In Search of Lost Haim: Homer and Heimat in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Abstract

In this essay, I return to Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to suggest that Odysseus’s crew comes to figure ‘the Jew’ as a representative of nature in the antisemitic Imaginary—the nature that enlightenment continues to repress. Escape from enlightenment’s deadlock will depend on the ‘remembrance’ of that nature, an operation itself considered ‘Jewish’ and enacted in the epic’s dialectical form.