Adorno's Siren Song

Bibliographic Data

ID4070807
AuthorsRebecca Comay (corresponding author)
Year2000
Issue81
Pages21
Publication date2000-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew German Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/488544
OpenAlexW2323200041
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Excursus on an Excursus In a lengthy excursus or appendix to the first chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment - a detour in a book which constitutes itself essentially as an extended patchwork of such appendages - Adorno reads Homer's Odyssey as an allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. Odysseus himself would be the quintessential figure of homo oeconomicus, his voyage an extended business trip, his passions the usual affairs men fall into when they have a devoted wife at home. So domesticated is Odysseus's wanderlust, so conventional his calculations, that Adorno indeed reads the ancient epic as a modem novel, the bourgeois genre par excellence.1 In his reading of the Sirens episode Adorno reckons sharply just what the costs of Odysseus's enlightenment might be. If reason can only assert itself as the domination of an alien nature, this is in turn inseparable from a self-domination which becomes self-mutilation at its extreme. Reason becomes unreason when pushed to its conclusion: the attempt to free oneself from external bondage to the Other unleashes an endless ritual of sado-masochistic bondage games in which the subject has himself tied up tight. In the face of the Sirens' singing - a voice of nature, a voice of pleasure, a voice of the past, and, yes, a voice of women - both the danger and the solution would be extreme. The Sirens are not the

Aesthetics · Art · Dialectic · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Passions · Siren (mythology) · Subject (documents) · Critical Theory and Philosophy · History · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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