Members of the Frankfurt School did not wish to discuss their Jewish roots and did not consider their strikingly similar backgrounds relevant to the history of their doctrines (a perfectly understandable position because would-be prophets cannot be expected to be seriously self-reflective, and critical theorists, in particular, cannot be expected to relativize their unique claim to a nonreified consciousness). If their analysis of anti-Semitism is any indication, the proper procedure is either Marxist or Freudian, with the Marxist strain (“bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic reason: the concealment of domination in production”) fading inexorably into the background. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, anti-Semitism is primarily a “symptom,” “delusion,” and “false projection” that is “relatively independent of its object” and ultimately “irreconcilable with reality” (however defined). It is “a device for effortless ‘orientation’ in a cold, alienated, and largely ununderstandable world” used by the bourgeois self to project its own unhappiness—“from the very basis of which it is cut off by reason of its lack of reflective thought.” One of the reasons for this unhappiness is envy, more specifically the envy of the Jewish nose—that “physiognomic principium individuationis, symbol of the specific character of the individual, described between the lines of his countenance. The multifarious nuances of the sense of smell embody the archetypal longing for the lower forms of existence, for direct unification with circumambient nature, with the earth and mud. Of all the senses, that of smell—which is attracted without objectifying—bears closest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become ‘the other.’ ” Marcel Proust could not have said it better.65
If one were to use a similar procedure in an attempt to examine Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s struggle with their own Jewishness, the most appropriate symptom would probably be their analysis of Homer’s Odyssey, which they, revealingly (and apparently without the benefit of reading Ulysses), considered to be the foundational story of the modern self, “the schema of modern mathematics,” the Genesis of the all-enslaving Enlightenment. Odysseus, they claim, is “the prototype of the bourgeois individual” who forever betrays himself by tricking others. Physically weaker than the world he confronts, he “calculates his own sacrifice” and comes to embody deception “elevated to self-consciousness.” The hero of “sobriety and common sense” as the highest and final stage of mythological cunning, he restrains himself “merely to confirm that the title of hero is only gained at the price of the abasement and mortification of the instinct for complete, universal, and undivided happiness.” “Mutilated” by his own artifice, he pursues his “atomistic interest” in “absolute solitude” and “radical alienation,” with nothing but the myth of exile and family warmth to keep him afloat. In other words, he has a pronounced “Semitic element”—especially because “the behavior of Odysseus the wanderer is reminiscent of that of the casual barterer” who relies on ratio in order to vanquish “the hitherto dominant traditional form of economy.”66
The wily solitary is already homo oeconomicus, for whom all reasonable things are alike; hence the Odyssey is already a Robinsonade. Both Odysseus and Crusoe, the two shipwrecked mariners, make their weakness (that of the individual who parts from the collectivity) their social strength. . . . Their impotence in regard to nature already acts as an ideology to advance their social hegemony. Odysseus’ defenselessness against the breakers is of the same stamp as the traveler’s justification of his enrichment at the expense of the aboriginal savage.67
Odysseus the clever barterer is thus the prototype of “the irrationalism of totalitarian capitalism, whose way of satisfying needs has an objectified form determined by domination which makes the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the extermination of mankind.” Marx and Freud meet Sombart (again). The theorists of “bourgeois self-hatred” and capitalist domination appear to be the grave diggers of their fathers’ weakness and cunning.68
But that is not all. Enter the Nazis as man-eating Cyclopes, and Odysseus, “who calls himself Nobody for his own sake and manipulates approximation to the state of nature as a means of mastering nature, falls victim to hubris.” Unable to stop talking, he invites death by tauntingly revealing his true identity to the blind monster and his wrathful divine protector.
That is the dialectic of eloquence. From antiquity to fascism, Homer has been accused of prating both through his heroes’ mouths and in the narrative interpolations. Prophetically, however, Ionian Homer showed his superiority to the Spartans of past and present by picturing the fate which the cunning man—the middleman—calls down upon himself by his words. Speech, though it deludes physical force, is incapable of restraint. . . . Too much talking allows force and injustice to prevail as the actual principle, and therefore prompts those who are to be feared always to commit the very action that is feared. The mythic compulsiveness of the word in prehistory is perpetuated in the disaster which the enlightened world draws down upon itself. Udeis [Nobody], who compulsively acknowledges himself to be Odysseus, already bears the characteristics of the Jew who, fearing death, still presumes on the superiority which originates in the fear of death; revenge on the middleman occurs not only at the end of bourgeois society, but—as the negative utopia to which every form of coercive power always tends—at its beginning.69
It may not be entirely clear how the loquacious progenitors of “totalitarian capitalism” bring about their own destruction; how deserved—considering their tendency “toward the extermination of mankind”—that destruction may be; or where the modern Cyclopes not blinded by Odyssean reason can possibly come from. But perhaps this was never meant to be history, anthropology, or even moral philosophy. Perhaps this was self-critical theory. Perhaps this was their way of saying, with Brenner, that their function was “to recognize and admit,” through speech incapable of restraint, the “meanness” of their ancestors “since the beginning of history to the present day, and the faults in [their] character, and then to rise and start all over again.” They did claim to hope, after all, that “the Jewish question would prove in fact to be the turning point of history. By overcoming that sickness of the mind which thrives on the ground of self-assertion untainted by reflective thought, mankind would develop from a set of opposing races to the species which, even as nature, is more than mere nature.”70 Leopold Bloom agreed: “All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop” (U16:1111–15).