distinction.
They do, however, recognize Nietzsche’s contribution to the exposure of the
dialectic of enlightenment, in his identification of genealogy as critique and his
darkly negative appraisal of bourgeois culture. Nonetheless, as they elaborate in their
third chapter, while Nietzsche isolated the violence at the heart of enlightenment, he
did not, as they see it, draw the correct conclusions. Instead he prioritized this
violence, and transformed it into a philosophical principle. With this the authors part

49
Nietzsche (1999) 49-50
50
Nietzsche (1999) 50.
51
See, e.g., Nauen [64].
52
See, e.g., Cancik & Cancik-Lindemaier [17].
53
Benhabib [7] 169.
116 K. Fleming

company from him. Nor, more significantly, can they reconcile his Nachleben with
his achievement54:
Like few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlighten-
ment. He formulated the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power.
[…] However, whereas Nietszche's attitude to enlightenment, and thus to
Homer, remained ambivalent; whereas he perceived in enlightenment both the
universal moment of the 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.55
Theirs, then, is not simply an example of philosophical or literary one-upmanship.
By informing (inevitably) their reading of the Odyssey with discussion of Heimat and
Heimweh the authors are intent on wresting the power and the (political) implications
of these terms away from Hegel, Nietzsche, and (perhaps most urgently) their
successors. To reread the story of Odysseus’ nostos, with its strong sense of ‘home-
sickness’, is to redefine the history of (German) culture and philosophy. For Hor-
kheimer and Adorno, the Odyssey offers a glimpse of the origins of Heimweh, and
consequently the (pre)history of subjectivity, ‘It is a yearning for the homeland
[Heimweh] which sets in motion the adventures by which subjectivity, the prehistory
of which is narrated in the Odyssey, escapes the primeval world.’56 The Odyssey is
evidence of the moment of man’s coming into subjectivity, the precarious line
between enlightenment and pre-enlightenment.
Its longing for reconciliation, however, is far from the Hegelian surety of Heimat-
lichkeit. The authors expose the myth at the basis of this longing for antiquity. The
imagined Heimaten are themselves both the symptom and continued source of
alienation. Odysseus’ homesickness is, in fact, the longing felt by the subject
separated from nature and estranged from the true and irretrievable Heimat of
(pre-)enlightened non-identity. The sense of alienation and anguish felt by men is mistak-
enly channelled through the mythical notion of a lost homeland. Even if the myth were to
be fulfilled, and the false object of Heimweh seemingly discovered, its sufferer is still
not ‘at home’ (undermining Hegel’s sense of being heimlich with the Greeks). This is
nowhere illustrated more convincingly than in the Odyssey, when the hollow nature of
Odysseus’ own nostos is revealed in the prophecy of Tiresias (Od. XI.100-38). It is
this truth which the Odyssey exposes and fleetingly allows its readers to understand:
Novalis's definition according to which all philosophy is homesickness [Heim-
weh] holds good only if this longing is not dissipated in the phantasm of a lost
original state, but homeland, and nature itself, are pictured as something that
have had first to be wrested from myth. Homeland [Heimat] is a state of having
escaped. […] The transposition of myths into the novel, as in the adventure
story, does not falsify myth so much as drag in into the sphere of time, exposing
the abyss which separates it from homeland and reconciliation [Versöhnung].57

54
For Nietzsche and Nazism see, e.g., Golomb & Wistrich (eds.) [30]. See also Behler [6].
55
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 36.
56
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 60.
57
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 61. See Adorno [2] for a Schillerian theory of art as
Versöhnungsphilosophie.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 117

The political, cultural, and literary implications of Horkheimer and Adorno’s

redefinition of Heimweh and Heimat are unambiguous, ‘The fact that - despite fascist
lies to the contrary - the concept of homeland is opposed to myth constitutes the
innermost paradox of epic.’58 The National Socialist nostalgia for a true national and
ideological homeland is exposed as empty mythology, yet one with a deep philo-
sophical and literary history. They do not exaggerate when they declare that ‘En-
lightenment is totalitarian. [Aufklärung ist totalitär].’59 Reinterpreting the Odyssey
means describing and retelling the story of German (and European) ‘enlightenment’
and the prehistory of fascism within it: 'the Odyssey as a whole bears witness to the
dialectic of enlightenment." 60 It is nothing less than "the basic text of European
civilization [der Grundtext der europäischen Zivilisation]."61

Re-Reading the Odyssey

But this recognition itself is framed in irony. True, the authors’ text traces the
prehistoric origins of the ‘ratio’ of domination whose enlightened conclusion is the
barbarism of fascism. Yet the cumulative effect of the juxtaposition of the various
historical and literary examples serves (as Buck-Morss observed) as a corrective of
the present rather than a committed description of the past. When the authors declare
that ‘the hero of the adventures turns out to be the prototype of the bourgeois
individual,’62 a sardonic truth becomes salient. Like Nietzsche before them, the
authors admit that each successive reading remakes Homer in its own image: this is
the real consequence of our nostalgia for the ancient world. Each return to antiquity
inevitably becomes an exercise in proto-typing and the discovery of ‘likeness’ at the
expense of difference.
Yet, their reading of the ancient text is not one of straightforward despair at the
longevity of historical narrative of domination. Rather, the epic also contains brief and
(inevitably) elusive glimpses of true enlightenment and crucial moments of genuine self-
reflexion. Such a moment comes in one of the most famous of Odyssean tales63:
At the turning points of Western civilization, whenever new peoples and classes
have more heavily repressed myth, from the beginnings of the Olympian religion
to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and bourgeois atheism, the fear of unsub-
dued, threatening nature - a fear resulting from nature's very materialization and
objectification [Vergegenständlichung] - has been belittled as animist supersti-
tion, and the control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute
purpose of life. […] The intertwinement of myth, power [Herrschaft], and labor
is preserved in one of the tales of Homer. Book XII of the Odyssey tells how
Odysseus sailed past the Sirens.64

58
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 60.
59
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 4.
60
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 35.
61
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 37.
62
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 35.
63
See Wedner [95]. For DdA and the Sirens see Wellmer (2000) & Comay [22].
64
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 24-5.
118 K. Fleming

The Sirens, and Odysseus’ response to them, provide the authors with the most
compelling allegory of all that they have argued up to this point. They are the
depiction in epic of the challenge to enlightened thinking: art and the possibility of
self-reflexion. Their promise to sing of all that happens and their knowledge of all
that has happened represent the intoxicating lure of the primeval past. Just when the
‘enlightened’ self has struggled to separate itself from its mythical origins, and has
transformed the past into ‘the material of progress’, the Sirens’ song threatens to erase
those hard-won boundaries between past, present, and future: ‘Their allurement is that
of losing oneself in the past.’65
However, irrational enlightenment rationale dictates that the surrender of subjec-
tivity is tantamount to self-destruction.66 The unity of self, bought with self-sacrifice
and the radical separation of man from nature, would shatter. Odysseus must refuse
the temptation. Consequently, this literary moment recreates the tangled dialectic of
enlightenment:
The fear of losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself
and other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise
of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment. The way of civiliza-
tion has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment shines
everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power. Odysseus's idea,
equally inimical to his death and to his happiness, shows awareness of this. He
knows only two possibilties of escape. One he prescribes to his comrades. He
plugs their ears with wax and orders them to row with all their might. Anyone
who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable, and
is unable to listen only if he is unable to hear. Society has always made sure that
this was the case. […] They reproduce the life of the oppressor as a part of their
own, while he cannot step outside his social role. […] The servant [Knecht] is
subjugated in body and soul, the master regresses. No system of domination
[Herrschaft] has so far been able to escape this price, and the circularity of
history in its progess is explained in part by this debilitation, which is the
concomitant of power.67
The destructive purposelessness of the cumulative trajectory of history (anticipating
Adorno’s later rejection of the Hegelian dialectic of history, when he repeatedly stated - in
opposition to the dictum that ‘The Truth is the Whole [Das Wahre ist das Ganze]’68 - that
‘ The Whole is the Untrue [Das Ganze ist das Unwahre]’69) is what is finally at stake
in their account of the relationship between domination and labour in the Sirens
episode. Odysseus is no less than a proto-Hegelian and, given the authors’ Marxian
interpretative stance, a proto-bourgeois, whose actions (both literally and metaphor-
ically) initiate the dialectic of enlightenment, the irrational perpetuation of domina-
tion (both of internal and external nature) for its own sake. In this light, rereading the
Odyssey also means a return to the Ur-text of modern German philosophy, the

65
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 25.
66
On the Sirens and death see also Gresseth [32], Vermeule [93], and Vernant [94].
67
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 26-7.
68
Hegel [36] 16.
69
Adorno [1] 55.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 119

Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hegel’s (authoritarian) model of the development of

consciousness depends on the famous master-slave dialectic and describes the master,
initial victor in the struggle for recognition, who reaps the fruits of the bondsman’s
labour.70 Crucially, however, this episode in Phänomenologie des Geistes also nar-
rates the seemingly paradoxical movement of the dialectic whereby the bondsman, by
shaping the natural world around him, is self-realized. If we follow Horkheimer and
Adorno’s account, however, the dialectic stagnates: both master and slave are trapped
in their roles and are unfree. Odysseus’ unified and unifying instrumental rationality
resists and seeks to control the very temptation which offers him the possibility of
genuine reflexion. By employing his cunning, Odysseus creates a loophole: he can
listen without listening and so instrumentalize that enlightenment which offers
resistance. In binding himself to the mast of his boat and defying his deepest desires,
he controls the song of the Sirens and transforms it into the harmless stuff of the
concert hall, ‘their lure is neutralized as a mere object [Gegenstand] of contemplation,
as art.’71 Denied its radical power, the Sirens’ song is domesticated. This episode is
thus the Weberian dramatization of the ‘consequence of the restriction of thought to
organization and administration […] Mind [Geist] becomes in reality the instrument
of power and self-mastery [Herrschaft und Selbstbeherrschung] for which bourgeois
philosophy has always mistaken it.’72 The inevitable employment of enlightened
thinking and its closed system of comprehension undermines the potential of the
Sirens’ song. Yet the fear of that potential and the concurrent loss of subjectivity
remains. Odysseus suppresses both his own nature and his men. His instrumental
cunning has transformed his crew into mere objects of administration, the labour that
supports his false enjoyment of art. It is this system of exploitation, a new mythology
masquerading as enlightenment, which the authors, following Marx and Weber,
recognize in modern societies.
Through the Sirens episode, Horkheimer and Adorno challenge the established
narrative of progress. By re-examining this classic scene, the authors narrate the
origins of the threefold pattern of enlightenment: the domination of the self; the
domination of others by those who have achieved self-domination; and, finally the
domination of outward nature, in science and technology.
Odysseus’ wanderings at the edge of human understanding also serve as an
allegory of the formation of the self (which realizes itself by constant struggle against
nature and difference). This is mapped out by the geographical meanderings of the
hero:
The contrast between the single surviving ego [Ich] and the multiplicity of fate
reflects the antithesis between enlightenment and myth. The hero's peregrina-
tions from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of the self through myths, a self
infinitely weak in comparison to the force of nature and still in the process of
formation as self-consciousness [Selbstbewußtsein].73

70
See Hegel [36] 146.
71
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 27. Here ‘Art’ would seem to be false, enlightened art. See Wellmer (2000)
for the ambiguous discussion in DdA of art and ‘false’ art.
72
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 28.
73
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 38.
120 K. Fleming

Here we witness the formation of the subject which negotiates itself over and
against mythical forces, and finally overcomes them with the use of instrumental
reason. Self-consciousness is not yet fully articulated, and the various contests and
temptations which face Odysseus in the course of his travels - to which he often
partially submits, only to pull away at the last moment - provide the means for the
construction of enlightened identity. This is illustrated by Horkheimer and Adorno in
their discussion of the overture of Book XX ll.16-7. Here Odysseus wilfully sup-
presses his heart in a violent display of self-mastery. This is the moment at which the
rigid, reasonable unity of the self is asserted and internal nature repressed. Embedded
in this reading of the Odyssey lies another critical - Freudian - element of Horkheimer
and Adorno’s theory, the inherent relationship between self-renunciation and self-
preservation in Western thought: ‘The history of civilization is the history of the
introversion of sacrifice - in other words, the history of renunciation.’74
The dynamic of sacrifice, by Horkheimer and Adorno’s estimation, is one of the
surest indications of the nature of enlightened thought. Despite the fact that it appears
to pertain to the sacred, sacrifice actually unfolds as an embryonic model of the
bourgeois, capitalist economy (here the authors follow Freud, Marx, and Weber).
Sacrifice is a calculation for desired ends - the rationalized origin of bartering and
deception.
As we have seen, the very formation of enlightened subjectivity relied upon the
violent - sacrificial - suppression of nature within. To illustrate this the authors re-read
Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclops’ cave. Exercizing his cunning to gain mastery
over his situation, Odysseus denies himself:
Self-preserving guile lives on the argument between word and thing. Odysseus's
two contradictory actions in his meeting with Polyphemus, his obedience to his
name and his repudiation of it, are really the same thing. He declares allegiance
to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he saves his life by making himself
disappear.75
At no point is Odysseus more himself (the authors allude to the familiar aural
similarities between Odysseus and Oudeis) than here. Ironically, this self-repudiation
does little more than betray its origins in the magical from which it wishes to escape.
By erasing his own subjectivity and naming himself ‘No-one’, Odysseus unwittingly
returns to the amorphous space of the mythological: the self is preserved at the cost of
the self, proof of the fatal irrationalism of ‘enlightenment’.
Circe, Scylla, Charybdis, and the other overtly mythological characters of epic -
whose very location at the edges of the world allegorizes the part they are to play in
narrative of the self - behave mythologically, namely repetitively and non-
progressively. The eternal certainty of myth is what the enlightened self – Odysseus
- fears and defines himself against: ‘Every mythical figure is compelled to do the
same thing over and over again. Each of them is constituted by repetition: its failure
would mean their end. […] Against this Odysseus fights. The self represents rational
universality against the inevitability of fate.’76 And yet, in mastering the world

74
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 43.
75
Horkheimer & Adorno [43] 47-8.
76
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 45-6.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 121

according to the ‘ratio’ of domination, the subject merely swaps one inevitability for
another.
Mention of these female mythological creatures bridges to a further aspect of
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Odyssey. Circe, in particular, by her enchantment of the
Odysseus’ crew and their transformation into swine, offers an interesting moment in
the text. Superficially, Homer expresses enlightenment’s horror at the threat to the self
posed by unsubdued mythical forces. If Odysseus does not resist with reason, then a
literal loss of self occurs – the fate meted out to his crew. Circe, like the Sirens, is a
remnant of the magical stage of the world. The danger she represents is that of the
dissolution of the self and the relapse into instinct:
The hetaera both bestows joy and destroys the autonomy of its recipient – that is her
ambiguity. But she does not necessarily destroy the recipient himself: she holds fast
to an older form of life.77 Like the Lotus-eaters, Circe does not cause lethal harm
to her guests, and even those she has turned into wild beasts are peaceable[.]78
Homeric epic, however, qua civilizing text, must resist the pleasure of regression. By
describing the metamorphosis as that of men into swine – the basest of domestic animals –
the poet indicates his distaste for this mythological transformation. Despite this editorial
impulse, however, vestiges of the older form of life remain. Circe’s fearful power is not
that she can transform the men into animals, but that by so doing she might offer the
possibility of escaping enlightenment: ‘The mythical command to which they have been
subjected at the same time liberates the very nature which is suppressed in them.’79
Odysseus, however, renounces Circe’s control over him (Od. X.321ff). She must
submit to him, just as nature is overwhelmed by the advance of reason. In the face of
such dominant enlightenment, Circe’s terrible power, like the Sirens’ song, is reduced
to triviality. What knowledge she had is appropriated by the masculine ‘ratio’ of
domination: ‘[t]his lives on in the caricature of feminine wisdom. In the end, the
prophecies of the disempowered sorceress regarding the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis
merely serve the purposes of male self-preservation.’80
Scholars of the Odyssey have long debated the role of gender in the narrative.81
Here another level might be added to that discussion. Over the figure of Circe, and
indeed also the Sirens and Penelope, the dynamics of instrumental reason are
explicitly troped as male82: ‘humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before
the self – the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings – was
created[.]’83 Enlightenment is the history of the male impulse renouncing the female.
It is this which is mirrored with mythical regularity in enlightened society by man’s
subjection of woman. She is the natural enemy of enlightenment, a subject of non-identity.

77
Here the authors refer to Thomson [91] 153. Turning to this text we find he writes ‘Kirke, […] and the
like, […] belong to a primitive nature-religion older than Homer’s Olympianism and plainly irreconcilable
with it.’ Some evidence of the tacit influence of ‘Ritualism’ on DdA.
78
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 55.
79
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 55.
80
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 57.
81
See, e.g., Butler [15], Cohen (ed.) [20], Doherty [23], Bennett [8].
82
See, e.g., Kulke [51].
83
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 26.
122 K. Fleming

Epic is always already a narration of the constant and unstoppable transformation

of myth into enlightenment. Yet, in its occasional reflexion on those aspects of the
world which it finds most difficult to contain or understand – paradigmatically the
feminine - it also serves to provide a sidelong glance at ‘the tenuous utopian
margins’84 of enlightenment. However, the authors’ ‘feminist’ interpretation of en-
lightened history is not as straightforward as might at first appear.85 Clearly, they are
critiquing and deliberately repeating the Hegelian dialectic of self-consciousness.
This is a history to which women are not admitted, being unable to attain full moral
and ethical self-consciousness.86 As with the identification of Odysseus as the
prototype of the bourgeois citizen, the authors’ identification of the historical origins
of the subjection of women both creates and ossifies this dialectic87 even as it exposes
it. It is significant, nonetheless, that the authors’ analysis of the feminine in the
Odyssey associates it with the alternative to ‘enlightenment’. However, as with much
of their reading of the Odyssey, the text oscillates between the optimism of utopian
possibility and the pessimism of false enlightenment.

Classical Scholarship and Enlightened Barbarism

Much of the impression of both the mythological and the civilizing nature of the
Odyssey in DdA is drawn from the work of Gilbert Murray and J.A.K. Thomson.88
Horkheimer and Adorno were, it would seem, attracted to their readings of epic and
the Odyssey, influenced as they were by the myth and ritual school, with its anthro-
pologically inclined interpretations of ancient Greek texts. In this respect DdA is
framed as an archaeological and anthropological study of human thought which
traces the ‘Urgeschichte der Herrschaft’ - the originary history of domination. As
Horkheimer wrote to Pollock, the eventual dedicatee of the work and their colleague
at the Institut für Sozialforschung, ‘We had decided that this work must be done
because the Odyssee [sic] is the first document on the anthropology of man in the
modern sense, that means, in the sense of a rational enlightened being.’89 I would
argue, however, that the relationship of the text to anthropological scholarship is more
complex and ambiguous than some scholarship on DdA would imply. It is evident, of
course, that this material was the object of their critique (as Hullot-Kentor suggests);
Adorno, in particular, would be most concerned to critique the implied metaphysics
behind ‘anthropology’. However, it was also crucial to their knowing (re)construction
of the world prefiguring ‘full’ enlightenment from which the Odyssey emerged
(and over which the Homeric text exerted its embryonic domination). In keeping with
their own methodology, the authors both appropriated and reflected on this
scholarship.

84
Hewitt [40] 147.
85
See, e.g., Heberle (ed.) [35], Leeb [54] for Adorno and feminism.
86
See Irigaray [48] and Starrett [87] for feminist critiques of this dialectic.
87
See Hewitt [40].
88
It is telling that Horkheimer and Adorno felt obliged to circumvent German Philologie and refer instead
to - by then rather quaintly obsolete - British classical scholarship.
89
Horkheimer to Pollock, 20 March 1943, cited in Wiggerhaus [99] 323.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 123

However, one classical interlocutor whose place in DdA emphatically flouts this
model is Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. From his early career to his death,
Wilamowitz advocated and practised Philologie as Wissenschaft, firmly rejecting the
intrusion of ‘non-scientific’ influences, such as comparative anthropology, into its
enlightened sphere.90 Given his status as the pre-eminent (German) classical philol-
ogist of the early twentieth century,91 it is scarcely too much of a hyperbole to suggest
that in criticizing Wilamowitz, Horkheimer and Adorno take aim at the practice of
classical philology itself as the ultimate distillation of German Philhellenism. It is also
clear from Adorno’s first version of ‘Exkurs I’ that the critique of Wilamowitz is
drawn up along the (by now well-established) lines of the fracture between the
Prussian philologist and Nietzsche.
As with Murray and Thomson, Horkheimer and Adorno frequently cite Wilamo-
witz’s Der Glaube der Hellenen [101] and Die Heimkehr des Odysseus: Neue
Homerische Untersuchungen [100] in support of their arguments.92 Indeed, Wilamo-
witz’s analysis of the first few lines of Book XX is given as evidence of the portrayal
of the embryonic formation of the self. He writes:
∼
Im Anfang des υ bellt die κραδἱη oder auch das η’ τορ (die Wörter sind
synonym 17.22), und Odysseus schlägt an seine Brust, also gegen sein Herz,
und redet es an. Herzklopfen hat er, also regt sich der Körperteil wider seinen
Willen. Da ist seine Anrede nicht eine bloße Form, wie wenn bei Euripides
Hand oder Fuß angeredet werden, weil sie in Tätigkeit treten sollen, sondern
das Herz handelt selbständig. […] Aber zunächst dachte der Redende noch an
das ungebärdig klopfende Herz; dem war die μη∼ τις überlegen, die also ger-
adezu eine andere innere Kraft ist: sie hat den Odysseus gerettet. Die späteren
∼
Philosophen würden sie als νο∪ς oder λογιστικóν dem unverständigen See-
lenteile gegenübergestellt haben.93
Despite his (perhaps unwitting) recognition of the self’s lack of unity and his
suspicion of modish mythical irrationalism (as represented by such figures as Johann
Jakob Bachofen or Jane Harrison), nonetheless ‘[t]he Hellenistic scholar’s rigid depart-
mental arrogance blocks his perception of the dialectic of myth, religion, and enlight-
enment[.]’94 The very Enlightenment rationalism of his ‘scientific’ Philologie is itself
complicit in the domineering and destructive irrationalism of the dialectic of enlight-
enment. But they have harsher things to say at the climax of their tract. Their reading
of the Odyssey concludes with analysis of XXII 465-77 and its description of the
execution of the maidservants. For Horkheimer and Adorno this episode is allegorical,
once again, of the violent dialectic of enlightenment: ‘[t]he vengeance wreaked by
civilization on the primeval world has been terrible, and in this vengeance, the most
horrifying document of which in Homer is to be found in the account of the mutilation of
the goatherd Melanthios, civilization itself resembles the primeval world.’95 These

90
See Silk & Stern [84] and Bierl, Calder, & Fowler (eds.) [10].
91
See Fowler [25].
92
See Horkheimer & Adorno [43] 78-9, 84.
93
Wilamowitz [100] 89-90.
94
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 261.
95
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 61.
124 K. Fleming

verses dramatize the subjection of the primeval world by full enlightenment in

revenge for the threat posed to the self. In so doing enlightenment – now cloaked
in the deception of justice - repeats the irrationalism it has sought to escape. The
execution of the false maidservants mirrors the mutilation of Melanthios in its horror:
‘With an unmoved composure comparable in its inhumanity only to the impassibilité
of the greatest narrative writers of the nieneteenth century, the fate of the hanged
victims is described and expressionlessly compared to the death of birds in a trap;
and, as of the numb pause surrounding the narration at this point, it can truly be said
that the rest of all speech is silence.’96
In the context of these lines the authors once again turn their attention to Wila-
mowitz. Recalling his suggestion in Die Heimkehr des Odysseus that the poet found
contentment in his description of the execution of the maidservants97 they write,
‘when the authoritarian scholar enthuses over the simile of the snares,98 […] the
satisfaction appears to be largely his own.’99 The classical philologist, the damning
verdict reads, is here guilty of that same charge brought against the ‘cultural fascists’:
that of reading himself into the Homeric text. In this way, Wilamowitz becomes
paradigmatic of the ‘logical’ conclusion of enlightenment. In their most direct
assertion of the dangers of the German (re)turn to antiquity, they state that ‘Wilamo-
witz’s writings are among the most striking documents of the German intermingling
of barbarism and culture which is fundamental to modern Philhellenism.’100 It is clear
that this reference to Wilamowitz, while consistent with their attempt to expose the
irrationalism present in all ‘enlightened’ scholarship, is nonetheless also a synecdo-
che.101 As the fêted culmination of over a century of German nostalgia for antiquity,
he is its most immediately recognizable representative.
Paradoxically, however, the Homeric text contains both the power of oppressive
enlightenment102 with its expurgating, civilizing spirit, and (despite the authors’
suggestion that the long history of reading the Odyssey has transformed it into that
most ‘enlightened’ and totalizing of genres, the novel), the potential to critique this
‘ratio’ of domination:
But after the words “not for long“ the inner flow of the narrative comes
to rest. “Not for long?“ the narrator asks by this device, giving the lie to
his own composure. In being brought to a standstill, the report is pre-
vented from forgetting the victims of the execution and lays bare the
unspeakably endless torment of the single second in which the maids
fought against death.103

96
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 61.
97
See Wilamowitz [100] 67.
98
See Wilamowitz [100] 76.
99
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 265.
100
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 265.
101
For example, with regard to the passage discussed above they rather revealingly misquote Wilamowitz.
Instead of the past participle of ‘ausmalen’ – to imagine, they have him write the past participle of
‘ausführen’ – to carry out, perform, execute.
102
As Glucksmann has written of philosophical literature: ‘Texts do not simply serve the exercise of power,
they are that very exercise, they subject people.’ Glucksmann [27] 47.
103
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 62.
Odysseus and Enlightenment 125

In stumbling over the terrible deaths of the maidservants, the ‘narrator’ reflects on
the horror of the deed.104 This reflexion is central to Critical Theory. Since enlight-
enment, qua reification, is forgetting, remembrance offers the solace that humanity
might be saved, if it can be brought to reflect on itself.
Typically, this passage withstands any straightforward understanding or over-
simple interpretation. On one hand it seems obvious that the authors hold out little
hope for enlightened mankind. Resisting the implication that genuine enlightenment
is achievable, Horkheimer and Adorno furnish us with the horrifying possibility that a
tenuous chance of self-reflexivity is to be found alongside shocking violence and
cruelty. Yet, on the other hand, as the authors stated in their introduction, enlightened
thought, even if inevitably entangled with domination, is the only hope for mankind
and social freedom. In returning to the Odyssey, in tracing the ‘damage’ done to this
text by successive generations of readers (while remaining conscious of the irony of
repeating this themselves), they hold out the Homeric epic as the ultimate human text –
both enlightened and reflexive. It remains precariously liminal: ‘when speech pauses,
the caesura allows the events narrated to be transformed into something long past, and
causes to flash up a semblance of freedom that civilization has been unable wholly to
extinguish ever since.’105
That DdA was moulded by its historical context is undeniable. In fact, as I hope to
have shown, much of this text – its tone of despair, its return to antiquity – remains
incomprehensible unless reinserted into the times and tradition within which it was
produced. The authors’ closing remarks bear this out: ‘No echo remains of the words
“not for long” except Cicero’s Quo usque tandem [“How much longer (will you try
our patience)?”], which later rhetoricians unwittingly desecrated by claiming that
patience for themselves.’106 This strange observation possibly implies that the ‘not
for long’ of Homer’s text, mistranslated and deformed over time, has lost its reflexive
quality. But, at first sight, their sudden reference to Cicero is mystifying.107 Read
within the historical context of DdA, however, it might become a little clearer. What
they do not announce, apparently relying on their audience to recognize the allusion,
is that the ‘later rhetoricians’, or more specifically, as I suspect, later rhetorician, is
Goebbels, propaganda minister of the Third Reich. In 1931, in one of many inflam-
matory and violently anti-Semitic articles in Der Angriff,108 Goebbels adopted the
persona of Cicero, and called for the expulsion of the Jews from Germany: ‘Wie lange
noch, Catilina, willst du unsere Geduld und Langmut mißbrauchen?’109 Are we, the
readers, being compelled into our own act of remembering and reflecting? Does the
text dare us to forget, accuse us of forgetting?
As their critique of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wilamowitz (and even, perhaps, them-
selves) has implied, interpretations of antiquity are always already lodged in nostalgic

104
This observation seems, in part at least, to be indebted to Gilbert Murray: the authors remark that
Murray comments on the ‘consoling’ effect of XXII 473. See Murray [63] 127.
105
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 61.
106
Horkheimer & Adorno [44] 62.
107
Surprisingly, I have found no commentary on, or attempted explanation of, this remark in scholarship
on DdA.
108
A newspaper he had founded in Berlin – as the Nazi Party leader there - in 1927.
109
Goebbels [28] 87. See Thomas [89] for Goebbels’ interest in Roman literature. See also Ziolkowski
[106], Thomas [90].
126 K. Fleming

returns and the imposition of the reader on the ancient text. Both cause and effect,
these returns to the Greeks have a disastrous twentieth century history. DdA offers
Critical Theory as a ‘philology of the future’ and the possibility of salvaging the
classical past.

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