The reading of the Odysseus excursus in Dialektik der Aufklärung has been hampered by the insistence that the character of Odysseus is merely a prototype of bourgeois instrumental reason. However, this characterization fails to grasp the full breadth of the dialectic of myth and enlightenment, and overlooks the significant role played by Odysseus’s cunning in the development of reason. In addressing these problems, it becomes apparent that cunning is a form of mimetic intelligence and bears its own form of dialectic, which has implications for the understanding of Adorno’s later works.
Writing in the preface to Dialektik der Aufklärung in May 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno clearly described the focus of the book: “The aporia that we faced in our work thus proved to be the first subject we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment.”1 Occurring at the beginning of the work, this statement can itself seem aporetic, as it signals a conclusion that would appear to doom their project: that the self-destruction of enlightenment is both necessary and inevitable, that the history of reason is unavoidably destined to failure and collapse. However, it is the very nature of the aporia that is their concern, therefore stating its occurrence in such terms does not render it unapproachable but rather makes it concrete so that it can be studied. If this aporia is in some way intrinsic to enlightenment, in that it leads to its self-destruction, then it is its place within reason that must be assessed. And if enlightenment bears such an aporia, then their book becomes an examination of how reason might proceed despite this problem. The strength of this beginning has disarmed many commentators who, following Jürgen Habermas’s influential reading, have assumed that Horkheimer and Adorno were either being excessively pessimistic or, knowingly or unknowingly, were engaged in a project that was self-refuting, or indeed both. Although this hasty response has largely been rectified in recent readings, the aporia at the heart of enlightenment and its dialectical reformulation still prove elusive. In particular, the problems with Habermas’s reading can be found in the effect it has had on the reading of the Odysseus excursus, where Odysseus is seen to be simply a figure of instrumental reason. However, such a reading not only fails to take account of the detail of Adorno’s argument and the complexity of the figure of Odysseus but also signally fails to be dialectical.
For instance, while Habermas registers the double meaning of originating (Entspringen), “the shudder at being uprooted and the sigh of relief at escape,” which is implicit in the relation of reason to myth that is elaborated in Dialektik der Aufklärung, this movement is characterized as one in which “Horkheimer and Adorno follow Odysseus’s cunning into the core of sacrificial acts; there is an inherent element of deceit in this, insofar as people buy their way out of the curse of the vengeful powers through the performance of symbolically enhanced representatives.” The tensed ambivalence between the shudder and the sigh is thereby flattened, and to such a degree that Habermas can then claim that the thesis that is seemingly “justified” in the first excursus (on Odysseus)—that “reason itself destroys the humanity that made it possible”—does so because “the process of enlightenment owes itself from the very beginning to the drive of self-preservation, which mutilates reason because it claims the latter only in the forms of a purposive-rational domination of nature and the drives, precisely as instrumental reason.”2 Thus the complexity of cunning and the dialectic of enlightenment originating from myth are displaced by the supremacy of instrumental reason. To some extent this reading is supported by the discussion of sacrifice in Adorno’s account; however, this discussion is only part of his reading of Odysseus.
The key formulation of the dialectic, “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology,” shows the historical movement of reason as comprising two countervailing tendencies (the first of which broadly characterizes the excursus on Odysseus, and the second, the excursus on Kant and Sade), but it does not show how these tendencies come together to negotiate their aporetic implications (DA, 16; DE, xviii). It is this sense of dialectics that needs to be addressed, and it is in the discussion of the cunning of Odysseus that Adorno comes to grasp the depth and breadth of its formulation, in the responses that Odysseus makes to the aporias he faces. Nevertheless, in reading Adorno’s account, it will become necessary to go beyond it to understand what is at stake in Odysseus’s ordeals, for although Adorno registers the complexity of Odysseus’s position, the implications of this complexity are not fully followed through. Sacrifice, especially, is not a straightforward notion, as it cannot be grasped merely by consideration as a mechanism whereby one throws away something in order to gain something else, although Adorno does unhelpfully use this formulation. On the one hand, sacrifice is associated with ritual, which means that its form is both constructed and manipulable, and on the other hand, it involves a test of oneself or a gamble on oneself, where its risk may make it difficult to distinguish these aspects. Sacrifice is therefore an element of the series of encounters that structure the Odyssey and that are focused by the notion of xenia—of the stranger as guest and of the responsibilities of hospitality—which refers to a ritualized encounter that is both challenging and creative. Consequently, the gifts associated with hospitality are to be understood not only as forerunners of commercial exchange but also as establishing relations of mutual recognition, that is, of relations that construct the identities of host and guest but leave open the possibility that these identities may be constructed otherwise, as Odysseus discovers, as these encounters are intrinsically with the unknown, by which one may become changed even as one overcomes them.3 Thus it becomes apparent that the cunning of Odysseus involves a form of dialectics that differs from the form that emerges in the thought of Hegel. Such a revision in turn casts light on the status of Adorno’s dialectics, and its relation to mimesis and praxis.
Faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, we can become hopeless, as all possible solutions appear to have been lost and despair can then set in. But in desperation something else can take place, a repositioning or reframing of the problem that may render it tractable. In desperation hitherto unrecognized avenues can become available as the demands reveal possibilities that would not have been considered otherwise—the risks now make such thoughts feasible if the problem is to be overcome. This repositioning is an extreme mode of dialectical logic, which is also found in the mode of cunning or guile—a mode that is often seen to be disreputable, as it involves deception. For this reason, despite its importance for Homer, cunning is not taken up by Plato or Aristotle; indeed, it seems to fall outside the division between theoretical and practical intelligence. However, closer analysis of cunning indicates a profound complex of negativity that allows for a reconfiguration of possibility and its relation to thought.
Adorno discusses the paradigmatic model of cunning—Odysseus—in Dialektik der Aufklärung, but this reading is misconstrued if Odysseus is treated simply as an exemplar of instrumental rationality, for Adorno shows that Odysseus’s intelligence is as close to mimesis as it is to bourgeois pragmatism. Hence there is a further dialectic implied in the use of cunning that supplements that which occurs in its operation. Adorno makes the complexity of his reading apparent in his first description:
The adventures that Odysseus endures are all perilous enticements that draw the self away from the path of its logic. He surrenders [überläßt] himself to them again and again, testing them like a stubborn student [unbelehrbar Lernender], sometimes even as a foolish inquirer [töricht Neugieriger], like a mime insatiably trying out his roles. . . . The knowledge in which his identity consists and that enables him to survive has its substance in the experience of the diverse, distracting, dissolving, and the knowing survivor is at the same time the one who surrenders most boldly to the threat of death, through which he becomes strong and hardened to life. (DA, 64–65; DE, 38)
Much more than merely using these situations to demonstrate Odysseus’s imperturbable supremacy, Adorno emphasizes the curiosity and desire that impels him to keep experimenting with these experiences of loss and deviation. The risk of losing himself entirely is intrinsic to this experience, as Adorno states: the knowledge in which Odysseus’s identity consists has its substance in dissolution. This is not an image of domination but one much closer to the libertine, the one whose desire drives them to the brink of dissolution again and again, who endures this experience for what it broaches as much as for the endurance that it produces.4 The stubbornness of his position is of one who insists on not learning so as to perpetuate the experiment. But it is also one that involves a mimesis of death, of absolute loss, of the most extreme experience.
The logic of instrumentality derives from and remains subtended by these destabilizing modes of deviation and diversity, so that the former exists only as a simplified and reductive form of the latter. Consequently, “the self does not constitute the rigid opposition to adventure, but only forms itself in its rigidity through this opposition, and its unity merely in the diversity of what that unity denies.” The balance of this transition is always at stake, which means that it can itself become instrumentalized, as Adorno shows in claiming that Odysseus “throws himself away in order to win himself; the estrangement from nature that he achieves is accomplished in the abandonment to nature with which he measures himself in every adventure” (DA, 65–66; DE, 38). This sense of throwing himself away in order to win himself goes against the earlier point of letting himself be carried away by that which entices him, but the interrelation of these contrasting tendencies cannot be easily gauged or settled. It is part of the deception of the movement of cunning that it is not clear in itself, which is what makes it such an uncertain form of intelligence as its basis, and orientation is ultimately unreliable. Yet it is precisely this quality that renders it compatible with a nature that is equally unreliable in its tendencies.
The form of cunning (List) appears to arise from the complex relations of sacrifice, in which the attempt to honor or appease natural forces becomes a means to control them, of asserting oneself over them. In doing so, the riches of the present are given up in exchange for future promises, the present is itself sacrificed, as Adorno writes, and is thereby spuriously sanctified to balance that for the sake of which it has been given up (DA, 69; DE, 40). The reconfiguration of the relation to nature occurs through a reframing in which the edge (list) granted by the offering—its relational position—is turned against that which receives it, deceiving the latter and placing them in a position of weakness. This turning back or away (ruse, guile) is central to cunning and is the basis of its form of dialectics, and its possibility arises through this reframing of relation, since it reveals an edge that can be turned, just as what had appeared to be a gift turns out to be a tool if its position is reconfigured.5 Inherent in this turning is the emergence of a secular consciousness, a turning away from fear and awe toward a reflective response to these emotions, although this also means that the identity of the self, in Adorno’s words, “is so much a function of the unidentical, of dissociated, inarticulate myths, that it must borrow itself from them” (DA, 66; DE, 39). And so, for as much as there is the appearance of an instrumental logic in this set of relations, there is also an inability to transcend this context fully, which comprises a complicity with the depths of the deception, with its changeable and manifold uncertainty. Odysseus is after all a man of “many wiles” (polymētis), not a single unitary figure. Furthermore, to give up the present for the sake of the future is to rewrite the present from the perspective of a desired future, to actualize a particular future by turning it back into the present. In this way the aporia of the present, in which there appears to be no path out of it, is transformed from the point of its hypothetical overcoming. Hence the risk is not just of that which is being mimetically approximated but of the repositioning that occurs as its aporia is rewritten from the perspective of its already being past, leaving the self exposed to a position before and after its emergence. Within this complex Adorno varies his emphasis to reflect the range of its aspects, as when he remarks that “the constitution of the self cuts through that very fluctuating connection with nature that the sacrifice of the self claims to establish,” which must be coupled with the above statement if it is not to be misread (DA, 69; DE, 41).
If cunning is as old as sacrifice, then it is because there is as much exchange (Tausch) in the one as there is deception (Täuschung) in the other. However, it also indicates that some forms of cunning involve a sacrifice of the self (to itself, paradoxically), a loss that is found in its approximation to death, its extreme mortal risk, by which it seeks to survive. It is here that the mimetic aspect of cunning shows itself, since it is through the double maneuver of negating life in death and negating death in life that another pathway appears, which holds both these threads together in the appearance of survival. That is, the act of cunning can arise out of a situation of desperation, in which life itself is at stake, and yet the means of escape involves the greatest risk, of approximating death as closely as possible. In such a situation there is a mimesis of death, not by assimilating oneself to it, but by becoming like it, which is also to say that one is not it insofar as one is only like it. Hence the state of such mimesis involves a complex in which life appears to negate itself just as death is also brought to negate itself in survival. The risks of such a maneuver are evident, but what is also significant is the cognitive situation of being both like and unlike another, of being similar but also of remaining apart, such that this mimesis involves a form of reflexivity. As a result, in this move there is a reconfiguration of sacrifice as sacrifice, as a ruse or ploy, a configured rather than a literal relation of assimilation in which the self arises as that which is not the same as the other. It is through this distance that possibility itself becomes possible. Such a maneuver cannot be assimilated to the sublation of Entäußerung in Hegel’s thought, although it resembles it, for in cunning the very status of sublation is in doubt by virtue of the persistence of its mimetic instability. Indeed, it is Odysseus’s talent to be able to embrace both distance and the loss that comes with proximity, as is found in his encounter with the Sirens, which is not merely an example of the detachment of bourgeois appreciation.6
It is impossible to hear the Sirens’ song and live, as Circe tells Odysseus, yet he must pass by their island, so the situation would seem to be aporetic. But he “wriggles [windet] through, this is his survival” (DA, 76; DE, 45). He does so, as is well known, by a sleight of hand, by appearing to succumb to the aporia and then turning it against itself. That is, the aporia is not defied or resolved but transformed. “Odysseus does not try [versucht] to go any other way than past the Sirens’ island. Nor does he try to insist on the superiority of his knowledge and listen freely to the tempters [Versucherinnen], imagining his freedom is enough protection.” He offers himself up, allowing his path to coincide with that which seeks to draw him in, but in doing so changes the terms of the relation, for the challenge had not specified the conditions of the listener (Hörender), which could include another form of bondage (Hörigkeit) (DA, 77; DE, 46).7 After his encounter with Polyphemus, Odysseus seems to have learned the power of verbal inflection, of reframing the problem by rephrasing it, which Adorno echoes. This deception is a mark of the distance that Odysseus takes from the necessity of nature or myth—as he can now perceive them as myth or nature and manipulate them—but it is also the way that he can immerse himself in them and experience the loss of self this brings, from which his recovery is never certain. The use of guile is a risk, its success is not given, yet it is this uncertainty that makes success possible in the first place. Only by exposing himself to this danger, by rendering himself like it, can Odysseus reform its aporia, but it is intrinsic to this attempt that its failure is also made possible. Moreover, in discovering the duplicity of words, Odysseus finds that the realization of consciousness that this brings is coupled with a loosening and refiguring of the bond between words and things. Cunning yields an irreversibility by indicating the permanent possibility of reversal.
The Odyssey is thus preeminently concerned with the discovery of transition, not simply the protean transitions that mark its mythical encounters but also the transition into irreversibility, into history, which makes Odysseus a figure on the brink of modernity. In this way, it is not just the motif of homecoming that pervades the epic but also the experience of transition as such—of what it is to live through periods of change and what this implies—which subtends the contours of the journey of much-enduring (polytlas) Odysseus, as this journey could not take place without this experience, which also occurs in the recapitulation of historical and social forms that take place in the stages of his journey. The homecoming is an attempt to configure and formalize the experiences that have occurred, to bring to completion the sense of passing through something, which takes shape in the notion of the goal as the culmination of this transition, grounding and contextualizing his guiles, and making of this end the founding of history. However, as Athene observes when Odysseus reaches the shores of Ithaca, even here there is no end to his deceitful stories (apataon muthon) (Odyssey, 13:294–95). His encounters follow a template in which each mythical figure “is required to do the same thing over and over again. Each consists in repetition: its failure would be its end”; however, Odysseus is himself bound by the same law (DA, 77; DE, 45). His discovery of reversibility, which enables him to defeat these mythical figures, is never certain, as its possibility has to be repeatedly uncovered, so the transition it offers cannot be claimed as a guaranteed development. The mimetic aspect of the logic of cunning prevents it from ever being wholly instrumental and further complicates its attempted dialectic. What leads to this obstacle is the contingency in which each moment of cunning occurs, which cannot be fully transcended or absorbed without losing the edge that enables cunning to take place. The move by which Odysseus exposes himself to these risks is also that by which he seeks to overcome them, to pull himself up by his own loss and exposure, as it were, which demonstrates their intertwining.8
Hence where the mythical figures pass away once they have been defeated, the use of cunning contains its own loss, as it turns on the division between words and things, which cannot appear united once their distinction has been shown, so cunning is compelled to repeat itself with only the idea of its own overcoming. If this idea is translated into instrumental logic, then it forecloses its reach by denying its mimetic component: “With the denial of nature in humans, not only the telos of the external domination of nature but also the telos of one’s own life becomes confused and opaque” (DA, 73; DE, 42). Instead, and as the Polyphemus episode demonstrates most decisively, “self-preserving cunning lives from the process that prevails between word and thing,” an ordeal that is the ongoing history of modernity (DA, 79; DE, 47).9 The negativity inherent in this cunning is brought out by the displacement that occurs between Odysseus’s name and the name that he gives himself—Outis (Nobody)—when asked by the Cyclops, and at a deeper level by the relation between his cunning (mētis) and the phrase that is used when the neighbors of Polyphemus ask of the anguished Cyclops, “Surely no one [mē tis] is trying to kill you?” (Odyssey, 9:406). It would then be inevitable that cunning would involve such a profound negation of the subject, as it would derive from the ruse of self-annihilation that is central to its attempts. Equally, the sliver of negativity that is uncovered in the discovery of the difference between nobody and Nobody is enough to release its power in general. Cunning becomes an art of negativity, and an art more than a science, as it is always at stake in its usages and can maintain itself only through these continued gambits, which thereby grant it no security. The stroke of negativity goes both ways, as Adorno indicates in his use of verschlagen (to be devious or to be displaced), for as a turning it can always turn against itself; indeed, the self exposed by cunning perhaps is this turning (DA, 83; DE, 50). Odysseus’s cunning arises not from a distance that is simply linguistic or logical but from the negativity of a relational displacement that sets all things in motion, including itself, a movement that reveals a lack of ground, which is contingency as the possibility of always being otherwise and thus the necessary possibility of not being the self. The tension of the journey that Odysseus undertakes is one between losing himself and proving himself, as if he were being repeatedly made and unmade like the shroud that Penelope weaves.
Following its mythical template, time in the Odyssey takes place externally, spatially, through the episodic locations of the journey, which move the narrative along (DA, 66; DE, 39). By contrast, the use of cunning requires an acute awareness of timing, of the moment when contingency may yield a desired possibility. For such vigilance is attuned to the moment in which the possibility of development becomes available, for this moment to lead into that, rather than simply being joined to it externally. The process involved in the art of negativity is then of the ways that possibility can be brought to emerge through the unfolding of contingencies, such that they come together or fall apart. And so, like Penelope’s weaving, Odysseus’s excessive storytelling occurs because this is how his story can continue, how the unfolding of his temporal moment can be maintained: “He is objectively determined by the fear that if he does not ceaselessly cling to the frail advantage of the word against violence, the advantage of this will be withdrawn from him again. For the word knows itself to be weaker than the nature it has deceived” (DA, 88; DE, 54).10 Accordingly, his journey home is not to an idyllic prior state, nor is it about reconciliation; instead, it concerns a release from timeless mythic violence: “Home is the state of having escaped [Entronnensein].” A release that has to be won continually through his use of cunning, and that necessarily involves its own violence:
Terrible is the revenge that civilisation exacts on the ancient world, and in it. . . . It resembles the ancient world itself. It does not emerge out of [entragen] that through the content of the reported deeds. It is self-reflection that allows violence to pause at the moment of the narration. Speech itself, language in its opposition to mythical song, the possibility of remembering and holding on to the disaster that has happened, is the law of Homeric escape. (DA, 97–98; DE, 61)
Thus is the moment of transition held up to the vigilant eye, recognizing its impact and its implications, not passing over it as an act of fate but realizing it in its contingency and finitude, which thereby releases the moment as history. However, in its unrelinquished relation to myth, through its necessary mimetic proximity, it always remains natural history.
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant refer to models of hunting and fishing to understand the methods of mētis (cunning), and doing so reveals much about the development of its logic. For the hunter must learn from the prey, must adapt to it, in order to capture it, and, reciprocally, these tricks can be turned against predators to defeat or evade them. The mētis involved in these situations relies on a combination of dissimulation, vigilance, and swiftness, which allow the hunter or prey to achieve their aims. There is a reversibility to this logic that is tied to the imperative to survive, but this aim is to some degree distinct from the actions of mētis, which exists in a form that can proceed in either direction. Mētis exists between hunter and prey and can reverse its aspect from one to the other, for it is the net of adaptation that allows the one to approximate the other. The deception inherent in this logic is not merely a moral problem but also an ontological one, since it involves a mimetic transformation that undermines the human supersession of nature: it is not just that concealment is morally problematic, but that one’s identity and status become blurred as a result of this concealment. The journey of Odysseus is of the possibility of his becoming Odysseus, of the transformations that enable him to realize the possibility of being polymētis—polymechanos and polytropos, the one of many tricks and turns.
[Mētis] bears on fluid realities, which never stop changing and at every moment unite in themselves contrary aspects, opposing forces. To seize the fleeting kairos, mētis has to be faster than it. To dominate a changing and contrasting situation, it must become more flexible, more undulating, more polymorphous than the flow of time: it must constantly adapt to the succession of events, bend to unforeseen circumstances in order to better carry out the project it has conceived. . . . The variegation, the shimmering of mētis mark its relationship with the multiple, divided, undulating world in which it has become immersed in order to exercise its action. It is this complicity with reality that ensures its effectiveness. Its flexibility, its malleability give it victory in areas where there are no readymade rules or set recipes for success, but where each test requires the invention of a new avenue, the discovery of a hidden exit (poros).11
Mētis is not just the web of relations between subject and object but also their bond or knot, and so, insofar as it is mobile and complex, it cannot itself be seized; it is aporetic even as it opens new avenues, for in its confusing changeability it refuses complete definition or analysis. Hence there is no precise method for this intelligence, no pedagogy; it can be developed only through its contingent experience, which of course carries its own risks of loss.
It is understandable, then, why Plato would distance himself from this form of intelligence, but considering the proximity between Odysseus and the tricks and turns employed by Socrates, it is notable that Plato does not directly criticize the former.12 The most pointed criticism comes in the Apologia (38d–39a), where Socrates implicitly rejects the cunning of Odysseus by claiming that he himself would not seek to avoid his death by doing anything to save his life, although appearances in the Hippias Minor and Politeia are more ambiguous. Notwithstanding these last instances, the distance from Plato’s thought could not be further when it is realized that,
instead of contemplating immutable essences, [mētis] finds itself directly involved in the difficulties of practice, with all its risks, confronted with a universe of hostile forces that is disconcerting because it is always moving and ambiguous. As the intelligence at work in becoming, in a situation of struggle, mētis takes the form of a power of confrontation using intellectual qualities—prudence, insight, promptness and penetration of the spirit, trickery, even lying. (RI, 52–53; CI, 44)
Cunning is not simply a form of dialectics, since it bears out a different relation to contradiction, as has been seen, although it demonstrates a similar flexibility and ambivalence as well as a profound intertwining of experience and negativity. Equally, cunning is not fully aligned with the distinction between theoretical and practical intelligence; for while it makes use of an abstract gaze that seems able to perceive things as they are, it does not do so with a view to determining general truths, and while it involves care and planning, it also makes use of manipulations that are not bound by ethicopractical constraints, and thus it is not grasped by the distinctions between proximity and distance, and theory and practice. So, rather than just being an early form of dialectics, cunning is a mode of mimetic intelligence to the full degree of the ambivalence of this combination, which indicates the concrete and abstract basis from which dialectics emerges. The notion of a mimetic intelligence is inherently complex, since it involves both an instrumental and an aesthetic aspect—an intelligence that uses a mimetic approximation to the other to achieve its ends and a sensuous awareness of the reflexivity involved in mimetic approximation.13 To this degree, this notion is not simply pragmatic or aesthetic, for although it appears to submit means to ends, it does so by way of a kind of reflexive judgment, but one in which the form and possibility of these ends are to be found only through its means, so that their very occurrence is uncertain. Cunning involves a turning of the edge that is found when likeness gives rise to a moment of reflexivity, of negation, when similarity is found to be a mode of distance as well as proximity, but a distance that is contingent so that its form is not fully sensible or conceptual.
In the encounter with Polyphemus, Odysseus is faced with a problem, as he can neither defeat the Cyclops nor escape. Instead, he takes a route that seems risky as well as uncertain; he attempts to get to know Polyphemus by engaging in conversation, to become like him by approximating himself to the threat, as Odysseus relates: “I stood near to [anchi parastas] the Cyclops and addressed him,” where anchi carries the additional sense of likeness as well as proximity (Odyssey, 9:345). Doing so may increase the danger of being eaten, but it also reveals the maneuver that will enable him to survive (and, significantly, to avoid the perils of narcissistic identification). When he begins to speak to the Cyclops, Odysseus does not know that this will yield a possible escape, but he trusts in the contingency of the conversation that something will come up and that he will be able to take advantage of it because of his inventiveness. The conversation is a gamble, but it is also cognitive, for in approximating himself to Polyphemus he comes to know what he is like, to determine him, but from a position of intimacy that is also a negation. Thus the very possibility of possibility arises from this proximity, which the many turns of Odysseus’s cunning can then realize, but it does so in a form that, owing to its contingencies, is less than fully conceptual and is more like a form of immanent critique, an attempt to think through the situation from itself but in doing so to turn it otherwise. Cunning takes place in the submission of the end to its means so that the latter can, through its contingencies, yield a possibility to reach the former, but this route can be grasped only by way of a mimetic approximation to the other. As a result, cunning is not just a cognitive maneuver but one whose contingent existential stakes are never relinquished, since they pose both the possibility of success and an ever-present risk to subjectivity and to life.
Hence, contrary to the anthropological parts of Adorno’s reading, what occurs in Odysseus’s trials are more of the order of the gamble than of sacrifice; for where sacrifice aspires to a form of certainty in exchange, the gamble is highly uncertain.14 In addition, what is gambled is oneself—not an expendable part—and what is achieved is outside the order of the probable, indeed, it is precisely because the aim is so unlikely that the gamble arises. Thus the gamble exceeds the circularity of sacrificial exchange from both its sides, as it were, and in this way it reframes the encounter. A sacrifice is made to secure good fortune, so there is a fixed contractual relation between the two parties in which each seeks to please the other such that this order can be maintained. When Odysseus gambles, he directly challenges the nature of this relation by raising its stakes, for through his boldness and ingenuity he short-circuits sacrificial reciprocity by putting his own life at stake and surviving. The exchange is broken in a moment when everything seems won and lost, as Odysseus encounters the possibility of complete failure and success at the same time, and it is from this breaking of relation that he overcomes his ordeals and defeats his opponents. This formulation does not leave Odysseus in the position outlined by Hegel in his account of the life and death struggle, for although he has confronted the fear of death, he does not use this position to assert himself over others. Horkheimer’s earlier reading of the Sirens episode makes much of the division of labor between the master and the workers, but this model is a very partial explication of the ordeals (DA, 49; DE, 25).15 Instead, it appears that what engages Odysseus is the challenge of testing himself, perhaps more than the rewards this yields or the costs it incurs, and each time the test occurs it happens in the same way: he arrives as a stranger, an unknown figure, and through the ordeal he finds a way to change, to become something; and it is this incentive that seems to drive him, not just the desire to assert himself and to outwit his enemies but to experience the transformation that takes place on the basis of the challenge, which is yet unstable and has to be repeated again and again. At each stage he is threatened by death or oblivion, which means that it is not merely his existence that is at stake but also his identity, and not only his identity as king of Ithaca, husband of Penelope, hero of Troy, and so on, but also his identity tout court. Odysseus’s awareness of this struggle is found in one of the first episodes of his journey—the encounter with Polyphemus—when his identity takes place through a reframing of the stakes, not as a simple positing but as a refiguring of identity as such on the basis of negativity. The gamble is then a labor of the negative, which indicates both its stakes and its endlessness.16
Furthermore, insofar as cunning inherently dissembles itself, its deviations and indirectness are persistently reversible and incomplete. In contrast to what Detienne and Vernant state, cunning is not a circular mode of thinking, as its turnings do not return completely to themselves; instead, there are versions that unfold and escape the grasp of thinking (RI, 55; CI, 46). Cunning is always a thought that risks losing itself. While there is a reciprocity between what is bound and what binds in any trap, which creates an encirclement that seemingly cannot be escaped, this reversibility indicates that the weaving together of its aspects can also be attenuated or distorted in any direction (RI, 292; CI, 305). More profoundly, it is in the relation between such enclosures and their release that the basis of cunning would appear to lie, that is, in the relation between aporia and poros, peras and apeirōn, where it is the sense of an interstice between them that cunning draws out, so that in regard to a block or passage, for example, there is a point that may be turned otherwise, and in either way. Thus, if a situation is limited, it can be overcome by finding that it can be turned against itself and made limitless, which is to find the moment of its immanent negation, the point where its status becomes tangible by reframing it as such a situation. As was noted earlier, “cunning lives from the process that prevails between word and thing” (DA, 79; DE, 47).
In their preface Horkheimer and Adorno write that the critique of enlightenment “is intended to prepare a positive concept of it that will free it from its entanglement in blind domination” (DA, 16; DE, xviii). Such a notion is precisely figured in the cunning of Odysseus, for in regard to the Sirens his reason cannot emerge by challenging their myth any more than it can do so by succumbing to it: “Defiance and delusion are one, and whoever defies them is lost to the myth he faces. But cunning is defiance that has become rational” (DA, 77; DE, 46). Defiance that remains mere defiance is bound to that which it seeks to defy, to the illusion of its myth that it seeks to overcome, whereas in cunning Odysseus finds a more rational mode of response in which this rejection of myth harbors a recognition and revitalization of its own rational mode; the enlightenment that resides in myth. Such a move is then more dialectical than oppositional, and cunning achieves this step by unearthing the rational threads embedded in the myth, the possibility of redetermining the situation by recognizing its existence as such, reading its terms otherwise so as to remove oneself from their bondage. As has been seen, this move requires an approximation to the object that finds a position of defying it from within its own terms, turning the myth against itself and indicating its own rational possibilities. In a move that anticipates Adorno’s later negative dialectics, the becoming rational of this defiance of myth does not imply its complete rationalization; instead, Odysseus’s cunning succeeds by finding the “gap between the rationality and irrationality of the victim,” between its social and symbolic functions (tacitly countering the “rational” analysis of the Sirens episode proposed by Horkheimer) (DA, 71; DE, 42). However, this gap is necessarily unstable and indistinct, and so seizing upon it involves an exposure to its instability and obscurity and their ever-present risks. The understanding of negative dialectics as a form of cunning thereby indicates the lack of certainty of the former, which cannot be removed without also removing its supersession of delusion. In Adorno’s later words: “Dialectical reason follows the impulse to transcend the natural context and its delusion . . . without imposing mastery over it: without sacrifice and revenge.” Conversely, in thinking of dialectics as negative, it is removed from an insistence of universalism and occurs through the challenge of its mimetic approximation, its knot of natural relations. “Dialectics is, as a philosophical procedure, the attempt to unravel the knot of paradoxes with the oldest medium of enlightenment, cunning.”17
Notes
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 13; Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi (hereafter cited as DA and DE, respectively). I cite published translations for ease of reference, but all translations in this essay are my own.
Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, 132, 135; Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 108, 110–11. As Habermas states, the “episodes [of the Odyssey] tell of danger, cunning, and escape, and of the self-imposed renunciation through which the ego learns to master danger, gains its own identity, and at the same time takes leave of the happiness of an archaic oneness [Einsseins] with nature, both external and internal” (133/109). Lambert Zuidervaart (Social Philosophy after Adorno, chap. 4) and Amy Allen (“Reason, Power, and History”) discuss the problems with Habermas’s reading, although neither addresses the role of cunning. The stakes of this issue are illustrated by J. M. Bernstein, who claims that the “textual function” of cunning in Dialektik der Aufklärung is “to make us feel the deceptions in our submission to rational authority,” which follows the Habermasian reading that the focus of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s work is solely to critique enlightenment as instrumental rationality (Adorno, 84). It is because the former characterization fails to be dialectical that the latter also falls short; conversely, discovering how cunning is more than just a mode of deception enables a better grasp of the dialectic of enlightenment.
As Émile Benveniste points out, the designation of the stranger, or xēnos, derives from the contract of xenia, not the other way around (Dictionary, 67).
As Adorno later notes in terms very applicable to Odysseus’s journey, the dissolute is “one who drifts apart in all directions without being organized by a consistent, harmonious principle of reason. So that—and this leads us, if you want, very deeply into the moral taboos on polygamy and libertinism—erotic infidelity always stands as an example of how the unifying discipline of the ego-concept has failed in people” (Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit, 355; History and Freedom, 255). The episodes with Circe and Calypso show how this tendency counters the telos of homecoming in the Odyssey.
Adorno makes this point in considering G. W. F. Hegel’s thinking, the “experiential core” of which “is cunning overall [listig insgesamt]; it hopes for victory over the superior power [Übergewalt] of the world, which it sees through without illusion, by turning this superior power against itself until it turns into another [ins Andere]” (“Aspekte,” 287; “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” 42–43). While Hegel’s account of the cunning of reason in history is somewhat obscure, his thoughts in Science of Logic are more helpful, as cunning describes a situation in which “the purpose [Zweck] posits itself in a mediate relation with the object and inserts another object between itself and it” (Wissenschaft der Logik, 166; Science of Logic, 746; see also Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, §209; Encyclopaedia Logic, 284). This mediation of ends sets up a form of circularity that both is and is not instrumental, which Adorno’s thought is developing.
The version of this encounter in the first chapter of Dialektik der Aufklärung (DA, 49–53; DE, 25–28) appears to have been largely written by Horkheimer and is notably less complex than the version in the Odysseus excursus. Unfortunately, this first version is often seen as representative of the work in general. Axel Honneth sees the encounter with the Sirens as “a key metaphor of the book” (Kritik der Macht, 59; Critique of Power, 47), although he misreads its image as that of “the task of a solitary subject.” Albrecht Wellmer (“Death of the Sirens”) and Günter Figal (“Odysseus als Bürger”) come closer to Horkheimer’s reading by treating the encounter with the Sirens as one in which free contemplation of the work of art arises because of the division of labor between Odysseus and his crew. Nevertheless, Wellmer and Figal fail to recognize the dialectical implications of the position Odysseus occupies, which is given a more careful reading by Sommer, “Exkurs I.”
Confirmation of this approach can be found in the most distinctive of Odysseus’s modern descendants: “Kafka did not preach humility but recommended the most tried and tested mode of behaviour against myth: cunning. For him the only, weakest, smallest possibility of the world not being right after all is to agree with it. Like the youngest child in a fairy tale, one should make oneself quite inconspicuous, small, a defenceless victim [Opfer], not insist on one’s own right according to the custom of the world, that of exchange, which reproduces injustice without interruption. Kafka’s humour desires the reconciliation of myth through a kind of mimicry. Here, too, he follows that tradition of enlightenment that stretches from Homeric myth to Hegel and Marx, in which the spontaneous deed, the act of freedom, is tantamount to the fulfilment of the objective tendency” (Adorno, Prismen, 284–85; Prisms, 268–69). Significantly, Kafka would develop his own reading of the Sirens that anticipates the overcoming of the aporia that Adorno sketches out, but it is extraneous here because it removes itself from a dialectical reading through its inversions and self-deceptions. Benjamin discusses Kafka’s reading in his 1934 essay and in doing so prefigures Adorno’s thought: “Odysseus stands at the threshold that separates myth and fairy tale. Reason and cunning have inserted feints into myth; its powers cease to be invincible” (“Franz Kafka” [1977], 415; “Franz Kafka” [1999], 799). As Adorno comments, “The fairy tale arises as the outwitting [Überlistung] of myth or its refraction” (Adorno and Benjamin, Briefwechsel, 93; Complete Correspondence, 69).
As Eva Geulen writes in an important article, “Mimesis thus does not denote what is imitated or imitates in art, but its capacity to make itself similar in the medium of form.” Mimesis involves a sleight of hand, or quid pro quo, which “is not just the trick, the cunning of expression to assert itself against mimesis and to raise itself above it by putting itself in its place. The quid pro quo then shows itself not as a proprium of expression, but as a consequence of the mimetic.” In doing so, this movement not only echoes and inverts instrumental exchange but also reveals its own imminent collapse, its failure to sustain itself that derives from its semblance quality. “But it is precisely this shortcoming of all mimetic impulses that is the indispensable opportunity for the quid pro quo. Only where there is an effort and need to make oneself similar and to resemble does it come into play, and the complicated dialectical machine that Adorno operates here first gets going” (“Leid-Kultur vs. Mimesis bei Adorno,” 164–65).
In an earlier draft of this line, Adorno had written, “In the service of self-preservation, cunning is the subjective procedure that traces the process that objectively prevails between word and thing” (“Geschichtsphilosophischer Exkurs zur Odyssee,” 61–62). Aside from the telling elision of the subjective and objective aspects of this relation, it is revealing how the caution of “tracing” the process becomes strengthened into “living from” it in the later version. In general, this earlier version, which includes the piece that later appeared as “Über epische Naivetät,” is more concerned with the status of classical philology following the romanticism of Rudolf Borchardt and Ludwig Klages, as discussed by Fleming, “Odysseus and Enlightenment”; and Zellini, “Nietzsche, die homerische Frage.”
As Adorno later remarked in regard to Penelope’s weaving, “What cunning does to her artefacts, she actually does to herself. . . . This episode is not, as it is easily misunderstood, an ingredient or rudiment, but a constitutive category of art: through this, it takes into itself the impossibility of the identity of the one and the many as a moment of its unity. Works of art have their cunning no less than reason” (Ästhetische Theorie, 278; Aesthetic Theory, 186–87).
Detienne and Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence, 28–29; Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, 20–21; hereafter cited as RI and CI, respectively). Although this is the most extensive examination of the notion of mētis, Detienne and Vernant leave aside its role in the Odyssey to explore the broader aspects of its cultural development.
Plato’s response to Odysseus is discussed by Silvia Montiglio in From Villain to Hero. As Montiglio makes clear, Plato’s objections to the presence of deception in cunning contrast with the more sympathetic response by Socrates recorded by Antisthenes. Evidently, Plato is seeking to remove the Socratic dialectic from its association with guile or trickery by emphasizing its moral dimensions; however, this attempt is necessarily limited by the place of negativity in dialectics, as is drawn out in the Sophistes.
Two recent attempts to explicate Adorno’s notion of mimesis are developed by Owen Hulatt in “Reason, Mimesis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno” and Pierre-François Noppen in “Adorno on Mimetic Rationality.” By tying his account to the drive for self-preservation, Hulatt misses the reflexive moment of determination in which being like another is also an awareness of negativity, of not being the other, which differentiates active mimesis from its passive form. Noppen’s account is stronger insofar as he considers the contingent conceptual status of mimetic thought, but he does not recognize the stakes of its dialectical form. For my own readings, see Aesthetics of Negativity, chap. 6; and Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance, chap. 3.
A critique of Adorno’s use of anthropology can be found in Hénaff, Violence dans la raison?, 30–39; Noppen is more positive in “Anthropology in Dialectic of Enlightenment.” The latter is the only discussion to take seriously the role of cunning in Adorno’s argument. In particular, Noppen makes much of the way that Odysseus discovers his edge by uncovering the nonidentity of words and things, which in turn releases him from the mythical necessity of their relation. See also Hullot-Kentor, “Back to Adorno.”
Further evidence for the distinction of their views can be found in Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 130. This work was based on lectures given in the spring of 1944, one year after Adorno had finished writing his excursus, and offers a very traditional reading of Homer.
The issue of the gamble is taken up in Adorno’s later thought in terms of the virtuoso who appears to succeed although their work seems impossible. Insofar as the artist is confronted with the problem of reproducing (wiedergeben) the “incompatible demands” of the work—between its content and its appearance—the work is formulated as a problem, and from this perspective the artist proceeds by finding “the point of indifference where the possibility of the impossible is hidden.” While echoing the impossible situation of Odysseus in confronting the demands of the Sirens, this analysis shows that a full reproduction of the work in the face of these demands is not possible because of their inherent contradiction, which then leaves the work suspended in its realization (Ästhetische Theorie, 163; Aesthetic Theory, 106). Moreover, the stakes of this move are evident, for “no net is stretched beneath authentic works of art that protects them in their fall” (415; 280).
Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 144–45; Negative Dialectics, 141. Cf. Adorno, Ontologie und Dialektik, 330; Ontology and Dialectics, 240.
