Objectives:

1. Converting speech “from tautology into language” (DE 11). Question: how true is
this? Upending the “pre-Socratic unity of Logos” (Marxism and Literature 22), where
language stood alongside world, nature, the divine, human law, and reason, is he
flat-out wrong? So Auerbach is not alone in his proposition: Adorno is really the odd
one out in his proximity to complete and utter anachronism.

Even Adorno doesn’t seem to wholly agree with this thesis: “The teaching of the
priests were symbolic in the sense that in them sign and image coincided.” (DE 13)

“With the dissolution of the contract through its literal fulfilment a change occurs in the
historical situation of language: it begins to pass over into designation. Mythical fate had
been one with the spoken word. […] The word was thought to have direct power over the
thing, expression merged with intention. Cunning, however, consists in exploiting the
difference. One clings to the word in order to change the thing. In this way consciousness
arises out of intention: in his extremity Odysseus becomes aware of dualism, as he discovers
that an identical word can mean different things.” (DE 47)

“He declares allegiance to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he saves his life by
making himself disappear.” (52)
Page 53: After discovering the formalism of words, Odysseus falls back on the mythic unity
of Logos. That’s why he yells his name to Polyphemus, and that’s why Adorno’s argument
on page 37, that epic and myth formulate a dialectic, is so effective. For language to have
power over reality, it must have distance, but Odysseus falls back into reality because such
distance “is also suffering.” (DE 54)

Another key passage: “subjectivity, the prehistory of which is narrated in the Odyssey”. (DE
60) Therefore, again, it is a prehistory, an organization of elements that would come to
formulate the conditions through which subjectivity would congeal.

THE CRUCIAL PIVOT POINT IS THE CONCEPT ITSELF OF HOMELAND: THINK JAMES BALDWIN
AND “FINDING AMERICA” IN FRANCE: THE AEONIANS FIND GREECE IN TROY. It is this
congealing. “[that] the concept of homeland is opposed to myth constitutes the innermost
paradox of epic. Precipitated in the epic is the memory of an historical age in which
nomadism gave way to settlement, the precondition of any homeland.” (60)
“Homeland is a state of having escaped”. (DE 61)

“Speech itself, language as opposed to mythical song, the possibility of holding fast the past
atrocity through is the law of Homeric escape. Not without reason is the fleeing hero
repeatedly introduces as the narrator. […] when speech pauses, the caesura allows the
events narrated to be transformed into something long past, and causes to flash up a
semblance of freedom that civilization has been unable wholly to extinguish ever since.” (DE
61)

“in the report of the infamous deed, hope lies in the fact that it is long past.” (DE 62)
 2. “In Homer, epic and myth, form and subject matter do not simply diverge; they
conduct an argument.” (DE 37) It is the detailing of “the subjects flight from the
mythical powers.” (37) So this is Adorno argument.
3. It is Odysseus’ own name which comes to haunt him in the encounter with Cyclopes.

“by inserting his own intention into the name, Odysseus has withdrawn it from the magical
sphere. But his self-assertion, as in the entire epic, as in all civilization, is self-repudiation.
[…] The man who, for the sake of his own self, calls himself Nobody and manipulates
resemblance to the natural state as a means of controlling natures, gives way to hubris.” (DE
53)

-Totality and simultaneity.

-“Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized.” (11)
- “The world controlled by mana, and even the world of Indian and Greek myth, are
issueless and eternally the same. All birth is paid for with death, all fortune with
misfortune.” Thyestes, Argus, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra all solemnly nod their heads.
-iconography
page 13: the genesis of semiotics.
page 18: in Hegel and Enlightenment, by denying the capacity of language to be more than
sign, by disclosing “each image as script”, through a determinate negation and an
acceptance of the nominalist configuration language transcends its limit as script, losing its
power as power and handing itself over to truth.

c) at the Homeric stage, individuality derives itself from “nonidentical, dissociated,

unarticulated” myths: its inner clock, its time, is so weak, and it only understands succession
of space inhabited by local divinities. We occasionally fall back into this conception of time,
and it demands again that historical time detach itself from space. The individual is tied
down, in myth, to cyclicality, but in Homer we see the development of a historical time.

the shift from metis (cunning) to reason. Metis is a teche, a craft, an unassailable portion of
experience. Reason is instrumental
kleos (glory)
Outis (nobody)
Nomos
bios v. zoe