“On the basis of this insight [”Odysseus is a small-scale model of the developing whole of world spirit] Adorno reconstructed the primal history of subjectivity. Cunning originates in sacrifice. Odysseus’s cunning escape from mythical powers has its paradigm in the deceptiveness of mythical sacrifice, which in every instance aims to exchange as equivalents something less valuable for what is more valuable: the hecatombs exchanged for victory in war. Adorno shoes that the over-turning of sacrifice, and the movement toward the development of cunning inheres in the dialectic of sacrifice. In carrying out the deception, the supplicated dieties are at the same time overthrown: “All human acts of sacrifice, methodically carried out, deceive the god to whom they are offered: they subordinate him to the primacy of human purposes and dissolve his power.” Cunning develops as progress in sacrificial substitution. The power to substitute an ox for a human sacrifice is no different from the power of an employer to substitute the labor of the others for the employer’s own. “The Concept of Enlightenment” develops this theory of progress through sacrificial substitution to explain the development of discursive logic as a form implicit in mythical sacrifice: “Substitution in the course of sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic. Even though the hind offered up for the daughter, and the lamb for the first-born, still had to have special qualities, they already represented the species . . . Substitutability reverses into universal fungibility.” The unity of knowledge sought by physics is the epitome of the ruse of reason in that this unity is the result of the sacrificial abstraction of the particularity of the world as a whole. The pivotal point at which myth becomes enlightenment and enlightenment becomes myth is sacrifice, and the transition from myth to enlightenment is progress in the power of substitutability. Whereas “The concept of Enlightenment” follows out of this dialectic particularly in regard to logic and the sciences, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” explicates it with regard to the history of the self. The unity of the self originates in the internalization of sacrifice as renunciation. Civilization begins with the sacrifice of the self to the self and the power of the self develops as its power of renunciation: “The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice. In other words, it is the history of renunciation.” The actual form of Odysseus’s cunning, whether with Polyphemus or Circe, is his ability to dominate himself, that is, to renounce himself in the service of his own self-preservation. Cunning resists nature qua myth, but in its sacrificial order becomes myth.”
- Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance; Collected Essays on Theodore W. Adorno, 38-39.