Baptizing Adorno's Odysseus

Abstract

The question Adorno and Horkheimer leave the reader of the Dialectic of Enlightenment with is: How, finally, are we to supplement the project of the Enlightenment, so that it may attain its libratory potential? As I find Adorno's answers to the question of the proletariat's political failure troubling, in leaving little possibility of reform or hope in concrete terms for continuing successfully in the project of liberation, I intend to provide an alternative narrative of human liberation based on a critical rereading of Adorno and Horkheimer in light of René Girard. Specifically, I argue that Girard can provide a model of human liberation that enables the transcendence of the Odyssean disposition to self-sacrifice that Adorno and Horkheimer see as a key to the failures of the proletariat. In Girard's terms, I argue that the strategy of Penelope rather than Odysseus can provide a model for a psychology and praxis of liberation.

Notes

Notes

1. Thus, with Habermas, I emphasize the specific historical context of the Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer's circle to think through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking with Marxist intentions.” Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 116; Roberts sounds a similar note: “The critique takes its cue from the oppression and physical atrocities perpetrated by the [Nazi] regime and seeks to explain these in terms of the wider philosophical background.” Julian Roberts, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58. On the other hand, Jarvis seems to think Adorno and Horkheimer were driven primarily by more speculative concerns; he writes “It [the Dialectic of Enlightenment] asks: what must have happened for our thinking to have become what it is?” and elaborates thus: “It is partly a way of trying to understand, that is, how it has come about that social-scientific empiricism … has usually ended up giving a very abstract account of social experience indeed.” Simon Jarvis, Adorno (New York: Routledge, 1998), 42–43.

2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1976), 3; hereafter cited in the text.

3. Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer align their work with what they take to be the general project of the Enlightenment even as they criticize it, writing “the accompanying critique of enlightenment is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination” (DE, xiv).

4. I refer to Adorno apart from Horkheimer as the author of the Odysseus chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but to Adorno and Horkheimer together as coauthors of the rest of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, with the exception of the Juliette chapter.

5. I agree with Brunkhorst, who wrote that “rationality for Horkheimer and Adorno does not mean a mere conceptual scheme, but is conceived as an integral part of social reality.” Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 69. By speaking of dispositions to thought and behavior, I am partially “fleshing out” what Horkheimer and Adorno meant by “social reality.”

6. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 129. Bernstein makes a similar interpretation, saying “they claim that enlightened reason and rationality as a whole are only instrumental, and that the skepticism of instrumental rationality occurs only when it claims to be total and self-sufficient,” and finally “rationalized reason is skeptical, and because it is skeptical it is thereby irrational.” J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University press, 2001), 84. Again, in Ingram: “having once conceded that reason, be it formal or dialectical, is impelled by a need to dominate, however, Horkheimer and Adorno were at a loss to account for the rationality of their own emancipatory critique.” David Ingram, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (New Haven, CT: Yale University press, 1987), 67.

7. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 163–64, my emphasis.

8. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 164.

9. According to Palamarek, “At its most elemental, then, the dialectic simply registers a separation of subject and object as the condition of the subject's formation.” Michael K. Palamarek, “Adorno's Dialectics of Language,” in Adorno and the Need in Thinking, ed. Donald A. Burke (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 56, my emphasis. I hope to have provided reason to think the subject's formation is a bit more involved for Adorno at the most elemental level. Even animals, who for Adorno lack language and do not register the subject/object distinction, are subjects. It would have been better, in my opinion, to say that for Adorno registering the subject/object distinction goes with the formation of an ego over and above mere subjecthood.

10. Palamarek speaks somewhat differently: “At every stage in the transition from magic to myth and from myth to Enlightenment, and the degeneration, both actual and potential, of Enlightenment into sheer barbarism, the installation of forms of domination is accompanied by … the emergence and evolution of the capacities of language” (54). In addition to adding stages of “Enlightenment” and “barbarism” which I have not distinguished but mean to run together with what he calls the mythic stage in my (c), he does not recognize an animal stage prior to the formation of the human magic stage, which corresponds to my (b).

11. In “The Dialectic of Enlightenment” Roberts writes that “for Kant, the self materializes through its role as center of the categorical system surrounding it” (66), and that for Kant, “the subjects of knowledge and of morality become extensionless centers, abstract geometrical points of reference” (69). Adorno wishes to allude to a popular way of understanding the self in Kantian terms, which is, nevertheless, inaccurate in Adorno's view because for him the ego—the “I think” which accompanies all my representations—emerges from an already existing self, and is therefore not a necessary condition of the possibility of that self's experience.

12. That “nature” should be understood in a wide sense that includes the self's own emotional states is suggested by Adorno when he says, for instance, “The individual as subject is still unrecognized to himself, still unsure. His affective forces (his mettle and his heart) still react independently of him” (47, n. 5).

13. The progression from egoless self to self with an ego may be relatively automatic, a process that does not require many individual choices. Thus Adorno uses the term “function” to describe the process:

• at the Homeric level, the identity of the self is so much a function of the unidentical, of dissociated, unarticulated myths, that it must derive itself from those myths. The inner organization of individuality in the form of time is still so weak that the external unity and sequence of adventures remains a spatial change of scenery. (48)

A mathematical function is not so much a specific number fixed in advance of the operation, but a result that emerges as different numbers are plugged into the function. Just so, at different times, there is a self—still weak—that undergoes various adventures at different locations, and as different adventures are plugged into the self-function an ego emerges as a result.

14. Bauer's reading of Adorno and Horkheimer is similar to mine on this point, though Bauer sees them as referring to the bourgeois: “his instrumentalized reason and internalized principle of exchange leads him to subordinate his desires in order to attain these goals. The result is the repression of his drives and the sacrifice of pleasure.” Karin Bauer, Adorno's Nietzschean Narratives (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 30.

15. In their reading of the story of Odysseus and the Sirens, this point is emphasized repeatedly; they write “the stopped ears which the pliable proletarians have retained ever since the time of myth have no advantage over the immobility of the master. The over-maturity of society lives by the immaturity of the dominated,” and “the regression of the masses today is their inability to hear the unheard-of with their own ears, to touch the unapprehended with their own hands—the new form of delusion which conquers every conquered mythic form” (36).

16. In contrast, to Bauer it seems that the main problem brought on by Enlightenment rationality is linguistic in nature: “As a system of signs, language is allocated to the transmission of facts and figures and assigned the function of calculation in order to know nature; as sound or image, language is ascribed to art and assigned the task of imitating nature” (29). I suggest in contrast that for Horkheimer and Adorno in the DE the main problem brought on by Enlightenment is psychological in nature.

17. Roberts, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 60.

18. Roberts, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 61.

19. Bernstein would seem to have made a similar point in saying “if the dualism of enlightenment and myth inscribes a history, it is a history of the present: progressive and regressive tendencies within it are in accordance with the practices and ideals it furthers” (86). As Adorno notes, the present time has both progressive and regressive possibilities, and whether it will be progressive depends on whether the progressive possibilities are actualized in practice.

20. Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 121.

21. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), 8. In this book, Girard presents a clear, retrospective summary of his work, and this makes it especially useful for the survey of his theory that I am giving here. Hereafter abbreviated as “ISS.”

22. Girard, ISS, 9.

23. Girard, ISS, 157, 156, 157.

24. In particular, Girard could be used to lend detail to Adorno's early notion that the forms of social relations may be projected into the subject so as to structure its subjective life. For instance, in his reading of Kierkegaard, Adorno says: “The harder subjectivity [in Kierkegaard's sense] rebounds back into itself from the heteronomous, indeterminate, or simply mean world, the more clearly the external world expresses itself, mediately, in subjectivity.” Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 38. While Adorno finds little libratory potential in such structural analogies as they are present in Kierkegaard, I will argue shortly they may ground a libratory project when read in Girardian terms.

25. In Girard's terms, the subject taking the practice of scapegoating unto itself is part of a wider system in which again and again peace is temporarily restored in communities through each one's scapegoating the innocent.

26. Girard, ISS, 137, 138.

27. On Girard's case for the uniqueness of the Christian narrative, see ISS, part 3, chaps. 9–11.

28. While I am at pains to avoid a narrow religious exclusivism, there are several open questions which I would like to flag. First, about the required transcendent reference point: could Hinayana Buddhism or Shinto, being arguably non-monotheistic, provide such a reference point? That is, how does the notion of a transcendent reference point logically relate to that of monotheism? Again, might a religious exclusivist appropriate the argument here? Is it logically consistent with religious pluralism? I am unable to treat these issues here.