Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment: Translating the Odysseus Essay

Author(s): Robert Hullot-Kentor

Source: New German Critique, No. 56, Special Issue on Theodor W. Adorno (Spring - Summer,
1992), pp. 101-108
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488330
Accessed: 13/05/2010 22:25

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Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Translatingthe OdysseusEssay

Robert Hullot-Kentor

Though there are no instrumentsto confirm it, no selection of writings

to be polled, anyone rummaging around in the social sensorium for the
idea of Adomo the pessimistic philosopher, fixated on Auschwitz, will
find that it has vanished. Its disappearance was not the result of com-
pelling disquisition; argument is, in any case, unable to transform
opinion of this sort. Rather,Adorno can no longer be accused of being
hindbound because the years that seemed to be progressively setting
the world at a distance from the focal point of his melancholic glance
have been dislodged by the cold war thaw. As that glacierreceded, dis-
gorging Iron Crosses, economic stagnation, black-draped Primates of
Orthodoxy, and fully intactpsychosocialcomplexes of the Ottoman em-
pire, it completely rearrangedthe temporal landscape. Pushed out of nu-
meric sequence, the postwaryears now appear as a detour, and the 90s
increasingly line up as a direct extension of the 30s, though with a ma-
jor proviso: American intellectuals of that earlier epoch - Edmund
Wilson being exemplary - were optimistic; they believed they could
see what was taking place at the heart of things, and that social criticism
could transform, and if necessary, overturn society. Today, by contrast,
social devastation is simply beyond adequate cognition: there is a be-
wildering sense that faced with its essence, we could not describe it. In
that the return of the thirtiesis not strictlyfactual or simply metaphoric
but is regression in the psychoanalyticsense of the return of problems
that were never solved in the first place, left to themselves they have in
thc meantime also worsened for the concepts that once named what
was occurring alienation, overproduction, rcification, the critique

101
102 Noteson Dialectic of Enlightenment

of labor, commodification - which can no longer be made to bear

significance. The best that can be wrung from the recent comment by
Ross Perot's ad man (Hal Riney, who put Reagan in office) that "A
president is a more interesting product than most"' is a sense of exag-
geration. The diversity of contemporary critical theory presents no
counter-evidence of fertile thinking: in a context where the only
genuine advice available to Willy Loman is that his wife should get a
job, intellectual diversity now has more to do with thought's recog-
nized arbitrarinessas exploited by academic entrepreneurs. It is an
open secret that in spite of discontent bordering on fury there is no
substantial social criticism left.
The paralysis of social criticism brings into focus an aspect of
Adorno's work that could not be recognized so long as his writings
were deemed hindbound. What is now strikingis that - having been
hectored from conformist universities, experienced the continent-wide
collapse of social criticism and given the isolation he was forced into -
Adomo was able to keep thinking.This was not just a matterof deciding
to persevere. The intensity of Dialecticof Enlightenment, written during
the war, is the urgency with which Adorno was compelled to under-
stand why criticalthought in the broadest sense - as the entire move-
ment of enlightenment - had capitulatedto the status quo and on this
basis to find a possibility for continuing to think. What Dialecticof En-
lightenmentdiscerns as the reason for thought's capitulation deserves
blunt statementbecause even if it is a discoverythat everyone has made
at some point it puts its finger on the origins of conformistthinkingxwith
rarecandor:thought conforms out of fear.And it is not just that thought
balks at disturbing insights but that thought itself develops as an or-
ganization of fear that progressivelyconforms to what it would master.
The book's first two essays, "The Concept of Enlightenment" and
"Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment," are the most closely inter-
constructed of the studies collected in the volume because they devel-
op this thesis in directly complementary fashion: the first essay pres-
ents a history of fear from the primordial scream of terrorin the face of
overwhelming nature to positivism, in which thought is restricted to
the standard of the mastery of nature and thus reduced to nature; the
second essay shows how in the figure of Odysseus the rationalityof in-
dividual identity took shape as a process of adaptation to the mythical

1. San Francisco
Examiner26 July 1992; A-12.
 RobertHullot-Kentor 103

world against which it fearfully struggled. Fear is the inner reflex of

self-identity (whether conceptual or individual), which unwittingly de-
velops as identity with what it strives to dominate.
Adorno does not wield this obviously Hegelian philosophem as a
magic formula, externally. In the Odysseus essay, for instance, the
fruitfulness of the analysis of the hero's escape from Polyphemous as a
dialectic of self-assertion and conformity depends on the concreteness
with which it shows that there is no possibility for dominating what is
overpowering except through likeness to it. The key episode is a more
than famous moment in the epic: Odysseus ultimatelysucceeds at escap-
- whom he has blinded - only because
ing the raging Polyphemous
he had earliergiven his name as "Nobody." When the strickenCyclops
calls on his tribe for aid, he credulously and helplessly bellows that
"Nobody" has hurt him, allowing Odysseus to flee unimpeded. Adorno
develops the logic of this escape by asking why Odysseus thought to
name himself "Nobody." He could not have plotted ahead to the mo-
ment in which it would save his life. Rather - according to Adorno
the name is formed as a dialectic of self-assertion and adaptation to
myth: Odysseus "names himself 'Nobody' because Polyphemous is
himself not a subject." This is not simply the spontaneous imitation of
what is feared. Rather, it is regression in the service of the ego in that it
hinges on a demythologization of language that permits the discovery
and manipulation of a pun. In the midst of his fright Odysseus per-
ceives that the word is not magically fused with its object but rather
that one word may have severalmeanings. The hero exploits the ambi-
guity of sound in "Odysseus" (oudeis)to stand up for himself as "No-
body" (outis).Here self-assertion is self-denial: "As in every epic, as in
all civilization," Adorno writes, "the self enters into precisely that coer-
cive circle of the context of nature from which it attempts to escape
through adaptation."
Adomo's interpretationof the dialecticof self-assertionand adaptation
in Odysseus'sescape would valuablyilluminatemany contemporarylin-
guistic developments, but Odysseus's emergence as "Nobody" through
the punning manipulation of the relation between oudeisand outises-
pecially elucidates Derrida's well-known formulation of "differance"
through the manipulation of differand defer.The obscurity of this latter
pun is not the result of introducing time into logos but of the introduc-
tion of the amorphous into self-assertion. As Adorno implies, every
- Derrida's included - names its speaker nobody in that it
pun
104 Noteson Dialectic of Enlightenment

hopes to snap the given direction of the linguistic event, but not by as-
serting a putsch: these puns are for the cornered, and they do
homage to the force that they cannot challenge directly by their adap-
tation to phonemic amorphousness. This explains the pun's character-
istic mix of cleverness and stupidity. Children are geiger counters of its
regressivelibidinal economy in that they defend themselves against the
strained funniness (that masks aggression) by howling that it stinks.
Dcrrida's insistence that all language must play - that deconstruction
is always occurring - is an elbow in the ribs with archaic precedence.
For rationalityappears at the boundary of Western civilization bearing
a samples case, a curious smile, and many dumb jokes. Just as the
maker of that Ur-pun is eager to traversea gauntlet of monsters, ready
to elude each one under the necessity of adapting to them if it will just
get him home with something to show for his trouble, Derrida's puns
serve as a mask for a first rate academic schemer who, in America, at-
tacks conceptual "privileging" only at elite institutions.Odysseus - as
Adoro wrote - the cunning solitary, "homoeconomicuswhom all ration-
al thinkers once resembled" is also homoeconomicus whom all thinkers
are once again obliged to become.
The authors of Dialecticof Enlightenment
let the book fall out of print
for several decades. When they finally decided in 1969 on its republi-
cation they explained in a new preface that their earlier reluctance to
reissue it was because times had changed since the book was Tritten
and in certain respects it was "no longer appropriate to contemporary
experience." But, if the authors did not think that the book's reap-
pearance was justified by those postwar years, they made plain that
they thought its republication would be justified by the future: "The
development toward total integration recognized in this book is inter-
rupted, but not abrogated. It threatens to advance beyond dictator-
ships and wars" (x). The authors expected the contemporary return of
the 1930s that would pick up where Dialecticof Enlightenmentonce left off
and again make urgent its ability to trace thought's fearfulness, obliga-
tion to conform, and destructiveness. The form of Hegelian psychoanal-
ysis that the book pursues, in which determinate negation no longer sub-
serving totalitybecomes the memory of nature ratherthan its domina-
tion, is a positive concept of enlightenment whose implicationsfor con-
temporary thought can no longer be passed over. Yet, if the book needs
to be better known, it is important to begin to recognize the ways in
which it continues to stand at a remove from American readers.
 RobertHullot-Kentor 105

First of all, the positivism that Adorno claimed was the ultimate
stage of the adaptation of thought to the status quo no longer holds the
place it once did, but has long been in the process of being deposed
and most recently by varieties of pragmatism. While post-philosophical
- who argue that
philosophers like Rorty philosophy as such pom-
pously lays claim to the unachievable - do not mark a simple break
from the belligerent philosophical tradition of a country that has put the
brunt of its efforts into proving that "You can't say things like that," still
this is not the positivism that was on Adorno's mind, and his related,
impassioned critique of univocal signification is no longer an outsi-
der's position.2
Second, there are several intellectual traditions involved in the vwrit-
ing of Dialecticof Enlightenment- other than the obvious one of Ideal-
ism - that make the book obscure for Americans. Adorno formulates
the dialectic of enlightenment as the process by which the domination
of nature results in regression to nature in the form of a society that is a
second nature; history as domination is a natural history that recreates
barbarism. This idea of society as a second nature runs throughout
German thought and has its distant origins in Luther. In his argument
against the formative influence of Greek philosophy in Thomasian the-
ology, and the subsequent treatment of the divine on the model of a
thing, he denied the perfectibility of nature, and in the starkest terms
magnified its irreversible corruption: "Even the sun and the moon -
he Nwrote- have put on sack cloth." While sanctifying the mundane,
action was fundamentally deprived of significance. Nature's collapse
was history's trajectory.3 While similar motifs occur among the other
founders of protestantism, Luther was the most unrelenting and the
deepest critic of the idea of progress. Though Adorno's thinking is of
course opposed to Luther in so many ways that it is absurd to say so,
still there is no overlooking the extent to which the intellectual resources
of Dialecticof Enlightenment- the dialectic of history as nature, the critique
of reification, the intense reservoir of the critique of progress - were

2. In generalI referto Adoro as theauthorof Dialectic This is

of Enlightenment.
somewhatunfairto Horkheimer,for the bookunmistakably showshis handthrough-
out. Butit is Adornowho primarilyshapedits ideas,who pursuedthem in his later
writings,andwho wasultimatelyresponsiblefor the reissuanceof the book.See "Back
to Adomo," lelos 81, esp. 6-9.
3. Thisis the historicaleventthatBenjaminthoughtwasfundamentalto the origin
of German Baroque drama. See TheOriginof GermanTragicDrama,trans.J. Osbourne
(NLB:London, 1977) 138.
106 Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment

defined by this religious tradition. And even the plaintiveness of the

language of the Dialecticof Enlightenment- "The fully enlightened earth
radiates disaster triumphant" - is, though punctually a description of
WWII, unthinkable in isolation from a Pietistic language of suffering
that can be followed throughout Adorno's works. Without the
Lutheran tradition, he could not otherwise have written in Aesthetic
Theory,for instance, that art is the "unconscious history of suffering."
This idea - like the framing dialectic of Dialectic of Enlightenment-
exists at such a remove from American thought and an idea of nature
that has origins in a Calvinism that was not formed by the relentless
historical disaster sedimented in Lutheranism, or by the vast
plunderable landscape that helped spawn the buoyant mentality of
"We'll paint it ourselves!", that even if art is the memory of suffering,
even if history becomes a second nature, these ideas seem immediately
to lose their resonance when researched this side of the Atlantic.
Furthermore, however much there is to learn from Dialecticof Enlight-
enment, it is now puzzlingly unlikely in the expressionist historiography
that reconstructs the origins of the mind from the scream of terror to
the modern by way of the Greeks. The cultural and temporal complex-
ity that followed WWII has made absurd any effort to draw a single -
even exemplary - arc out from prehistory to the modern and hold it
together with the claim that the Odysseyis the definitive document of
the origins of rationality. Yet why this reconstruction hinges on the
Odysseygives insight into every aspect of the book, and it is another intel-
lectual tradition present to Dialecticof Enlightenmentthat sets the book at an
oblique angle to American readers: in various ways many German intel-
lectuals since the eighteenth century considered themselves and Germa-
ny 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
wriththe goal of reinvigorating the German will to battle and sacrifice.
In this context it is not surprising that Adomo presents a schematization
of history that cites Odysseus as a key ancestor of the German bour-
geoisie. But Adomo does so primarily in order to develop a counterthe-
sis to archaicists such as Klages who, allying themselves with one tangent
of Nietzsche's work, called for a return to primordial myth: Adomo
steals away Klages' invocation of life and the critique of intellect by show-
ing in his study of the Odysseythat myth is already enlightenment, and
 RobertHullot-Kentor 107

that enlightenment becomes myth; the disaster of contemporary socie-

ty is already the longed-for mythical world and any return to myth
would only amount to immersion in another form of self-opaque en-
lightenment. The only wNay to recover what was lost in myth - accord-
ing to Adorno - is by fulfilling enlightenment.
And, finally, though there is much that is excellent in the existing
English translation of Dialecticof Enlightenment,its many serious prob-
lems make it virtually impossible to study the book seriously. Just to
take a few examples: in the original, double-line breaks divide "The
Concept of Enlightenment" into three sections; the English, however,
deletes the second break from between the two paragraphson page 29.
As a result, no English reader will discover the tripartite articulation
which, once recognized, clarifies the text in a startling number of
directions. Similarly,the Odysseus essay is riddled with error, whether
it is the mixing up of the "power of the immortals" with the "power of
immortality," "herbs" for "cabbage," the confusion of "awareness"
with "destruction," and the interpolation of transitions that obscure
paratacticalrelations. The most important general problem, however,
is the use of "representation"for Vertretung rather than "substitution,"
an error that is not strictlywrong but one that makes it impossible to
understand the theory of sacrifice that is central to the essay and the
book as a whole.4
These mistakes are all correctable, but that is not all that stands in
the way of adequate translation. The foremost is that only extreme
pressure could get the owners of the English rights to waste money on
setting the words straight. The single other alternative - that which
was taken by German students who published pirated editions of the
book over the several decades that it was out of print - is beyond
American students or faculty, who owe a much larger part of their
minds to footnotes and copyrightthan do Europeans,and in the current
sauvequipeutatmospherewould in any case never find ways to cooperate
on such a project. But, if that could all be solved, then the real problems
of translationwould emerge, some of which no one would want to think
about, let alone describe. For example, "The Concept of Enlighten-
ment" opens with a long quotation from Francis Bacon. The English
translatorirreproachablyquotes from the seventeenth-centuryEnglish

4. See"Backto Adomro"27-28fora morecompletediscussionof the problemsof

the existingtranslationof the Odysseusessaywith regardto its theoryof sacrifice.
108 Noteson Dialectic of Enlightenment

original. But Adorno and Horkheimer themselves quote a modern

German translation of Bacon that is far more direct and comprehen-
sible than the English original; their version is an important source for
the continuity of the whole German essay that vanishes when the text is
based on the English original.
No less significant for the possibility of translating Adorno is the
condition of contemporary American English. The shibboleths of its
current canine vector - the "Go ~withit," "In your face," "Have it
all," "Out of here," "Bashing" - quote a momentum that is felt in
any effort to bring a line of Dialecticof Enlightenment
into English. The
sense that all that will count as contemporary speech is a punch in the
mouth awakens a preference in translation for the remote and stilted,
an impulse that must be parried as much as the canine. On the other
hand, much of the language has been technocraticallyabsorbed: the
concept of "behavior," for instance, which once formed a constellation
with the ideas of approach, thought, attitude, and response, is the only
available translation of Verhaltenas it appears in reference to
Po!vphemous's Verhalten- a mimetic Verhaltensweise- even though
the English concept is now increasingly restricted to a set of elicited
acts. Translating Adorno into English often means having to rely on
somehow invoking archaiclinguistic vestiges in words and phrases one
w-ould otherwise avoid. Academic fetishization has also taken its toll:
"discourse" - which once worked well for "Rede" - now sets the
wronngspin on the concept, no matter how carefully it is fixed on the
page. The new translation of the Odysseus essay, which follows, is a
provisional start at a new translation that has had these various issues
in mind and, hopefully, provides at least a draft that can be studied
without the reader being fundamentally misled.